My (yet) personal suspicion on Big Data

Some Cambridge scientists say, Big Data should have 5 Big Vs (Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value) of Big Data, including:

• its Volume in terms of size, or the number of variables needed to describe it,

• its Velocity, in how it’s collected and processed in real-time,

• the Variety of its diverse, linked and unstructured datasets,

• its Veracity in terms of where it originates from and how complete it is,

• and finally its Value, and especially how the use, linkage and re-use of data can provide crucial new insights that may have been unforeseen at the time the data was collected.

I've recently begun learning basics of data science to feel refreshed, yet based on my personal experience with Google (still receiving a handful spam emails unfiltered by Gmail) and Amazon (rarely alert me when a new book of series/authors I've been following, even I've bought tonnes of Kindle books), I am still not sure why those super intelligent data scientist cannot solve such appear-to-be-simple problems, which I'd love to know anyway:-)

What if the clean-tech sector adopts more regulated approach like the pharmaceutical and biotech sector?

A sharp decline (from £210M in 2012 to £70M in 2014) in investment into the cleantech is a sort of reasonable response from private risk money. To put it simply, the balance between risk and return is almost broken. This is my personal, possibly unique, observation by being in cleantech after completing an MBA with healthcare concentration, with an undergraduate degree in political science.

Two issues of cleantech investment
Cleantech, arguably defined by reducing greenhouse gas emission such as CO2, might require a totally different approach, if we seriously addressing the climate change problems while aiming for modest financial returns. However, there are a few crucial issues in the cleantech sector to overcome the situation:

• From a perspective of economics of energy sources, coal, oil, and gas are too competitive  compared with clean energy sources. Possibly competitive and stable (or base for civilisation) sources are hydroelectric and geothermal, both of which are biased geographically, unfortunately; and
• Clean technologies need longer (mostly more than 5 years, which is similar to the pharmaceutical and biotech sector) shot of investment than typical venture capital's timeframe, since fundamental technologies develop linearly, not exponentially as in the IT or computing sector.

Due to these two fundamental factors, private risk money won't be invested into the cleantech sector because there are more attractive opportunities for the money. In short, the cleantech is too risky but its expected return is not high enough to compensate the risk.

Plausible solutions
So what kind of solutions can the sector pursue? It is quite basic: both increasing return while reducing risk, obviously. The latter is better addressed than the former, from my perspective. One example in the UK is this Cleantech hub idea in London: Proposed CleanTech hub to end green investment drought?

To address the former, one good example might be the highly regulated pharmaceutical and biotech sector. The healthcare sector allows a monopoly rent for initial years through regulations to incentivise R&D into such fields, which benefit human beings in the long run. Without such regulatory, thus artificial, monopoly, no one would invest in several hundred million dollars to such a risky business.

Two micro and macro pitfalls
Of course there is plausible pitfalls if the cleantech sector implement this idea of rigid regulations.

On one hand in micro level, by the nature of technology, it is difficult to identify the core patent or intellectual property. As it is based on piled past researches and likely cross-licensing between firms, such as in the electronics industry, it is hard to define what should be protected by regulatory.

To put it differently, usually cleantech products cannot be standalone as those in the healthcare sector, where a product or drug means an identified molecule or chemical material. However, since medical devices, which should have similar features as electronics and thus cleantech products, are also regulated, this could be sorted out if carefully and thoroughly discussed and socially and politically agreed.

On the other hand in macro level, issues related to energy are prone to be a political agenda as energy security is, at least for some resource-less countries, crucial for a government to maintain its sovereignty. Therefore, it is difficult to share a common interest among governments, leading to fragmented approach by each: but this has to be solved as soon as possible to avoid catastrophic changes in global climate.

Europe could lead this discussion because it's coordination between governments are at least tried a lot, and geopolitically, it is far from the next consumption giant: China (and India in the longer run). It is indeed a must to involve them to cap GHG emission drastically, otherwise they consume [really!!] a lot of fossil fuels in coming decades (see below), which will exacerbate the situation to irreversible status. I don't blame them as I totally understand their willing to catch up to better quality of life.

Source: Charting the outcome of the Obama – China climate deal by 2030 (Whats Up With That? ,2015)

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. 

2015 New Year resolution (belated)

After several short trips to Korea, Japan, the US, and Spain within a few weeks, I finally came back in London, (caught a cold again), and successfully extended my visa to remain in the UK as a happy dependent :-p.

Now, belatedly, is the time to set new year's targets as every year. This year, again, I should stick to rather simple targets (rough allocation of time); this year is going to be a year of totally challenging new stuff:

• Career: to success in seed financing for the startup (50%).
• Private: to learn anew not to be bored; through studying Finance (MSc-level) and Economics (BSc-level) (20%), learning programming (20%) and absorbing various contents to write up a short fiction (10%).

Happy New Year 2015 monument, in a sort of traditional Japanese way with an orange.

Regrettably, last year I did not achieve much regarding my revised targets:

1. Keep exercise every week: Not really at all. After an accident in golfing, I stopped playing it. 
2. Complete the Cambridge MBA with writing up the final dissertation on 'innovation and corporate governance': Done, but not fully satisfied with what I wrote up.
3. Confirm a place, likely in London, for researching management in the UK while working on the entrepreneurial project: The startup goes well so far (definitely this is the greatest achievement unexpectedly), yet failed to secure a research position.
4. Draft a story of science fiction. An idea of multi-worlds/minds structure is there, yet still too vague to start writing.

Anyway, my life to get busy living goes on.

From a new year's trip to Grand Canyon in the US

Learning Ruby on Rails

As I have been managing the company website, I realised I have to learn basics of web development. Therefore, last weekend, I joined a two-day workshop by Codecourse, which was a great opportunity to practically learn how to code with Ruby on Rails. This is my work-in-progress web applications.

It was really worthwhile course; what I essentially learnt was following:

• All the important setups for web application development: online console by Nitrous, html and CSS frameworks by Bootstrap, online application platform by Heroku, Static Maps API by Google maps, voice and SMS APIs by Nexmo,  some gems in Github, and online e-commerce platform by Stripe.
• How to practically develop (1) a personal website, (2) a web app to record locations and display in the map, (3) a web app to send a SMS text message, (4) a web app to upload pictures and purchase an order online, and (5) a web app to post status updates. So basically they are what you do mostly online nowadays (i.e. Wordpress or blogging, Messenger, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter etc.).
• While following instructions by the organiser and facing unexpected errors, essentially my learning was about how to identify an error (mostly typo or undefined class or method) and how to crack it mostly by yourself.

Nitrous' console image

The following is my personal memo on the very basics on Ruby on Rails so that I would not forget about it at all.

• To create a new project, command 'rails new the_name_of_the_project'. After run 'cd mysite", type 'rails server' starts the server so that you can check your code updates in your browser.
• application.html enables every page to contain the same code that is in the application.html.
• To add a new page, (1) open the routes.rb file in the config folder, (2) open the static_pages_controller.rb in app/controllers/, and (3) create a new file under the static_page folder.
• To use Bootscamp CSS, first you have to copy Bootstrap CDN to the application.html.erb.
• After you install in Gemfile (c.f. gem is a function defined/developed by someone already, e.g. Devise: sign-in and sign-up/authentication), you have to stop the server (Ctrl+c) and then run the "bundle install" command to reflect the changes while.
• To upload updated pages, command (1)"cd the_name_of_the_project", (2) "git add . ", (3) "git commit -m"Finished the project", (4)"git push heroku master".
• To create a database, run 'rails generate scaffold the_name_of_database', followed by name and definition of each column. (e.g. 'rails generate scaffold location name:string address:string latitude:float longitude:float')

UK's new initiative for digital entrepreneurship: Digital Business Academy

Online course for free by Judge and UCL; I've got to sign up to see whether the MBA (esp. Marketing) was worth paying for the high tuition.

The Digital Business Academy, a joint venture by Cambridge university’s Judge Business School, UCL, Tech City and start-up course designer Founder Centric (FT, 2014)

Two of the world’s top academic institutions (i.e. Cambridge Judge Business School and University College London*) decided to start free online courses of business topic** for 'those that have shunned formal education in favour of entrepreneurship to obtain some formal business training'. (FT, 2014)

* Where are other two?
**The list as of today covers eight courses:

1. Size up your idea
2. Set up a digital business
3. Develop and Manage a digital product
4. Make a marketing plan
5. Build a brand
6. Understand Digital Marketing Channels
7. Run a digital marketing campaign
8. Master finance for your business

Source:

Financial Times. Online course opens to sharpen start-up minds. 19 Nov 2014. Available from: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bc7f0ca2-6e70-11e4-afe5-00144feabdc0.html

SVC2UK 2014

The theme of this year's Silicon Valley Comes to the UK was a bit scattered, at least to me, compared with the last year's focus on med tech and how to cope with chronic diseases in the advance economy. I got some good hints on how da hardware startup should grow and learn its operational capability throughout the years of its journey to scaling up abroad. Note: it will take long time (5-10 years to become sustainable) so you'd better be prepared for the longevity.

Walking through St. John's College early in the morning, while developing my thoughts as follows.

Another personal finding is that I would not be able to like the Silicon Valley's culture of 'hyper high tension'. It is way too much for me, or I just became too old or introversial to accept it. I do understand that kind of way of making a rather emotional momentum in the market would do good for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who want money.

However so, for example, why people think Uber is changing the world? By utilising unutilised vehicles for the era of new sharing economy? As far as people move around, however, the energy consumption would be more or less same. Its $17 bn valuation, or value will be just captured from other transportation modes, unless it starts transportation services by self-drive car, which will be totally something new and existing service providers won't start as it is too risky and legally unclear who in the end is responsible and liable for any damage a self-drive car makes.

From Uber's blog:

We have some exciting news to share this morning. We have just closed a financing round with some of the leading investors in the world, raising $1.2B of primary capital at a $17B pre-money valuation. The total raise will be about $1.4B with a second close of strategic investors soon. We are thrilled to have top tier institutional investors, mutual funds, private equity and venture capital partners joining us.

Seed funding situation in the UK 2014 Q1

According to Beauhurst's Equity Investment Review (free part), in 2014 Q1,

there were 72 deals at the seed-stage and investment amounts were disclosed for 46 of these, totaling £52m.

 

So the simple average was £1.13m per seed deal, which seems a quite reasonable target for us after a year or so. What's more, 14 deals were done by Crowdcube and Jenson Seed EIS Fund, managed by Jenson Solutions. I am not familiar with those guys, so I should follow up those two key players.

Other VCs, including venture or growth investment players, mentioned in the report are Business Growth Fund, Index Ventures, Albion Ventures, Balderton Capital, Accel Partners. The Cambridge MBA programme had exposure to Index Ventures and Accel Partners, if I remember correctly. Not too bad.

What's different between entrepreneurs and turnaround managers?

As I worked in a boutique consulting firm which is good at a hands-on turnaround of a distressed firm, I have witnessed successes and failures of several turnaround managers. Now I step into an entrepreneurial world, I just summarise how I learnt would be beneficial to my entrepreneurial career going forward.

Entrepreneurs and turnaround managers appear quite different; however some important characteristics would be shared: especially, both of them have to demonstrate strong leadership to face and overcome difficult situations.

What is different?

• Obviously, entrepreneurs are those who make one from zero, while turnaround managers are who turn minus into plus. Especially in the initial phase, turnaround managers would focus on streamlining existing operations and cost bases, while entrepreneurs try and error how to make revenues.
• In other words, turnaround managers have to decide which existing business, products, and customers to be terminated; whilst entrepreneurs have to figure out where to start its business.
• Entrepreneurs can do hands-on management on everyday operations as the size of the team should be small; yet turnaround managers usually have to manage multiple layers in the organisation which could have several hundreds or more employees. How to mobilise the organisational, or internal, resources  is a key for successful turnaround managers; while how to leverage external networks of different expertise is required for successful entrepreneurs. 

What is shared?

• Sooner or later, business development, or how to make revenues, is essentially crucial to grow the company (for the first time, or again), which should deliver a good momentum among employees. Without such a momentum, initial enthusiasm will be fade out or worn out.
• It is all about how to attract, engage, and motivate people involved; both entrepreneurs and turnaround managers have to make stakeholders believe that the company will become successful in a short time-frame. Thus a deep understanding of the nature of stakeholders are necessary to be successful.
• Both are financially restricted very much; so a well-balanced control of money is beneficially to the firm, whetherever it is in the early development phase or distress.
• Everyone is neither perfect nor a superstar, therefore a team of management, especially how top two or three people interact and communicate, would determine the success or failure of the firm.

This view should be changed after my entrepreneurial journey, which I look forward to experiencing now!!

I hope I won't die like this, after working too hard and long :-p

Most useful tags in HTML

A memo from Tech Society session; most useful tags in HTML:

• <a> link to other pages etc
• <link> link to an external style sheet
• <ol> ordered list
• <ul> unordered list
• <li> each bullet in the list
• <p> paragraph
• <div> division
• <img> load an image
• <script> use other languages such as Javascript
• <form> declare a form such as to send information
• <input> an input for a form

Six key entrepreneurial opportunities in Cambridge

Three very important, at least to me, communities you should try all if you pursue entrepreneurial course and three more stimulating events for networking.

Opportunities to work as a team:

i-Teams: every term (Michaelmas, Lent, Easter) 3-4 teams of 5-6 postgraduate students each are formed to develop a strategy on how to commercialise a cutting-edge technology that is developed in Cambridge. This was where I met the inventor and my co-founders. The final presentations are open to the public, and thus there comes local angeles. Note that you have to go through the application process with submitting your CV and cover letter.
http://iteamsonline.org/

CUE (Cambridge University Entrepreneurs): there are famous £100, £1K, £10K competitions for which entrepreneurs try their ideas, business concepts, and business plans. These competition allow entrepreneurs to make a good pace of developing an idea into a solid business plan. You may submit an idea as an individual, but for business concept and plan you will need a team.
http://www.cue.org.uk/
http://iteamsonline.org/congratulations-to-our-1k-winners/

Accelerate Cambridge: even it is quite new to the history of Judge Business School, the accelerator has gained good attention among entrepreneurs. Theirs training sessions as well as free coachings have been quite helpful to get start-ups in very early phase. They may provide a seed funding up to £20K. This is not open to everyone as you have to pass an interview by the coordinator.
http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/accelerate-cambridge/programmes/

Opportunities to join exciting talks and discussions:

CUTEC (Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club): its Technology Venture Conference is one of the biggest tech and entrepreneurial events in Cambridge. As ARM is the main sponsor of this club, there should be a talk by Hermann Hauser (ARM co-founder), which I highly recommend to join if any.
http://cutec.org/

Silicon Valley Comes to UK: this holds a three-day event where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from Silicon Valley conduct a bunch of talks and sessions for entrepreneurs as well as students in Cambridge and London.
http://www.svc2uk.com/

Innovation Forum: it was new to Cambridge last year. The one-day event was interesting and a good opportunity for networking.
http://innovation-forum.co.uk/

The Cambridge Phenomenon: a great guidebook to understand the Cambridge cluster further in depth.

Get busy living

The feeling of disappointment, out of unsuccessful MPhil/PhD applications, has gone in a few days, implying I might not have been utterly serious about it. Anyway, I couldn't make it on the way to academic research of management, which I felt like doing so for months. This, notwithstanding, surprisingly yet ironically encouraged me to do my best in the management of real businesses; a startup with Cambridge PhD guys.

Life goes on; I will keep moving to 'get busy living' rather than 'busy dying'.

What would I carve after all? Probably nothing other than my name and what I love.

The end of the Easter term - now it's done except for summer activities which is nevertheless a lot to go.

The Easter term was officially completed yesterday. This term was overall great (with a few exceptional mistakes) in terms of the quality learning I've had with the four electives (Biotech and Pharma, Lean Six Sigma, Behavioural Finance, and New Venture Finance) and two core courses (Microeconomics and Corporate Governance and Ethics), not to mention Leadership in action :-p

The electives are either very practical (Lean Six Sigma / New Venture Finance) or thorough and holistic to the subjects (Biotech and Pharma / Behavioural Finance). The discussions in the Corporate Governance and Ethics were deep enough to stimulate my interest in the field further.

For the MBA programme, my plan for summer is (1) to write up a dissertation of 6,000 words on innovation and corporate governance, and (2) to complete a Lean Six Sigma project with Fitzwilliam Museum Cafe to get the LSS certification of Green Belt for the first week of July.

In addition to these activities, I will continue (3) to work on the entrepreneurial project (H2GO Power) as a member of founders given I will keep staying in the UK for the coming year. Also I've decided (4) to join Summer School programmes at the University of Cambridge on Science Term II (11:00am-12:30pm for 20 July - 2 Aug, and Interdisciplinary Term III (9:00am-3:15pm for 3 Aug - 16 Aug).

In short, what I will do this summer are:

1. 6000-word Dissertation (MBA);
2. Lean Six Sigma Project for one week (MBA);
3. Start-up (Accelerate Cambridge / Imperial College Climate KIC);
4. Summer school (Science II / Interdisciplinary III)

This summer should be one of the memorable summer, indeed.

Lean Six Sigma project for the Fitzwilliam Museum Courtyard Cafe

Final assignments in Lent about to be done

Now is 4:30 am, when I am now at the peak of busiest weeks, polishing up the essay for Philosophy in Business.

I argued in the paper that what is 'social responsibility' of a business fundamentally and implications in the modern context of businesses. This has been fun to struggle with very philosophical questions such as what is responsibility and can a business be responsible etc.

On top, my team will have a presentation for Strategic Pricing, where we for the first time used conjoint analysis to assess various packages of a charity event. It was also fun to use the most updated on-line tool.
https://discover.sawtoothsoftware.com/
It is still beta version as of today, but adequate enough for simple choice-based conjoint (CBC).

After tomorrow (actually today), I can focus on:

• Preparation of three exams, namely Marketing, Operations Management, and Strategy in a actual order of timing/date
• Update of financial projection of the entrepreneurial project
• Initial cumulative research phase of our Global Consulting Project (GCP)

The Cambridge Phenomenon as preparation for our GCP

This Feburary has been too busy to blog

Some said this Lent term is more busy than Michaelmas, yes they were absolutely right. Especially, these two weeks are hectic way too much even for me, such as

• Applied for MPhil course at JBS;
• Visited a factory tour of a specialised printer manufacturer;
• Visited LSE for considering MSc/MPhil course;
• Joined Oxford/Cambridge Entrepreneurship Day (partially);
• Completed four assignments:
• Group one for Marketing;
• Individual one for Strategic Pricing;
• Group and individual ones for Cost Management and Control; and
• Confirmed Global Consulting Project for an oncology cluster, which was my first choice luckly; initiated the Project Initiation Document (so called PID), conducted a few initial meetings and interviews.

What's more I will have to do by next Thursday (i.e. only within a week, not this Thursday):

• Complete four assignments:
• Individual exam and group presentation (on conjoint analysis) for Strategic Pricing;
• Group observation note for Operations Management;
• Individual essay of 2-2.5K words for Philosophy in Business (2-2.5k words essay);
• Update the financial projection of our entrepreneurial project on "hydrogen sponge"; and
• Finalize the chapter for "lost decades" project.

...and just after that, three exams on Marketing, Strategy, and Operations Management are awaiting. After the exam, we will start the Global Consulting Project for four weeks until 11th April.

What a exciting and hectic term of Lent at Cambridge MBA (and so forth).

Talks/seminars/conferences around Cambridge in December 2013

The best of this month: "The Flawed Dominance of Economics: Engaging other Social Sciences in Government". My key takeaway is that the combination of economics and social science (e.g. Psychology, Behaviour Science, Sociology, Criminology, etc.) can be intriguing to me. Or, I would like to challenge the Economics from a different perspective and tools, not limited within the conventional Economics.

The Keynes Lecture Theatre, Kings' College, Cambridge

The second best: Neuroscience clash course. My key takeaway is that I am not so super interested in the actual functions of the nerve system in the body; rather I am much interested how we interpret the surface meanings and interact with each other, and thus how the overall ecosystem of human beings works.

As the first week was the end of Full Term of Michaelmas, there were not much although I overachieved the target by over 50%(!), with the participation target of more than 30 talks/seminars/conference in this term.

On top, I now feel that I am grasping what I would like to invest my time in next year. It's been a very effective decision to test my interests by listening to various topics beyond the ordinal MBA course, even from time to time some were very hard to be understood.

The full list of talks/seminars:

• #041 Neuroscience Clash Course (2) Glia = Glue ++++
• #042 London Business School Global Healthcare Conference 2013 +++
• #043 Neuroscience Clash Course (3) Neurons +++
• #044 The Flawed Dominance of Economics: Engaging other Social Sciences in Government +++++
• #045 i-Teams Michaelmas 2013 final presentations +++

Two assignments done; now is the time to relax and think over the future.

Overall, two presentations on this Monday and Tuesday went well.

After completing one presentation, from the riverside terrace of the Anchor, Cambridge

The first one was quite similar to my previous job in management consulting; yet the second one was more challenging because it was talking about a bit unfamiliar technology to around 50 people, most of whom I don't know, including a bunch of angel investors/serial entrepreneurs; however, I surprisingly did a good job at the latter one, maybe thanks to some confidence that has been developed through these months.

A certificate of completion of i-Teams at Cambridge University

Anyway, after one essay for Management Practice and one in-class assignment for Management Science (Statistics), will arrive the end of this term (and the Christmas break).