When I left my home country of South Africa for the UK in pursuit of a Computer Science Master’s Degree, I didn’t expect to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.

Investors’ and advisors’ mantra is “focus on only one segment of the value chain”. Those are wise words… Unfortunately, when you’ve seen up close-up the root causes of the insurance sector’s failure to gain the consumer’s trust, you realise it couldn’t be solved by addressing a single value chain segment. The entire value chain and proposition needed redesign. Daunting prospect when financial backers shy away from such an ambitious approach.

What was your vision for founding Cervest? Tell us more about how Climate Intelligence plays into this.
The idea for Cervest was conceived as I was operating my sustainable agribusiness company in Ghana. Although well-funded, we had no way to assess how climate change affected yields and processing assets.  This led me to team up with mathematicians to help quantify climate risk – and that’s where Climate Intelligence (CI) comes into play.

Apple is typically ‘first’ in terms of category defining products and services. They know what the consumer wants and needs well before the consumer does. But in this case they are comfortable slotting in as a fast follower. Klarna and others have trailblazed their way into becoming an already developed fintech solution which, a business as large and powerful as Apple, is comfortable replicating and integrating into their own services. It is both a logical piece of innovation as well as a sign of a well developed fintech market.

Matt Cooper
Chief Commercial Officer of Crowdcube

The UK’s population of over 60s is set to increase by 3.1m over the next decade – an increase of 19% to 20 million individuals. All with their own sense of purpose, needs and wants. According to ONS estimates, the over 60s also account for 49% of the total household wealth in Great Britain, a whopping £7.2 trillion2.

Intellectual property exists to enable you to protect the non-tangible assets of your company. In this article we take a brief look at trade marks. The name of your business and of its products and services are likely among your company’s key assets. They are the trade marks which you use to denote your company’s goods and services from those of any competitor. Ensuring you have protected them as best you can and that you choose them well in the first place are important in ensuring you minimise trouble ahead and to assist in demonstrating to investors that some of your core assets are on a secure footing.

Every entrepreneur is hardwired to think we can innovate our way out of anything, let’s make this better, faster, or of course, more delicious… The climate crisis is, without a doubt, this generation of founders’ biggest opportunity to innovate. Across every industry, there is a unique, pressing and massive need to build a more sustainable future, and at the same time develop these new solutions into building high scale ventures with purpose.

The year 2020 was full of unexpected situations. I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d be working from home with a crazy dog, a new kitten, children homeschooling – and a million critical business decisions to make before my second cup of coffee. My worlds merged unsettlingly: I would be deep in discussion with the Blis executive team regarding cash forecasts with my five-year-old son demanding, “wipe my bum!” from along the hall.

The takeaway industry has been one of the few sectors able to operate and thrive in the pandemic and has provided a lifeline to many hospitality businesses.. Pre-pandemic, the industry continued to grow at a fast-moving pace thanks to the rising popularity of on-demand apps, yet its acceleration reached new levels as lockdowns hit the nation. Not only were order numbers increasing, but the quality of orders improved, with an average price of orders increasing by 10% as consumers looked to ‘treat themselves’ according to data compiled by City Pantry.

What were the key assets you saw in Maëlle Gavet as the new CEO of Techstars and have you set a roadmap for her to follow in the ‘years’ ahead?

Maëlle has been a leading technology executive and entrepreneur for over 15 years. She began her career as an entrepreneur and then went on to become a Principal at the Boston Consulting Group from there she became CEO of OZON.ru, Russia’s largest e-commerce site (which recently went public on NASDAQ and is valued at over $9B), and then Executive VP of operations of the Priceline Group, the largest online and travel agency in the world which includes brands like OpenTable, Kayak, and Booking.com. Most recently Maëlle was Chief Operating Officer at real estate platform Compass, valued at over $6B.