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I for one can’t wait to get my hands on an electric car. Faraday Future’s concept (see picture above) fits the recent trend of manufacturers trying to outdo one another from a desirability perspective. In the beginning there was Tesla – with the Lotus designed Roadster and then the Model S and Model X – all aimed at typical buyers of luxury and sports cars, particularly when Elon Musk added ‘Ludicrous’ mode. Then there was the brief shooting star of Fisker Karma, and more recently the mainstream car companies have got involved – the Porsche Mission-E is still a concept but is one of many high end electric cars that will hit our roads in the next few years.

Of course, I have no hope of being able to afford any of these cars. I’m a huge fan of Tesla (and own shares) because I think they’ve built for the long term and will reach the mass market in the end. The key inflection point will be the Model 3 which will be unveiled this year. If it’s under £20,000, has a range of 200+ miles and desirable, I think the switch to electric amongst ‘ordinary’ car owners will be very fast.

Having said that I want one I don’t see the need to buy a car though. We use cars quite often, but generally by renting them from Avis, Zipcar or (more recently) DriveNow. DriveNow have a few electric BMW i3’s in their fleet but they never seem to be in the right place. If one of the major hire car firms made renting electric cars affordable, I’d start using them in a heartbeat.

With most of London being street parking, I don’t quite see how charging will work. If we had a garage (a rare luxury in London) then it would seem easy but I remember visiting the Google offices in California and seeing the rows of charging points in the car parks and realising we’ll need something similar in London boroughs. If a local authority was to help make this happen, I’d even think about moving there.

I think it might be urban air pollution that swings it in the end with major cities realising they can save lives by switching to only allowing electric vehicles into their central areas. If either of the two main candidates for London Mayor committed to making central London zero emissions only by 2020, I’d vote for them.

Basically I’m a bit of an electric sheep at the moment. I really want to be able to use electric cars and I’ll follow the companies and people that make that possible.

A few years ago I wrote a blog post called ‘How to stop geeks becoming the next bankers‘. At the time I was worried about technology exacerbating the job losses created by the 2008 financial crisis. I wrote “We need technology to solve the difficult problems we face… technology should be creating new and better institutions rather than just gradually eroding old ones and leaving a vacuum in their place.” But the motivation behind the post was my belief that technology has real potential to make the world a better place and I didn’t want to see it highjacked by people who just wanted to get rich off the industry.

So posts like Paul Graham’s at the weekend make me pretty angry. Whether he meant it quite like that or not, sticking up for inequality is at best a bad PR decision for him personally and at worst going to strengthen the backlash against the tech sector and Silicon Valley. In my darker moments I think we’re completely failing at stopping tech becoming as toxic as banking.

Arguing that inequality doesn’t matter is just daft. I’m all in favour of people getting rewarded for creating great companies but to argue that the point of creating companies is to get richer than other people is completely misguided. Making enough money to be considered ‘rich’ should be a side effect of creating something that improves peoples’ lives. And I don’t think anybody is arguing to eradicate inequality – it just shouldn’t continue to be so extreme. Society is a lesser place for every obscenely rich billionaire who does nothing with their wealth other than tickle their own ego.

I don’t believe that extreme inequality is inevitable – it has happened because of the rules and norms we’ve chosen and we need to get serious about changing them. Tim Harford, writing about some of the controversies around the ‘gig economy’, says that the relationship between state and the technology industry needs to be completely rethought:

” … here is a far more radical approach: we should end the policy of trying to offload the welfare state to corporations. It is a policy that hides the costs of these benefits, and ensures that they are unevenly distributed. Instead we should take a hard look at that list of goodies: healthcare, pensions, income for people who are not working. Then we should decide what the state should provide and how generously… Call it libertarianism with a safety net.”

That safety net of course will come at a (taxation) price – something that a lot of people and companies in Silicon Valley resist. Listening to people at the more Ayn Rand end of the spectrum you get the feeling they would love Silicon Valley to float off into the Pacific away from the United States and all its pesky taxes and poor people. Or maybe the only plausible endgame is that the rich jump on the rockets they’ve built for themselves and leave behind the detritus of planet Earth.

Although it annoyed me, I’m glad that Paul Graham’s post has got a debate going. He partly rolls back his own argument at the end of the post, admitting that he’s really just made a semantic argument, suggesting, “Let’s attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That’s much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.” I think he underestimates how closely poverty and inequality are linked.

Mark Suster posted the best response from an investor I’ve seen. He ends his post, “I believe in income inequality in so much as it’s an obvious consequence of capitalism. I have no problem when success is rewarded with riches. But I don’t celebrate income inequality. It pains me.”

I would add that it’s something that pains me and that I want to change. The technology industry has created huge wealth and with that comes responsibility. I hope in the future it can create wealth as well as large amounts of social value – and hopefully do that with the benefits distributed more equally.

Just thinking back over the books I’ve read in 2015, there have been some good ones. These are the ones I enjoyed the most – in no particular order (not all published in 2015 obviously but I read them in the last 12 months):

• H is from Hawk has scenes that have stuck in my mind like a brilliant novel but it’s actually a non-fiction book.  Helen Macdonald’s memoir of buying and training a Goshawk intermingled with what she learned from reading accounts of other peoples’ attempts is a wonderful book.
• Seveneves – Neal Stephenson’s most recent is an epic story that spans generations trying to survive the Moon shattering and the subsequent meteor storms obliterating life on the surface of Earth. It’s the best new, original science fiction I’ve read this year.
• Holacracy – I’d seen a few articles about the idea of ‘the opposite of hierarchy’ but it was watching how Fairphone put it into action that got me to read the book. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll see lots of new technologically enabled ways of organising companies in the next few years.
• Ready Player One – Ernest Cline’s love letter to 1980s computer games is all good fun. It’s a really well done page-turner of a cyber fiction novel and no surprise that it’s going to be a film in the next couple of years.
• To The Edge of the World – we had a fantastic time on the Trans Siberian railway in June travelling from Moscow to Beijing. I read Christian Wolmar’s history of the building of the line along the way and learned a huge amount about Russia.
• Humans Need Not Apply – there have been a spate of machine learning and artificial intelligence books this year and this was my favourite about the implications. There’s an emerging – and slightly annoying – voice common to books by current and former Silicon Valley executives that this one does fall into, but I think many of the predictions are sound.
• The Master Algorithm – another book about machine learning, in this case an attempt to actually explain how some of the algorithms work to a lay reader. It’s not always a straightforward read but helped me understand things much better.
• Postcapitalism – I was sceptical about this one because I thought it was going to be about protest movements and how if we all just lived like them society would be fine, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a much bolder more ambitious attempt by Paul Mason to link the failure of our financial system and the rise of information technology. Definitely the best book I’ve read this year about the current situation economically and politically.
• The Sense of Style – I’m a sucker for books about writing but this one is excellent. Steven Pinker puts his scientist’s eye and years of experience as a writer to work to create a wonderful guide to writing in the twenty-first century.

We’re very pleased to announce that Bethnal Green Ventures has been certified as a B Corp. If you haven’t come across the idea before, it’s a voluntary system for companies to show that they meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. B Corps are required to change their legal documents so that employees, communities and the wider environment rank alongside shareholders in decision making processes. We’re joining companies like Etsy, Change.org, Kickstarter, Patagonia and our friends over at Fairphone as well as a whole host of companies who are newly certified in the UK.

We first talked to the UK B Corp team about applying earlier this year and we’ve found the process of certification useful in its own right. At first it just looks like a long online form and I’d say the first draft took us about half a day to complete. There are a few questions on there that are still a bit US centric but almost every page makes you think. We’re still a relatively small and young organisation so it actually helped us to begin to put good systems in place to make sure we meet the standards we aspire to. Once you’ve completed the form you then have a Skype interview as the B Labs team go through any questions they have about your answers on the online form. They also ask you to upload documents so that they can see proof that the policies you say you have actually exist.

For us becoming a B Corp is a statement that we’re about more than money. We’re doing our best to improve the social and environmental impact of our work and our organisation. To be honest we’re now a bit competitive about it. Our score is 92.5 which is well below our friends at Fairphone who certified back in May with 104 and we’re already scheming about how we’ll catch up!

We also like that B Corps feels like a community rather than just a certification process and we’re looking forward to the UK launch event in Camden this evening. Congratulations to James, Charmian and the team who have brought B Corps over to the UK. We hope it’s a movement that grows!

As the tech for good community grows in the UK and Europe, we get loads of opportunities sent to us at BGV which we try to send on to alumni and other people we remember to but we’re not particularly systematic about it.

So I thought it might be worth collecting them together in a very low-fi way and sending them out to people who are interested. The idea is that I’ll put together a little email newsletter with three sections:

• Funding and competitions
• Events
• Jobs

The only criteria is that they have to be opportunities relating to technology startups that are trying to have a positive social or environmental impact on the world.

Before getting too serious about it I thought I’d see if there’s any demand – so sign up if you’re interested and we’ll see how it goes!

tinyletter.com/techforgood

How to manage yourself as a team is a perpetual issue at BGV. Most of the ventures we support through the accelerator are micro teams (2-3 people) and then grow to be small (4-10 people) before hopefully going on to be huge – the BGV team itself is now six people and we’ve tried quite a few techniques.

When you have very little in the way of person hours available to you as an organisation, it’s vital that you get the best and the most out of everybody if you’re going to get to where you want to be. But there’s not much in the way of orthodox approaches when you’re at that scale. More traditional ‘management’ only really kicks in for organisations larger than tens of people but I’m interested in whether you can set up interesting patterns when you’re small that create healthier larger organisations too.

In the past at BGV we’ve used the RACI framework which we found really helpful. We’ve never had a CEO or line management in a traditional sense so it helped us organise our work very well. Melanie also designed our current system of team development which consists of six monthly 360 degree reviews – which is also a very good exercise for small teams.

After a recent visit to the Fairphone team and seeing how they work with a team of around 40 people (and growing) I started to learn more about holacracy. It’s used by organisations like Zappos, Medium and quite a few others. The basic idea is that you separate out roles from jobs and have semi-democratic ‘circles’ of roles that are self managing. It all sounds a bit hippy but when you dig into it, it actually requires incredible levels of discipline.

We went through the exercise of describing all the roles in the organisation last week which came to 13 pages and now we’re starting to look at organising around the circles that emerged. So far I think we’ve found it a useful approach but the proof will really be in whether it sticks and helps us in the long term.

There’s a great episode of Invisibilia about how expectations affect reality. It goes back to an experiment done by psychologist Bob Rosenthal where he got some lab rats and put them in separate enclosures marked ‘incredibly smart’ and  ‘incredibly dumb’. He then asked people to train the rats to navigate a maze.

The ‘smart’ ones did twice as well as the ‘dumb’ ones – despite the fact that they were actually all the same. It’s an effect that has been seen in lots of different contexts. People behave differently depending whether they think they’re with clever or not so clever people.

I think a lot of it happens in the startup world based on what other people say about the founders or a company. If you think a startup has promise, it’s more likely to have promise. Those investors that treat all founders as if they’re talented and exude confidence in their abilities are more likely to find they have winners on their hands.

I liked this piece by Bill Gurley ‘In Defence of the Deck‘.

The great storytellers have an unfair competitive advantage. They are going to recruit better, they will be darlings in the press, they are going to raise money more easily and at higher prices, they are going to close amazing business developer partnerships, and they are going to have a strong and cohesive corporate culture.

A great presentation about a business is a brilliant thing and a huge amount of work goes into the best ones. Of course, a pitch is no use on its own – and nobody would (I hope!) invest based on a deck alone.

We’ve now had over 50 ventures pitch at BGV Launch Nights and we consistently get feedback from audiences that they’re some of the best presentations they’ve ever seen. We have a few founders who can carry off the ‘no slides’ style. Jamie from Talklife did it really well last year. But most use visuals and simple text to create an impact. I remember Miquel knocking it out of the park when he gave the Fairphone presentation back in 2012 – the format revealed a lot about the company. There have been many more that are memorable. In fact you can see them all here.

To be honest we don’t have a magic formula for helping teams create great pitches. We simply get them to pitch to each other on Friday afternoons over a few beers for the second half of the programme. They then give feedback (usually in the form of a ‘praise sandwich‘) and do it again the next week. We tell them to think of investors as just one audience for their pitch – it should appeal to customers, future employees and their friends and families just as much as it does to people with cheque books.

Also worth noting that we’re not interested in decks when teams apply to BGV – we ask people not to use them at our interviews. While we would never fund anybody ‘pre-idea’ we do fund teams ‘pre-deck’. We think assessing a team based on a deck that they haven’t yet had a chance to really develop is a bit unfair.

There’s some great science fiction around at the moment. I’m not sure what’s going on but something about the present is inspiring great writing about the future. One of the best books I’ve read this year is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson – minor plot spoilers ahead so beware.

The novel starts with the Moon blowing up. It does so in a fairly matter of fact way – one minute it’s there and the next something (we never find out what) has caused it to disintegrate into many smaller parts. It takes a short while for scientists to realise that this is very bad for Earth dwellers and will eventually lead to so many pieces of rock entering the Earth’s atmosphere that the surface of the planet will become a firey mess and uninhabitable for thousands of years. The novel is the story of how human beings try to survive.

Weighing in at 880 pages, it’s hardly a short story and Stephenson manages to use that to give the most plausible version of life in space that I’ve read. There’s no warp speed or magic device for creating gravity. Food is scarce and death is random and frequent. The ‘Seven Eves’ of the title are the only survivors (down from seven billion) capable of reproduction five years after the surface of the Earth has become uninhabitable. Ingenuity is all that the human race has on its side. Robotics