As an investor and advisor I get hundreds of startup ideas pass through my inbox every month, ranging from the genius and groundbreaking to the untenable and the downright crazy. Sometimes they can be both crazy and genius, with some really whacky ideas actually working out, raising a serious amount of money and gaining impressive support. It’s quite difficult to put together a list of such companies, though, because in many cases what must have seemed like a completely crazy product upon launch has become a norm and something hoards of
Read more →As an advisor to young and growing companies, there’s one major mistake I see inexperienced entrepreneurs make time and time again – moving too slowly. But the need for speed in launching a startup has little to do with being the first to market, and everything to do with having the necessary resources to actually GET your product to market. Often new entrepreneurs spend so much time trying to get everything perfect that they run out of money. To launch a startup, you need to be agile and you need to be
Read more →UK-based FinTech firms received 80% less VC funding than their German counterparts throughout Q2 2016. According to CB Insights and KMPG’s “The Pulse of FinTech” Q2 2016 report, venture capital-backed FinTech firms in Germany saw more than an 80% increase in funding than those in the UK – with notable deals going to startups including N26 and Finanzcheck. Given global market uncertainties associated with political events such as the UK’s Brexit vote and the upcoming US presidential election, the report notes that it was not surprising that venture capital investors
Read more →Octopus Investments has launched a new fintech business, Octopus Labs, to fix what it considers is ‘the broken financial services sector’, with technology built in-house as well as sourced from later-stage fintech start-ups across the UK. According to the new business, while the past few years have witnessed a fintech revolution in the UK, most of the innovations that have sprung up remain unfamiliar and unpalatable to both financial advisers and retail investors. Octopus Labs is breaking into a category it calls ‘advisertech’ by ‘self-building’ some solutions and supporting others through a fintech
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