👋🏾 Hi friends!

You can really feel the summer vibes right now. Here in Europe everyone is just slowing down a little bit and you just know that come August the out of offices will be out in force.

For founders working on building momentum, this is a really frustrating time. Fundraises may need to be pushed back to the Autumn or deals that may have been progressing suddenly find themselves in a hiatus.

But at the same time, it’s a great time to carve out some time to think about what’s actually needed in your business at the moment. Instead of being intensely reactive, you can take the time to be a bit reflective and move towards a more strategic flow - at least for a month or two.

And that’s my plan for next month, I’ll be working, but I know not much will be happening, so I can spend the month looking at what’s working, what’s not and planning to come back bigger, better, stronger in September.

Oh and writing more hopefully!

Remember, if you have any feedback or if there’s something you’re desperate to see me include, just reply to this mail or ping me online - I’m very open to conversations.

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With that said, let’s get into it.

Rip-Off Degrees and the Future of Work

Yesterday we went to my daughter’s graduation.

I couldn’t be prouder, especially because the first ~1.5 years of her experience were completely rubbish as a result of covid, and to be honest didn’t improve much thereafter either.

Now she didn’t graduate with one of those rip-off degrees we’ve been hearing about from the government lately (though I’m guessing my joint honours in modern languages would have been bang on target) - no, she is the proud holder of a BSc.

Anyone that spends any time in my company will know I have, ahem, strong views on education (tl;dr the whole system needs ripping up and reimagining). It’s one of the reasons I chose to educate my kids through the IB programme after first being exposed to it in Australia.

But things are moving quickly.

So my advice to both my daughters has been for some time - but with more urgency today - that beyond what they learn in school, the skills they really need to prioritise are:

• Resilience

• Flexibility

• Adaptability

And whilst there has been a massive push for STEM in this and other countries, I have long believed that it is creativity that will push the boundaries of what we’ll do with more technical disciplines delivering the how we will do it.

Today, with large language models able to generate code in seconds, we’re already seeing the cost of software engineering set to drop considerably, and with that we will see a comensurate drop in the average number of engineers employed in software companies.

Conversely (and at least for now), we are seeing an explosion in the nascent profession of prompt engineering - and speaking to a friend of mine building a generative AI business in the legaltech space (launched before Open AI released Chat GPT), the sort of people he is looking to hire into these roles are philosophy, economics and English grads - people who not only understand how to think (and think about thinking), but also how to communicate in different ways to achieve a desired result.

The reality is that I don’t know what the world and, importantly, the landscape for work will look like in 5 years time, I just know it won’t look much like it does today.

And I don’t think our kids are being prepared for this - at least by the mainstream education system.

Interestingly, Theo Priestley and I had an impromptu conversation about the failings and opportunities in the education system as part of our overall delve into the future in last week’s pod - check it out if you haven’t already.

How can did I add value?

Carrying on the education theme, last week, a friend of mine who has had an incredibly successful career working with startups and more mature companies in the venture space reached out for some advice.

She is building a proposition and reached out to me to see whether it made sense for her to join a entrepreneurship programme being offered by a well known UK higher education institution.

She wanted to get a bit more formal understanding on topics like valuation, investment and a couple of other areas.

Here was my response:

• How much does it cost?

• Have you had any testimonials from others who have taken it?

• What specifically are you looking to get out of it and why do you think they will be able to provide it?

• What competencies do the teachers have in delivering this?

Having briefly scanned (the course marketing pack) I would say:

1. It feels like something that you will pay a bunch of money for and get stuck doing stuff on line

2. The faculty look like folk that have never actually done anything entrepreneurial!

I personally am now of the opinion that you can construct your own learning using chat gpt to develop a curriculum and make recommendations around reading / learning.

Why pay?

The certificate etc. is irrelevant. No investor looks at stuff like this and says, ok great they've done a course at (redacted). (different if was techstars or ycom etc)

And that’s the reality, not only is there a tonne of information on line (via newsletters and blogs just like this one) but you can get the AI to generate a curriculum with learning materials for you - I’ve done that for a Masters in Finance myself. Heck I recently told the admissions guy at an online MBA programme that I’d only do it if it was full ride.

So hopefully I saved my friends a bit of cash and for all the financey stuff that she may want a better handle on, I can steer her in the right direction myself.

Would love to get your thoughts on what the value of these sorts of courses are in today’s environment - just hit reply.

Thank You for the Meme-ories

Mariano is a pretty smart guy (check out our conversation last year, here) - and as it turns out a pretty funny guy too 😃