Grombles

I have been investing in start-up companies (businesses with little or no trading history) for around 20 years. Unfortunately, despite knowing a great deal about starting and selling businesses, at least half of the ones I pick eventually fail and lose me all the money I invested in them... although some of it might be recoverable as tax relief. So over the years, I've come to realise that the odds are heavily stacked against me backing a winner - typically defined as a sale of my shares, known as an exit , within 10 years, paying me at least 10 times the money I invested. To get the same result from guaranteed compound interest over 10 years, you would have to be paid a rate of about 25% - so get it right, and it's a big prize. I've managed it a couple of times, so overall have recovered most of what I've lost on the many companies who died, but it's a very high risk game. So why do so many angel investments in particular die, and why is it so hard for us to spot t

I started writing this on New Year's Eve 2023/24. The war in Ukraine has been grinding on for nearly two years. In the past couple of days, Russia has increased its intensity of rocket attacks across the whole of Ukraine. Many of those missiles are being intercepted and as far as I can tell, not much is being damaged. Russia's hope is presumably that these attacks will sap the morale of the state as well as absorb what's left of their US supplied anti-missile resources. At some point, Ukraine's stockpiles of war materials and trained military will be depleted compared to Russia's vastly superior stockpile including more than 2,000 warplanes they have been loathe to use until Ukraine's defences are weaker, and Russia will eventually push west when it controls the skies. We can't allow that to happen for two reasons: Where will they stop, and the further west they advance, the less the citizens in the territories they occupy will be prepared to accept Russian

In 1991 I created the original TABi prototype while working for BMW. Previously I used a day diary to keep notes, thereby having a timeline to assist note retrieval. When my calendar went digital, my notes became sequential, requiring me to recall whether each note I saw was made before or after the one I was searching for. There had to be a better way to find my notes. What was needed was a clue as to what was written on each page. A tab for every page. But ordinary tabs along one edge only gave me a few tabbed pages. I needed to invent a way to have tabs along more edges. So I tried running tabs along the top, the side and the bottom edges. Still not enough tabs. Then I hit on the idea of tiers, effectively multiplying the number of tabs by two or even three. TABi was born and I constructed the prototype you see above. I used it for some time, and liked it, but instead of developing it as a product, I reasoned that all notes would eventually go digital, so abandoned the idea and buil

This morning I met Tony. He works for a company who unblock drains, so quite a messy job, but curiously satisfying when the blockage is removed. Anyway, he was a very chatty chap and while he was flushing out years of accumulated unmentionables from our pipes, he told me about a previous job he had working for a rail company. The story went that he had been made redundant and his wife passed on an ad to become a train guard. He thought 'why not?', so signed up and loved the job. One day, following a challenging train delay that he needed to delicately manage, he got a knock on his door to be confronted by a passenger. "How can I help you sir?" he asked. "I thought I'd let you know how well you dealt with that situation", the chap replied. "Well done!". Turned out he was the chairman of the rail company. A day or two later, Tony was called into his bosses office and told that he had been recommended to become a guard trainer. Promotion and more

Grow some food Share some food Eat some food Bonk Sleep Repeat Why over-complicate things?

My family, along with the rest of the world, is hooked on Wordle. Every morning my wife, three children and various partners, jump on their screens to be the best that day at guessing Wordle in the least steps. Care now needs to be taken to make sure a) no-one knows your favourite starting word (so when you publish the blank result, they don't all get a free first line), and b) you change it regularly so they can't eventually work it out. Probably best to alternate your 2 favourites (so you don't have to keep working out good starters containing common letters). If they're not certain you've started with your favourite, they'll not bother trying to work out what you've used. After a while (we're now into several weeks of competition), you begin to get a feel for the sneaky way the game creator likes to use words that don't sound like they're spelled or where he (James Wardle ... oddly) uses rare combinations of letters. Actually, knowing that he&