Welcome to the (Ad)venture™
My new, new, thing is called…
It is a powerful philosophy from Japan which treats imperfections as something beautiful not to be hidden from view.
It was introduced to me by the kind and caring soul who is my therapist Vanessa Hondius:
Kintsugi 金継ぎ means literally, “to join with gold”, it treats breakage and repair as part of history, rather than something to disguise.
Clearly for me this is a big part of coming to terms with being an active 30–something year old with two sons climbing mountains and doing bike rides from Paris to London one year and being flown home on a stretcher and in a wheelchair from South Africa only a few years later.
I’m lucky I can still walk. Without my family I may have not been so lucky. My wife pushed me on a hospital bed from the worse public hospital in Cape Town to a private hospital and demanded they treat me whilst waiting for the insurance company to pick up the telephone. That’s the sort of Life partner you want to have beside you when things hit the fan.
Something I have discovered, over the course of my life so far, is men, by and large, are pretty simple and often very weak despite externally showing confidence and strength. Women, on the other hand, are incredibly strong, in body, mind and spirit both internally and externally.
Why Kintsugi (Ad)ventures?
Well…
“Adventure Capital” was the original term [/ədˈvɛntʃər/] for “venture capital” dating back to the early 1980s in California. A time when investors actually had to take risks, bet on unproven technologies and go on a journey with founders into an unknown future.
Not a bunch of investment bankers, strategy consultants and Oxbridge graduates sitting on startup boards telling founders “this is how you should run your company!” . What a joke venture capital has become, Georges Doriot and Don Valentine must be rolling in their graves!
I worked as a Lecturer at UCL — the 4ᵗʰ best university in the World, according to some rankings — one thing I observe over a period of 10+ years was we’ve gone from “Everyone wants to join a band” (like The Beatles), to “Everyone wants to be startup founder” (like Elon Musk), to “Everyone wants to be a VC” (like, I don’t know, Peter Thiel or whomever is flavour of the month).
The problem is you (sing.) will never be John Lennon, Paul McCartney, not even Ringo Star. You won’t be Elon Musk or even Bored Elon. You won’t be Peter Thiel (a.k.a. Skeletor). That’s OK. Because you basically, just need to be yourself. Whatever and whomever that is and be proud about it!
You were born naked, you will die naked. You will not take anything with you. You are not in competition with anyone else. You might think that’s scary but I find it liberating. It lets me live for today and enjoy what I’m doing today.
Broken legs and broken dreams aside it was only 9 months ago I joined the awesome team at Kindred Capital as “Head of Data”. Although very disappointed that I didn’t make it work at Kindred (and as Chrys Chrysanthou forewarned me) it wasn’t on the cards. I am still very thankful for the brief time I spent working with Leila Rastegar Zegna and the Kindred team. For one, it reminded me there are actually good people in venture capital industry. They are not all a bunch of self-serving, egotistical, usurpers. That’s just the vast majority it seems.
Below is a brief investor deck for potential investors and “backers” (min. £10k):
So… This blog post is a long winded way to say, I’m back like Schwarzenegger and I’m going to do a new fund and it’s called Kintsugi (Ad)ventures.
I will soon be announcing a new partner who is joining me on this journey but for now I am eternally thankful to everyone past, present and future who has been part of my journey.
Live long and prosper 🖖
FIN.
p.s. If you want to invest check out my 👉 AngelList syndicate 👈
p.p.s. I’ll leave you with this ridiculous photo of me dancing with a dolphin in Malta. I love to swim with dolphins. Both literally and figuratively. Literally speaking. I love animals and swimming (including with dolphins) this guy was called Hank. Hank the dolphin. What a dude. Dolphins have it all figured out.
As Douglas Adams noted:
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
Figuratively speaking. I like working with people much smarter than I am to learn from them, I’ve done this my entire career. To name a few… as a co-founder (Rob Fitzpatrick, Simon Chan, John Spindler), as an academic (Prof. Isabelle Szmigin, Prof. Deborah Streeter, Dr. Dave Chapman, Prof. Philip Treleaven), as a venture capitalist (Dave McClure, Philipp Moehring, Anu Pathria, Parker Thompson, Chris Mairs, Wendy Tan-White, Matt Clifford, Alice Bentinck, Leila Rastegar Zegna, Chrys Chrysanthou, Russell Buckley and Mark Evans), as a husband (my beautiful wife Sonia) and as a son (my amazing mother Christine and father Colin).
Until next time… That’s all folks 🥕
