Paul Miller

This is roughly what I said in a talk I gave at the Designers Accord London Town Hall meeting at the Design Council on 19th January 2012.   I don’t know about you but when I read, watch or listen to the news at the moment I get pretty depressed. The Today Programme seems to [...]

After some initial skepticism, I’m now much more into the lean startup way of doing things. Although I’d read a bit about it beforehand, it was one of our investors at School of Everything who really pushed us to follow the methodology rigorously. At first we found it really difficult but after a year of [...]

During a recent trip to New York and San Francisco, a few people said they thought that the movie The Social Network was having an effect on the number of people who wanted to start a startup. Now, on the face of it, The Social Network isn’t a positive film. It’s mainly set in the [...]

There are some bits of starting a company that everybody has to do, no matter whether their aims are to change the world or not. I thought I’d just write quickly how we went about doing the legal setup, banking and accounting for School of Everything because when we started out, I had no idea [...]

Choosing who to work with is the most important decision in startup life. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to start something up on your own and so it really is worth spending time finding great people to work with very early on. There will be no formal interviews, CV’s won’t be [...]

When you’ve defined your problem, have a short description of your solution and you’ve started getting positive feedback from real people, it can be helpful to build a prototype of how your solution might work. The key thing here is that you’re not yet building the technology you will finally use. You’re using things that [...]

We’ve just started helping the first cohort of Bethnal Green Ventures projects and I’m using it as an excuse to write down some of the things I’ve learned about social startups over the past couple of years. It starts with a hunch You start the process of developing a startup with hunches about both the [...]

Paul Graham is a bit of a hero of mine as I think he is for many people who have had a go at creating a start-up. Not necessarily for his track record (which is also brilliant) but for his ability to put his finger on what’s important, particularly in the essays on his site: [...]

It struck me this morning how my experience of London has changed in the last few years. I swiped my Oyster card to get on a bus to go along to a meeting of School of Everything Unplugged (organised using Meetup), then hopped on a TfL bike to get back to the office. I’m about [...]