Aside from the difficulty of starting and growing a successful company in the first place, there’s also the challenge of getting an ‘exit’ where the return on the investment you’ve put in is made ‘liquid’. In the dot-com boom the answer was an IPO and then from 2002–2012 the answer was ‘get bought by a big american company’, which was fine but a bit limiting.

Now there are some new options starting to appear. It’s good to see that the London Stock Exchange has announced a new proposal called the High Growth Segment which got quite a lot of coverage in the business pages this week. The idea is that small but fast growing companies can go public and retain their independence rather than having to sell out. Combined with initiatives like the Social Stock Exchange (which is apparently about to launch) all this gives me some hope that London is becoming smarter about the whole life cycle of investment.

Thank goodness for that. It being Valentine’s Day we can finally talk about what we’re up to with Bethnal Green Ventures. We’re very pleased to be able to announce that we’ll be back bigger and better for 2013 and beyond with new investment, new digs and the ability to back lots more talented founders using tech to solve social and environmental problems.

Our main partners will be the Cabinet Office, Nesta and Nominet Trust — between them they’re investing £1.8 million over the next four years. We’re also going to be getting support from our friends at Keystone Law and Google Campus as well as a whole host of other organisations and mentors that we’ll be able to announce over the coming months.

The basic format of BGV will be the same. We’ll run a call for ideas, choose the best teams that apply, invest £15,000 in each venture and run a three month programme that involves learning directly from people who’ve already built great startups, free office space (this time at Nesta and Google Campus) and a Demo Day at the end. The difference is that rather than six teams, we’ll be able to invest in 20 teams a year (in two cohorts of ten — one in the summer and one in the winter).

The investment gives us the capacity we need to build up an amazing community of founders using tech to solve social problems. That’s where we think the real value will come from — the peer network that emerges from our alumni and mentors — and we’ll now be able to grow that to several hundred people in a few years time.

I’ll be blogging more about what we’re looking for and how the programme will be improved over the coming months. We’ll definitely be tweaking it based on the feedback we got from the teams, mentors and investors last year.

Applications are going to open on 6th March but if you have an idea you’d like to run past us before then, feel free to get in touch — hello@bethnalgreenventures.com is the best way. We’re more than happy to meet up or talk it through. Even if we don’t invest we’re really very friendly about it — if you’re trying to do something that uses tech to address a social or environmental problem, we’ll try our best to help.

Ten years ago I was doing quite a lot of thinking about the future of nanotechnology. Strangely though, even then, it was already over.

I first came across the idea when I was at school and reading everything I could get my hands on by Richard Feynman. Back in 1959 he gave a talk called “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”. The most famous quote is perhaps:

The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.

Technology then sped ahead and many of the things that Feynman had predicted became possible — including in 1990 a team at IBM using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope to position individual Xenon atoms to spell “IBM”. In the 1990s and early 2000s the idea started to spill into popular science led in particular by an MIT researcher who had a knack for communicating the subject — Eric Drexler. His book Engines of Creation (actually published in 1986) and all the public speaking and interviews he did raised the prospect of molecular machines, of cars and buildings made of diamond and the ‘everything box’ which would enable us to manufacture whatever we liked at home.

Then, in Europe at least, the genetic modification debate happened and there was a sense that nano could be the next technology to face a backlash. And Eric Drexler sort of disappeared. This Wired piece from 2004 paints a picture of a man pushed out of the field he helped to popularise. I’d got a sense of that the year before when I was at a conference about the implications of nanotechnology and found out that the organisers had wanted him there but their academic funders had blocked him being on the agenda.

I was reminded of all this by the article in the current issue of Wired UK which accompanies Steven Levy’s interview with Google CEO Larry Page. It’s called “A healthy disregard for the impossible: 7 epic projects that can change the world”. Almost all of them have the ring of the kind of ideas that Drexler thought nanotechnology would make possible and I wonder how much of his thinking is now around us or close to commercialisation.

I’ve been struggling with passwords for a while. I sign up for all kinds of things and keeping track of all the different password/username/email combinations has frankly become a bit of a nightmare, especially across different computers, tablets and phones. Then there’s the worry about anything other than randomly generated passwords when it comes to hacking attacks (and even those might not be good enough in the long run).

Although a lot of people recommend it, to be honest I found 1Password pretty baffling to start with. There are a bunch of sites that it doesn’t really work with very well and out of the box it doesn’t sync across machines.

In the end though I settled on using 1Password with Dropbox and gradually using it to replace all my passwords with new ones randomly generated by 1Password. By the way the Dropbox synching only works if you have your Dropbox folder in the default location on a Mac — took me a while to work that out.

(Just spotted that Nic Brisbourne posted about the same subject today!)

Enjoyed watching this video of Tony Fadell talking about his experience of leading the teams behind all kinds of interesting projects including the iPod, iPhone and Nest learning thermometer. The last answer about self-doubt particularly caught my eye:

“If you’re not having doubt you’re not pushing the boundaries far enough. It’s too easy… you need to be feeling that doubt every single day.”

I’m just about old enough to remember the miners’ strike of 1984. Listening to ‘Just Deserts’ by Michael Blastland on Radio 4 a few days ago I realised quite how impossible anything like it would be today. The argument in the programme is that the financial gains from the growth we’ve seen over the past 30 years have gone to senior executives rather than workers or shareholders. The last point surprised me — I’d assumed that at least some of the relative gains had gone to investors but the figures (at least for public companies) show the opposite.

The result has been a gradual growth in inequality and the more I read of the economics, the less I think anybody really understands what’s going on. Perhaps that’s because there are a whole host of reasons for the changes. Unions blame the laws curbing their power, others say that increasing regulation has made it more expensive to employ people at all and others blame the underlying structure of the modern company which effectively gives executives free reign.

I’m not sure. But I think technology has probably also played a big part. Automation (as this Washington Post series explains) is changing the structure of the economy in ways we didn’t notice because of the shock of the financial crash of 2008 and all the talk about public sector deficits. And unless we look at the way we apply tech in the future, things could get worse.

Photo some rights reserved by MuseumWales.

I’ve been helping out a bit on the Design Council’s Working Well Challenge (supported by the Nominet Trust) for the past six months or so and yesterday was Demo Day where the three teams pitched what they’ve been working on. They were brilliant and all are well worth finding out more about. They were:

Discoverables  is a website that uses a game-like approach to help young people find and develop their key skills and strengths. Users earn ‘discoverability points’ as they take on missions and challenges in order to create a rich showcase page that they can email to employers or take to interviews.

The Matter is a newspaper run, produced and published entirely by young people. Each edition is their public response to a question asked by the government or a business.

Step Up is a website that helps young people to identify their career ambition, and provides them with the means and confidence to connect with those that can help them achieve it.

Before the teams pitched Mike and Mat asked me to say a little bit about what’s going on in the world of tech social ventures. Here’s roughly what I said:

Hello.

My name is Paul Miller and I help run Bethnal Green Ventures. We invest in and support very early stage social ventures that are using technology to solve problems in healthcare, education, employment and sustainability.

My involvement with the Working Well Challenge has been via the steering group. It’s been a lot of fun and I’ve been hugely impressed by the progress the teams made and I hope you are too when you hear from them in a few moments time.

Before your hear from them, I thought I’d give you a little context. We live in pretty challenging times employment wise, especially if you’re young. Britain’s youth unemployment rate stands at 21% — double the average across all working age groups. Across Europe the picture is even worse. Both Greece and Spain’s youth unemployment rates surpassed 50% in 2012, Spain’s has now reached 55%.

Even more challenging is that it seems old solutions may not work any more. We used to be able to say that when the growth came back after a recession, employment would return too. This time that doesn’t seem to be the case. In the US, the growth is back but the employment isn’t. It’s thought that nearly 4 million so-called ‘middle-class’ or ‘graduate’ jobs have disappeared, being replaced, at best, by very low paid jobs.

Working well won’t be about working like your parents, or even your older brother or sister. In just the space of a decade, employment has changed almost beyond recognition for many people with much greater demands for flexibility, completely different ways of finding jobs, and entirely different career paths. The world has changed and we’re struggling to keep up.

The bright spot in this gloomy outlook is in the world of startups. The tech startup and investment world was about the quickest to bounce back after 2008 and increasingly those startups and their founders are looking at solving big, important problems.

Perhaps they’re listening to people like Jeff Hammerbacher who was one of the first employees at Facebook (but then left) saying:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

Or perhaps they’re listening to Tim O’Reilly’s rallying call for engineers to:

“Work on stuff that matters”.

Or maybe they’ve noticed the growth in something people call ‘impact investing’ or ‘social investment’. Commercial, philanthropic and public sector seem to be converging on a new set of tools that use the rigour of venture capital and private equity to have a social impact as well. Just in the UK, it’s a source of capital that is expected to grow to be billions in the coming years.

Whatever the reason, the growth in digital startups that are solving problems in healthcare, education and sustainability has been rapid.

I look up to companies like Fitbit, Ring-a-doc, Codecademy, Skillshare, Meetup.com, even Tesla in the US. Closer to home there are companies like AMEE, Patients know best or projects like Patchwork from FutureGov to help multiagency working around young people.

The skills of the people working on these projects in terms of engineering and design are superb. They are definitely some of the finest minds of their generation.

But on to tonight. There’s lots of talk about risk in this world and you might find yourself sceptical that any of these ideas will ever work — they just sound too ambitious.  Reid Hoffman has a colourful metaphor for running a startup when he says it’s like:

“Jumping off a cliff and assembling an aeroplane on the way down.”

I don’t see it like that. The truth is a bit more mundane for most startups. In fact it’s just a humungous todo list and there’s almost certainly something on that list for the teams tonight that you can help with.

When you’re listening to the teams tell you what they’ve done tonight, I’d urge you to come at it with a very simple mindset. Just think to yourself, “How can I help?”

If we all start approaching these big scary problems like that, we might have a chance.

It’s ten years since I started writing pamphlets. It actually all started when I was at university and picked up a book in Blackwells called Life After Politics and realised that you could get across really interesting ideas in a few thousand words. Apparently:

In order to count as a pamphlet, UNESCO requires a publication (other than a periodical) to have “at least 5 but not more than 48 pages exclusive of the cover pages”

I thought it might be interesting to take a trip down memory lane and see what I was thinking about and whether any of them held water 5–10 years on. It’s also the 20th birthday of Demos this year which is where I wrote most of my stuff during the noughties.

The first pamphlet I wrote (in 2002) was called Open Policy (free to download here or £24 on Amazon!) when I was working at Forum for the Future. At the time I remember I was deep into learning about hacker culture and network theory and I’d come across the work of Jonah Peretti.

With the click of a mouse, the message was sent. Nike, sports clothing giant and symbol of personal freedom, had created a feature on their website allowing shoppers to customise shoes with words or slogans of their choice. On 5 January 2001, Jonah Peretti ordered a pair of shoes customised with the word ‘sweatshop’ and Nike refused to deliver. But the email conversation between Peretti and the Nike customer services department about why the company wouldn’t allow his request was stored on Peretti’s computer.

Peretti forwarded the email conversation to just twelve friends, but within hours thousands of people had seen the message. Within days the message had been posted on popular discussion sites like Slashdot.org and Plastic.com and was seen by tens of thousands of other internet users. Soon, Peretti was getting calls from journalists and TV producers asking him for interviews. NBC’s Today programme flew him to New York to appear live in front of millions of viewers. There was nothing Nike could do to put the genie back in the bottle. Once the message was out, there was no going back.

Reading back there were a whole series of ideas going on which I thought were connected. The first was hacktivism (the pamphlet was actually going to be called ‘Hacktivism’ until quite late on) which I thought was going to increase as uptake of technology continued. I was right there. What I didn’t predict was the growth of social media managers to manage it. In 2002 if you worked for an agency you built websites for people, now you manage their social media.

Then there were the values baked into the internet itself:

In designing a network of computers one needs to set rules by which computers can communicate with one another. The rules are informed by the values of those creating the rules, just as the laws passed by a government depend on the values of the individual politicians in that government.

The other theme was applying open source principles to decision making both in companies and in government, which is where the title came from.

The argument presented in this essay is that there is a need for a massive increase in transparency. Organisations should learn from the open source movement where sharing and openness leads to far greater innovation.

It’s an idea that Clay Shirky has talked about much more eloquently recently.

And then it all ends by getting a bit meta:

Reductionism isn’t limited to science. It has permeated government and business thinking for the entire twentieth century. Institutionally, we are struggling to adapt the hierarchies of the reductionist age to the challenges of the network society.Only now are policymakers beginning to sense that the complexity of society cannot be handled using command and control. Our reaction to complexity, whether we are dazzled in the headlights of unpredictability or thrive on the unlimited possibilities, is key to the survival of society. And if we are to thrive we will need new tools.

Reading it back isn’t completely embarrassing — there were a few interesting ideas in there even if it doesn’t quite hold together as a whole. The pamphlet didn’t really get any media coverage but it did get downloaded a lot. I think making publications free was a bit of a novelty at the time. It did also get me noticed by Tom Bentley who was Director of Demos at the time. And that’s where I wrote my next few pamphlets…

John Brockman’s Edge.org Annual Question is ‘What should we be worried about?’ by which I think he means, ignoring the profile different threats get in the media and looking at real evidence, what could cause a real threat to humanity?

There’s some good stuff in there and some very worrying things I hadn’t heard about before. Brian Eno talks about something that chimes with my experience and has worried me for a while:

Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics. We avoid it like the plague—like Edge avoids it, in fact. Is this because we feel that politics isn’t where anything significant happens? Or because we’re too taken up with what we’re doing, be it Quantum Physics or Statistical Genomics or Generative Music? Or because we’re too polite to get into arguments with people? Or because we just think that things will work out fine if we let them be—that The Invisible Hand or The Technosphere will mysteriously sort them out?

Whatever the reasons for our quiescence, politics is still being done—just not by us. It’s politics that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan and a few hundred thousand casualties. It’s politics that’s bleeding the poorer nations for the debts of their former dictators. It’s politics that allows special interests to run the country. It’s politics that helped the banks wreck the economy. It’s politics that prohibits gay marriage and stem cell research but nurtures Gaza and Guantanamo.

But we don’t do politics. We expect other people to do it for us, and grumble when they get it wrong. We feel that our responsibility stops at the ballot box, if we even get that far. After that we’re as laissez-faire as we can get away with.

What worries me is that while we’re laissez-ing, someone else is faire-ing.