I arrived to London 17 years ago, first to study, then to get some work experience only to wake up one morning about 10 years ago realising that this is my home and I don’t want to ever live anywhere else. My love, gratitude and respect for this city is immense. It’s openness, diversity and cultural energy made it the most vibrant city in the world and a magnet for the brightest and best. Now, I’ve always considered myself a radical optimist but I have to admit that recent developments in the UK really put my radical optimism for a test. To say that London’s status is not threatened is at best optimistic but this feels to me more like sheer arrogance and my view is that this arrogance of intellect, lack of empathy and frivolous self-indulgence threaten London’s status more than anything else.

The question that everyone raises with me when discussing the health and future of the tech sector in London is inevitably linked to Brexit and the impact last year’s decision will have. This whole subject has been hugely debated, polls give continually conflicting views and politicians and all sides of the media continue to provide conflicting public positions and perceptions. But looking beyond the day to day tactical news and by taking a pure business approach to the situation we find ourselves in then we should look positively to the future even if many of us hadn’t wished this change of course.

“Technology itself — social media, cameraphones — has also turned the world into a panopticon prison for bad boys, whose misdeeds are now visible almost all the time. It was a dash cam that caught Kalanick’s unsympathetic retort to a struggling Uber driver.”(Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, 15.04.17)

How important is reputation when you’re contributing so much to society? Can an entrepreneur get away with hell just because they’ve created the fastest, the best, the most innovative or even just the shiniest new product, solution or service?

A series of high profile patent and trade secrets lawsuits has shone a spotlight on the significant challenges facing emerging technology businesses, both in protecting their valuable innovations, but also in ensuring that they do not encroach on their competitors’ rights.  Recent and forthcoming legislative developments are likely to fuel further litigation, perhaps even on the same scale of the ‘smartphone patent wars’ of recent years. The risk of a product being pulled off the market due to IP infringement, together with the significant costs involved in defending a lawsuit, underlines the importance of proper freedom to operate analysis and a comprehensive IP portfolio.

Two years ago, I attended a seminar where more tales of woe for banks were being predicted at the hands of ‘fintech upstarts’. The sector was ripe for disruption, especially those ‘fat cat’ bankers who were too complacent to see it all coming. I wondered if I should be feeling happy, because Silicon Valley Bank was working with so many of these upstarts, or sad that all banks were about to be bypassed, undercut, destroyed or simply rendered irrelevant.

photo c/o Jason Lindberg

Ten years ago we started Hollwich Kushner – to explore the future of Architecture and to build buildings! We were young, curious minded and relentless in our desire to explore the world around us. Over these last ten years each project we have touched has granted us the opportunity to learn something new about ourselves and the effect our buildings have. Sometimes this has led to big revelations and other times more subtle lessons learned through trial and error.