Oxford Geek Nights 5
Should have practiced my talk! Then maybe I would have realised it wasn’t even close to being under 5 minutes. Video and slides on the OGN page.
Despite the talk being a disaster, it was, from an objective standpoint, successful: I’m getting somewhere with my public speaking jitters, and lots of people came up later to talk about it.
I met some really interesting people and heard some great talks. Conversations of note:
- Stelios Koundoros, founder at Optimor Systems, trying to bring rationality to consumerism with a recommendation system with some interesting maths under the hood. Some interesting standpoints, some refreshingly Internet-sceptic - probably the only ones in the room! Main thrust of his argument was the shallowness and poverty of online interaction versus face to face life. Also disagrees with me about the value of philanthropy where the funder is not also the executor.
- David Langer, heroic young web entrepreneur fresh out of Oxford, now busy making Groupspaces.com an invaluable social tool for us all! Great tips and stories for someone such as myself looking to follow in his footsteps! Was one apex of a short but interesting triangular debate between he, James Turnbull and yours truly about the soundness of advertising-based revenue models
- A frenetic short American sociologist whose name wasn’t forthcoming. Fired a million points at me about philanthropy in the US vs the UK - several of which were, I’m sad to say, wrong! Still, quite an interesting experience!
del.icio.us Tags: OGN,oxford geek nights
Bookmark/Share:
Related:
- Oxford University launches 2008 venture capital fund for own students
- Oxford's business school, the Said Business School, has Venture Capitalist ambitions. It has put together a £1m seed stage venture capital fund, the SBSVF, and is looking to invest in businesses launched by members of the biz school itself, or members of the Oxford Entrepreneurs (OE) network. They're looking to put in £50k to £100,000 to early stage ventures. They did something similar in 2007, and ended up investing in Jambase, a frankly underwhelming live music portal (recommending and reviewing concerts, with none of the elegance or simplicity of the excellent Songkick) after reviewing over eighty applications. The copyright notice on the Jambase site states that its been around in 1998, so I'm not really sure how that would classify it as a seed stage startup. The money for the fund has been put up by Sir Philip Green and David Bonderman. Philip Green is a giant of the retail space, notably famous for catalysing the turnaround at Marks & Spencers. David Bonderman is a venture capitalist who found the Texas Pacific Group private eq firm. Interestingly, and somewhat fittingly, SBS students are involved in vetting, reviewing and doing due diligence on applicants to the SBSVF. This somewhat betrays its...
- A lesson learnt
- I've finally had to face up to the question of what path to take in life. Nobody said deciding on a path through life was easy, and I never expected it to be - but how you manage the human relationships on which your decision process depends can dramatically affect the outcome. This is a lesson recently branded upon my brain, likely very painfully: as I write, a door seem likely to be closing to me that I would have absolutely loved to take, as a result of cowardly mismanagement of one such relationship. I've been faced with a short term opportunity to work with a fantastic bunch of people in a company with a great mission, with a position doing something reasonably interesting. It wouldn't pay much, in a city that's (in)famously expensive to live in, and the outcome is highly uncertain and might leave me in a financially unsustainable city with no job. What I've been trying to do is greatly reduce the risk by trying to line up a job for winter '09 onwards - in an industry which I think would suit me, career-wise. So it comes down to balancing the short term and the long...
- Holy cow
- No more undergrad lectures - ever. The future just rang the doorbell. Mood? Apprehensive. Sad that this will mean the end of my undergraduate life at Oxford, a place I've truly adored despite not leading the classic Oxford undergrad's life....
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Add New Comment
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment
Trackbacks