aka ‘highlights of the last few months’

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything and it’s time I did.  The last few months have been pretty busy so I thought I’d write some notes about the main items in one post and then we can pretend that I’m current again.  I’m well aware that the sheer size of this post means it’s unlikely to be read fully by most people.  There are some pics so perhaps that might be enough to hold your interest :)

Later this week, I’ll write a separate post about the things I’m working on now and I’ll try to keep more up to date from then onwards.  

All of the following covers October to December.

Silicon Valley comes to the UK

SVc2UK was a 5/6 day conference with events taking place in Cambridge and London.  The aim is to introduce students from universities to high-profile folks from the Valley and inspire the students to consider startups as a career path (either by founding or joining them).  I was involved in this conference back in 2009 and decided to join the the new team for the 2011 events.  This year the conference was preceded by a several ‘Appathons’ (read: hackathons), which took place at 6 Universities, including Cambridge.  You can find out more about the Appathon and the conference via www.svc2uk.com but here are some short notes and some pics.

— Cambridge Appathon —

The hackathons were 2-day events aimed at students and the theme was open government data.  I ran the Cambridge event on behalf of Cambridge University Entrepreneurs and we had about 80 people taking part over the course of the weekend.  Representatives from Google, Facebook, Apple and the Technology Strategy Board were present to advise the student teams and folks from the local tech community also got involved.  At the end of the weekend, we awarded Amazon Kindles to three winning teams (as decided by audience vote) and everyone was encouraged to enter the national competition too.  One of the Cambridge teams also won the national prize (a trip to SV).  Yeay!

Given the sheer amount of brain-ache involved, I could (should?) write a separate post on how to run a hackathon.  Maybe I’ll get around to it at some point but in the meantime, here’s the team that actually pulled this together: Matko, Alastair and Andy, Ben, Ivan, Simona, Saar, Roger.  I’m also especially grateful to the sponsors/supporters of the event: Red Gate Software, Cocoa Controls, Nick (at Google), SVc2UK and the Cambridge Computer Laboratory (who hosted us for a weekend).  Below are some pictures of the event itself and the national awards ceremony at Downing Street.

— SVc2C Conference —

This was the main part of the conference and the guests from the Valley were in Cambridge for two days.  In that time, they took part in a pretty large number of events and hopefully met a lot of interesting students.  If you’re interested in the list of guests, you can check them out via the link on the conference website.

You can find videos of this year’s sessions on the Vimeo account.

Stanford online courses

I did all three of the inaugural classes. Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Databases … and I enjoyed them in that order.  The following is a short summary/review of each.

ML-Class was fantastic since you had to write actual scripts and I really looked forward to both the videos and exercises every week.  At times, the exercises felt a bit contrived (one line of code in a file) but there were occasions where I had to really think properly to *get* that one line.  Once you got the hang of matrix multiplication the exercises got easier.  The scores don’t really mean anything since you could repeat the questions until you got a perfect score. At some point, I’ll go back over the iTunes U content from the profs 2008 class.  It has more theory/maths and covers reinforcement learning, which the applied course didn’t.  You can find my ‘programming’ exercises [on GitHub][Github ML Repo].

AI-Class was a very different course and it didn’t seem as ‘slick’ as the ML class but I learnt *way* more maths, specifically about probability.  Since I was terrible at probability at school, I really wanted to get a better handle on it and this class really made me work.  I have pages and pages of calculations for some of the in-class questions and I hope I can retain what I’ve learnt.  At times there was only a cursory overview of a topic before moving on but I should have expected that from an “Intro to…” course.  This was the only class with *both* graded homeworks and exams. Overall, I was in the ‘top 25%’ according the statement I got (overall mark was 95%).

DB-Class was the one I least understood but the one I originally thought I was going to stick with.  Within the first few lectures, I knew I was going to find it tough.  Relational Algebra made no sense to me and the videos seemed to cover each example once and move on to something else.  Since I didn’t have enough time to find additional resources, I ended up barely following along and basically flunked the course.  There was a mid-term and final exam and the homeworks could be repeated until you got a perfect score (but I ended up not bothering).  No idea what score I got but you needed >50% to get a statement and I didn’t get one :)

In general, I was very impressed by the dedication and effort the profs and the teams working with them put into the courses.  Although the profs were the folks centre stage, there were a group of largely unsung heroes who kept things running, put together exercises and enabled everything to happen.  This method of learning is really going to take off and if people can figure out how to deal with proper certification, then it might even challenge the notion of going to University.  There have been a slew of new courses available and I think I’ll try two more if I can fit them in (i.e. Probabilistic Graphical Models and Model Thinking).

Learning to code

I’ve also been trying to keep up with learning Python via LPtHW (see GitHub repo for progress).  I’d describe myself as chugging along and I’m glad that I’m not finding anything too difficult.

The trickiest part is finding ways to actually fit some coding into things I need done.  Since I finished analysing my PhD data, I’ve not had the need to write scripts or manipulate data in any substantive way and I don’t fancy re-writing any of my old stuff (NB I also tried to collate all of that and added it to GitHub too).  I’m sure I can find something worth doing and I suspect it might involve Django sooner than I thought.  

I also signed up to Code Academy’s ‘Code Year’ but I’ve not opened any of their emails yet (and I suspect I won’t have time). 

Events and occasional startup stuff

As always there have been a bunch of events and startup-related items in the last few months.  Normally I wouldn’t bother mentioning these but I’m in a list-y mood.

• - Seedcamp Demo Day (Sep)
• - CharityHack (Oct - not that I did much)
• - Silicon Roundabout Social Club (Oct)
• - Product Camp (Nov)
• - Connections talks (Nov & Dec - Cyberwarfare and Energy)
• - Eric Ries - Lean Startup (Jan - UK Book Launch)
• - HackerNews London Meetups
• - Visit to Olympic park (ok, so this was waaay back in May and should have had it’s own post but I never got around to it)

Pics of Visit to Olympic Park (in May)

… and finally

I manged to get this done in October.  Took a while.

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A few days ago, Seedsummit released a Term Sheet intended to be (or become) standard across Europe for early stage investment.

It’s been several days since the announcement and so far I haven’t seen much in-depth commentary on it (other than acknowledging its existence and how difficult it must have been to achieve consensus). That might be because the announcement seemed to come as a surprise, so perhaps folks haven’t had a chance to digest it yet. Or maybe nobody cares?

One post from the Guardian offered some criticism, but beyond that it’s all been a bit quiet. Since no-one else has posted any thoughts, I thought I’d go through the document and offer my opinions. I’ve put the notes in a more comprehensive post and summarised the main points here (mostly because going through a legal document is a little bit dreary).

Main comments on Seedsummit term sheet

There are a few of things that founders should be careful of. First is the liquidation preference, where founders should be getting the non-participating option (Option 1). Second is vesting, since founders probably want to adjust the values described. Third is how the option pool is set up (before/after the funding). Finally, the anti-dilution provisions don’t seem to provide any useful information so founders should check this carefully if they’re presented with it. For more detail on any of these points, see the relevant section in the detailed review.

The overall impression I got was that these are documents for dealing with VCs. Unsurprising since it was put together by 21 VC firms from across Europe. Surprising because I’m guessing no Angel investors were involved, despite the term sheet being advertised for ‘early stage’ financing. Since Seedsummit is trying to build a network of european investors (and credit to them for that), I did find it a little odd that there didn’t seem to be any Angels listed as helping to create this document. Perhaps it’s because the Angels aren’t investing on a pan-european basis? I’d love to see a Series A term sheet for comparison and my gut feel is that the Seedsummit document has a lot more in common with Series A than with Angel docs. This does beg the question, what does ‘seed’ actually mean?

What does seed mean?

In 2009, I set up and ran the first iteration of Springboard (a seed accelerator). We were helping early-stage teams to get a product out the door and to start getting feedback from users (customer development). When teams came out of the programme, I considered them ‘seed-stage’, i.e likely to be ready for seed investment, wherever that may come from. Ideally, the team would have a version of the product that was being used by early adopters. The team would be adapting that product based on feedback, although they would likely have little/no revenue. That basically sums up what I picture in my head when I think of ‘seed-stage’.

Over the last week I’ve met several VCs from different firms and asked them directly what seed means to them. For each of them, seed-stage investing involves companies that have a product, customers and revenues. This was pretty much the case for all the VCs I spoke to. I wish I’d probed for more detail as to what kind of revenue/customer numbers they expect but never mind.

In any case, despite using the same language, there’s obviously a gap between the above viewpoints. I’m not suggesting either of them is right or wrong but I think it’s important to point out such differences, especially in the light of the new ‘standard’ term sheet.

What does this term sheet mean for founders?

In brief, founders should do their homework. In going through this document, I spent quite a while researching and there’s actually a lot of information out there about what the terms mean and the impact they might have. As we now have a European VC term sheet in the open it’ll make comparisons with US VCs a lot easier. Any major disparities will quickly be picked on by the popular startups who might go elsewhere to raise money. Indeed, the real test will be whether or not a ‘hot’ new startup uses these terms and as they stand, I doubt that will be the case. Founders will still need lawyers and VCs will still be willing to negotiate terms.

We’re not quite at the point-and-click stage for early stage financing but with more and more information being put into the open, it does become easier for startups to make better informed decisions.

If you haven’t already, you can go check my review of the Seedsummit terms now.

You can either comment here or comment on HN

Photo credit: Affärsbilder by Dan Eriksson on Flickr

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Disclaimer: I still haven’t tried Hangout, not enough people in my circles yet.

Skype has been great for conference calls and video calls but it’s nearly always been a hassle with more than 2 people. It’s analogous to the way in which phones work i.e great when only two people need to talk but confusing to set up if there are more.

Although it’s different, Hangout might obviate the need to use Skype video again. Having multiple people, with cameras, all in one ‘room’ and effectively with one-click sounds fantastic. Of course, I haven’t tried it yet but I can imagine not needing to use Skype video again. Skype will still have it’s place (for now) since I find it useful to see who’s online and ask quick questions via IM. However, even that benefit might disappear in time.

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Ok, so I’ve been busy for the last couple of days. Last night was the CUE Grand Finale and tonight was the CUTEC conference and dinner. Both were fabulous and I guess I should write about them soon (It’s been a while since I actually posted new stuff here).

Let the damage limitation begin :-P

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I just spent the afternoon playing doing valuable research work with Lego.  The pics above show my amazing creation but they don’t do justice to the complexity of it.  I really didn’t think I’d need the instructions but I was so wrong.

This was actually part of a research study that will be done with 4-5 year old children.  Essentially, the kids will be asked to follow instructions to build objects and the researchers are interested in the self-regulatory processes during constructive play …  woosh …  Me play with Lego. Me happy.

Apparently, the bus above is considered too complex, which doesn’t surprise me since it took me a few hours to put it together.  Most of that time was spent rummaging around in the box for the right parts (that’s part of the study design).  I didn’t help myself by deciding part way through that I wanted it to be a right-hand drive bus instead of the left-hand drive that the instructions described (you might be able to spot the difference between pics 2 and 3).  That was fun.

Lego itself is pretty interesting and there are some really strict tolerances required in it’s manufacture.  If you’ve ever played with Lego, consider the following: the pieces are held together only by friction, yet you can create and dismantle fairly large and robust objects; if you build a wall of Lego, the plane of that wall is pretty smooth (no protruding bricks).  If you’re manufacturing millions of these little things, you can only achieve that with some damn precise engineering.  Apparently the moulds are made within a tolerance of 2 micrometers.  For comparison, the width of a human hair ranges from 17-180 micrometers.  It’s even more impressive when you consider that bricks from 1958 are still compatible with bricks made today.

Check out the Lego Wikipedia article for more info.

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