http://blumberger.net/?p=45 Many years ago, I was working for a large Canadian bank, managing two very different development teams — one using C++ to build a derivatives trading system, and one of Cobol programmers maintaining the bank General Ledger application. While the culture clash was obvious to any observer, nothing reflected it better than the big poster […]
Tag: startups
Social Investing, or Why We Invested In eToro
In 1990 I was an academic in Romania, teaching control systems theory. And I was making $50 a month — enough for food and utilities. For a series of political and economic reasons, I left Romania to move to Canada, and things changed dramatically — pretty soon I was earning a lot more than $50/m. […]
VC Negotiation Fun
When we started SBT Venture Capital, we were excited about a future of identifying great companies – visionary teams with excellent products. And excited about the post-funding challenge of helping them grow to their full potential. What we did not foresee was the huge amount of time spent on negotiating details, from term sheets to […]
An Alternative To Alternative Lending, or Why We Invested In AMP
Today we are announcing our investment in Advanced Merchant Payments — AMP, an alternative lender for small and medium-sized businesses. This is a market with tremendous unrealised potential — a credit gap of US$3 trillion faced by businesses all over the world that, while generating revenues and employment and profits, and being vital to any […]
Innotribe, Finovate, or Money2020?
This year I have attended four major FinTech conferences – Money2020, Finovate London and New York, and Sibos Innotribe. I have met with hundreds of startups, talked with maybe a thousand people. Some thoughts: All of them are growing – more companies, larger attendance – all in synch with the overall worldwide “boom” in fintech. […]
The Bicycle Test
I am at Money2020 this week, meeting in person with hundreds of colleagues from all over the world, out of the 6000 attendees. We all use phones and Skype and GoToMeeting and so on, and still, there is no comparison with face-to-face encounters. Meeting and talking with everyone through scheduled Skype calls would have taken […]
Magical Thinking?
Many things in life are quite difficult to understand, a long list that is getting shorter through scientific advances. But after thousands of years of living in a complex world that we mostly did/do not understand, we have developed various coping mechanisms, magical thinking being one of them. From Wikipedia, magical thinking “is the attribution […]
No more “Big Data”! Or why we invested in NetGuardians
It has been quite a short fast ride for Big Data technologies, from the forefront of analytics innovation to being embedded in (very) many modern IT solutions. Less than 10 years ago the first version of Hadoop was released, and 6 years ago projects inside large IT shops (my experience is from IBM 2008/9) considered […]
Money For Nothing
In a previous life we were trying to adapt new innovative technologies from startups to the needs of Sberbank — a “technology research” activity that involved actually installing and integrating solutions and trying them out, not just reading the company sales pitch/marketing brochure. And I was presenting in front of a large audience of Russian […]
Startup Boards
I have been a board member of many startups, and one thing I know for sure is that almost each board has a different view of its role and how to achieve it. Of course there are books and courses and blogs and all that. And everyone’s experience is different and most times not applicable […]