Brian Christian on Algorithms to Live By

I’m a member of the Long Now Foundation, whose mission it is to “…provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” One of their main activities is producing Seminars about Long Term Thinking, which are available…

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Access Granted

The great folks at the Access Granted podcast published a wide-ranging interview with me today on “the mosaic of my life”, which you can listed to below: I cover a quite a lot of ground, including: Why shit just keeps getting better Startup Weekends and how you can create a business in 54 hours The…

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Two aerial photos

I recently arrived back in Wellington from the Startup Nations Summit in Mexico. On my flight from Auckland to Wellington on 29 November 2015, I passed over the Karori Rip just south of Mana Island. The Karori Rip is an interesting phenomenon, basically a standing wave formed in specific tidal conditions in Cook Strait.  In…

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Unlimited Influencer 2013

  Unlimited Magazine has named me one of “The 2013 Influencers” for my role as a “startup guru” helping companies get going right from the idea stage.  It’s a nice little article, and I’m grateful to those who thought highly enough of my advice to recommend me to Unlimited. I’ve also snagged a PDF for…

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TICS bill submission

I recently contributed to a submission on the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill, a rather rushed and ill-considered piece of legislation that has massive potential for abuse by future governments, and which places unreasonable costs and procedures on people providing Internet services. The introduction reads: We explain in this Select Committee submission our opposition…

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Publons at Lightning Lab Demo Day

Publons is a Wellington-based startup that provides academic peer review as a service, with the ultimate goal of speeding up science. They graduated from the Lightning Lab accelerator programme [see my post on why Lightning Lab is so cool], and I recently took up position as lead investor in their angel round. Here’s their pitch…

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Welcome to Race Relations, Dame Susan Devoy

Dame Susan Devoy was recently appointed Race Relations Commissioner, amidst some controversy.  Like many, I was surprised by the appointment – I’d expected someone to be appointed to the position had some experience in the field, and was known to practitioners. It’s a done deal now – the appointment has been made, and I think…

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Why we love Lightning Lab

I was recently interviewed about why we invested in Lightning Lab, New Zealand’s first digital accelerator.  Here’s the YouTube clip: We’d been wanting to start an accelerator for the last few years in Wellington, and when CreativeHQ pulled together the key players, we quickly jumped on board.  So why did we invest in the accelerator…

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