where can i buy Clomiphene in stores In a very interesting piece about a financial services conference, I found out about Victoria Raffe, a former bank regulator in the UK, now an independent consultant, talking about the process of getting approval for new banks in the UK. As someone following closely fintech startups like Moven (and Simple before that) and others that deliver […]
Tag: startups
Hiring for Insurance, or Potential?
The “job description” has achieved gospel status in the modern corporation, from startups to large multinationals. It lists tasks, responsibilities, competencies, skills, and anything else the hiring organization, through the hiring manager and HR specialist eyes, thinks is important to help filter and select candidates for a job. I refer to this hiring strategy, jokingly, […]
The Startup CEO
There is no shortage of advice for startup CEOs, from books to blog posts, and an endless stream of online advice. The bigger the mainstream media buzz about startups, the better the chance of seeing almost every day something like “The 3 Most Important Characteristics of a Successful Startup CEO”. But I digress… I have […]
The Power of Positive Feedback
In one of my early jobs, I was a young engineer working for a company assembling electricity meters. Several thousand employees were working day and night putting those together, and the main activity was using small screwdrivers to screw together the many parts of the device. A key productivity tool was the electrical screwdriver – […]
The New Age of Algorithms
I come from an engineering background, for me computers were, for a long time, calculators, a tool to perform either complex calculations, or on large data sets. Otherwise a handheld calculator – standard in my university years – would have been more than enough. Computers were expensive, data entry was a pain, and output was […]
Q&A with SBT Venture Capital
1.What is your definition of fintech? My view is that fintech is a misnomer, but good as a shortcut name. What we really mean is the disruption of financial services through technologies like mobile, cloud, social, big data analytics, crypto, etc — and whatever will be invented in the years to come. While financial services companies […]
Why We (Sometimes) Invest
Our job at SBT Venture Capital is to invest in startups. To a novice, it sounds simple, until you realize there are thousands of startups, at various stages, and we need to narrow it down to a manageable list of teams that we can work with. I wrote recently about our filtering process, the “why […]
The Startup Team: 4 + 3 = 1
The days of building something really innovative on your own are long gone. Edison – the prototypical inventor – had a huge lab and many assistants. Steve Jobs led teams of innovators. I have been arguing for a while, in corporate environments and my blog, that no sane company should reward individual contribution/results and settle […]
Why We Don’t Invest…
In our work at STB Venture Capital we see hundreds of financial technology (“fintech”) companies. We ask all companies to submit their startup profile through the Gust web site — our submission page is here. Most of the time, we have to reject a proposal because it does not fit our preferred profile – we […]
The Vanishing Custom Electronics or Why We Invested in Mobeewave
This will be a short blog post, as I have already blogged before about my thinking regarding investing in mobile payments and the concept of “software defined anything“. In summary, I believe that we will have less and less specialised hardware devices for payments, and the ubiquitous mobile phone will become the default form factor […]