Duck in the Formal

This is quite Cambridge-like.

Duck in the Formal.

Some good news for overall startup community in the UK and especially for female entrepreneurs, but very bad for cleantech :-(

Some good news, and really bad news, according to 'the leading source of market intelligence on business funding in the UK'. (note; All the following graphs are picked up from the Beauhurst's report: Beauhurst Making Sense of UK Equity Investment 2014/15 Public Summary).

Good news comes first. Total number of deals and size of investment increased to more than one thousand deals and £2.3b invested. 

Total # deals and £ investment per year (Beauhurst, 2015)

Furthermore, the more you have female directors, the more you raise (forget about selection bias and correlation v.s. causation ;-p). This is good for us since our team has two female co-founders. 

Average deal size by number of female directors on the board (Beauhurst, 2015)

The next comes a bit complication: a trend toward crowdfunding that is replacing angel networks, especially in seed deals. As we seek a route of B2B business, this might become a hurdle for us to persuade less experienced investors who do not necessarily understand technologies. As we ask for not only money but also experience from seed investors, maybe we should focus on trying angel networks in Cambridge.

50% of seed deals and 20% of venture deals will be crowdfunded this year. (Beauhurst, 2015)

Angel networks now only account for 10% of seed deals. (Beauhurst, 2015)

The worst news is that the amount of  money invested into cleantech dropped by 60% in 2014, and the average size shrank down to less than £2M, which is smaller than the overall average size of £2.3M. This is really against as generally cleantech is more capital intensive.

Cleantech deals dropped significantly in 2014 (Beauhurst, 2015)

The hype might have gone; yet we have to give a go this year. Whatever we'd end up, we find excitement out of the journey. 

Summary of the Cambridge MBA courses I studied: what I liked (and not), and how I had to be collaborative actually.

As I compared the Cambridge MBA with other schools in the previous post, I (finally) felt like objectively seeing the courses (recapping them might follow later).

In a retrospective review, I liked (and disliked) the following courses most:

• Top 2 
• Project: Global Consulting Project (MBA page / Example of Project Deliverables)
• Core Corporate Governance by Professor Rau
• Next 3
• Elective: Philosophy in Business by the Faculty of Philosophy 
• Elective: Behavioural Finance by Professor Rau 
• Elective: New Venture Finance by Professor Randy Haykin, who comes from SV
• Bottom
• Cost Management and Control

Yet, satisfaction with a course does not necessarily mean a good result ...interestingly and sadly they are barely correlated (r=0.16).

Marks seems almost irrelevant to how I am stimulated by or satisfied with courses.

*Satisfaction is defined as an average score (1-10) between intellectual stimulation and personal fit to a lecturer; a relative mark is comparatively scaled based on my personal range between highest and lowest marks.

However, marks are approximately 40% determined by (in most cases) collaborative group works.

One example of how collaboration is included in marks (NB: weighted total of course depends on elective choices)

When you compare three terms, interestingly, the first term, Michaelmas, was more individualistic, while the last term, Easter, required a lot of class participations. On a different note, the second term, Lent, was the busiest term as there were a lot of group assignments while preparing for the coming GCP. However, when busy you learn a lot.

In my opinion, Michaelmas courses also should (and could) have engaged students more, to set up a pace of studying individually (yet for me this was good as I skipped some to join courses and events in different departments of the Uni).