Venture capital is a very small and incredibly young industry, but it is one with outsized power, particularly when it comes to the contemporary digital economy. For the entire duration of venture capital’s existence, this power has been in the hands of mostly white, highly educated and mostly wealthy men…

The investment world was recently shaken by the ‘Deliveroo disaster’ but why is still nobody talking about the ‘ethics of VCs’ and so much focus is on the tech companies funded and controlled by them? I was interviewed yesterday by a reporter from Citywire in London; she reached out because…

While nine months ago (see my earlier piece), many VC funds wouldn’t even have known what ESG might mean for them, there has been a wave of initiatives going through the industry recently. In general, ESG stands for environment-social-governance and comprises a set of principles that touches on issues from…

The time between Christmas and New Year’s is often slow — and even more so this year in London where Tier-4 restrictions keep us inside. So for me, it is the right moment to write next term’s lectures. Within a series on the anthropolgy of contemporary capitalism, I will lecture…

It’s rainy here in London and I just came home from afternoon tea with an old friend of mine. He has recently moved from banking into the tech world where he helps startups to do fundraising. His business model is simple but so far rather unusual for the startup world…

It’s Covid-lockdown-time and (quite a few) people have a little bit more time to read and think about things. I finally came around to work further on this list which is essentially the reading list for my book on the ethics of venture capital so far (see my other Medium…

In November, I laid out why I believe that the incentive structures for investors (and the startups they invest in) to care more about their impact, about ESG guidelines — in short: about being good or ethical — are changing. Increased pressure from the public and consumers, from LPs and…

Many VCs (and tech journalists) following their ‘content strategy’ have recently blasted out predictions for what is going to happen to the tech world in 2020. USV’s Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger engage the big topics (decentralization, space race, climate change, democracy, learning); AZ16 pushed out a whole collection on…

We have seen an increasing amount of scandals in the tech world over the last few years. From Uber to Theranos to Facebook and Hampton Creek, many VC-backed start-up companies coming out of Silicon Valley have recently received bad press. The issues that some of these tech companies were accused…