Paul Miller

I spent a wonderful three days last week in Derbyshire talking about how we could use everything we’ve learned about creating and supporting digital technologies to start a renaissance of making things. Instigator-in-chief was Russell Davies who wrote a little bit about why we were getting together in his Wired column last month:

‘Incubator’ has become a dirty word for startups. During the dot-com boom of a decade ago, there were hundreds of spaces in the US and Europe dedicated to growing new digital businesses which investors hoped would take over the world. But it didn’t work. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the [...]

As we start working on The Startup Factories there are a few things we need to get straight. First of all we need to try and settle on a definition of what constitutes an accelerator program. Quora is doing a great job of listing the kind of scheme we’re interested in as they pop up, [...]

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 [...]

Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years, partly because it’s very well written and researched but mainly because it made me change my mind about some important issues. Perhaps the easiest argument for me to accept (although I still learned a great deal) [...]

Not normally somebody I agree with, but Clarkson’s piece to end the current series of Top Gear was quite special. I think he’s right – the best hydrocarbon powered vehicles (planes, trains and automobiles) have been built. Now it’s time for something different. Nice music too.

My favourite business journalist, Peter Day, writing on the occasion of 21 years working on In Business: Some 10 years ago the great management thinker the late Peter Drucker told me that he did not think that the computer had yet begun to effect the way organisations were managed. At the time, it seemed to [...]

Saw one of these on my way to work this morning. Encouraging.

“If you’re going to take a long-term orientation, you have to be willing to stay heads down and ignore a wide array of critics, even well-meaning critics. If you don’t have a willingness to be misunderstood for a long period of time, then you can’t have a long-term orientation.” That’s Jeff Bezos in US News. [...]

A few weeks ago I had an argument about the future of the human race that baffled me. I won’t say who with, but he’s an environmentalist of note (who is in his 50s I guess). It went something like this: Him: We have a problem. Me: Agreed. Him: It’s really bad. Me: Yep. Him: [...]