Since 2012, he’s helped well over a hundred new businesses that aim to use technology to have a positive impact on the environment or society get started. Before co-founding BGV he worked for a number of public policy think tanks and was co-founder of an education technology business. He was awarded an OBE for services to startup investment in the 2020 New Years Honours List.
Highlights
I was sort of influenced by my family who have always been involved in activism and global issues as long as I can remember.
That effect of bringing a group of people together who are all committed to try and change the world using business and technology, that was what we learnt from that year.
For us there was always this assumption that actually you could do well by doing good.
Of those six investments, two have gone on to be really good investments.
If you can be a pioneer as a company then you become a very valuable company.
We just ploughed on
We were driven by the fact that we knew there were great people who wanted to work with us.
We do get a lot of people who want to work for us
It’s super important that everything we do is aligned with our mission and I think that involves doing it well and doing it right
it has made a difference in lockdown. It’s difficult to transition to being a remote team but actually it’s much nicer to transition to being a remote team if you have that culture of people being nice to one another, to be honest, it makes life a lot easier and we’ve been lucky in that.