3. Why set up your start-up in the UK? Especially in the current environment of higher taxes (VAT, capital gains, etc) and reduced government spending?

Here’s something controversial for you, I don’t mind paying taxes. Especially for things like education and health care. As someone who grew up with a single mom who worked very hard, I had to take on a huge debt to go to University and then graduate school so I appreciate everything the state does and if that means that I take a little bit less home so be it.

At the same time London is one of the most active entrepreneurship and digital centres so anytime you can get a mix like that you’d be mad not to take advantage of it.

The capital gains tax hits entrepreneurs and investors hard, but I do believe the government won’t take it higher than 40% which is what it was a couple of years ago. Hopefully, the government will include some breaks and exemptions for entrepreneurship.

Right now you have to be where your market is and where you can build a business, if you get to a point where you’re worrying about how much of your profits are being taken by taxation you’re going in the right direction. For me, the amount of connections, meetings, clients, advisors, investors you have in the UK and especially in London is phenomenal. People always talk about Silicon Valley and that’s great if you’re a tech company, but in places like London and New York you’re closer to the real world, where most people look at you funny when you say you “tweet”.

More on the Nestoria blog

How it all began; I met up with some great friends last night and another great friend today and talked about the year, our plans and hopes for it and how to achieve what we want to achieve.

A&S mentioned that every year they have themes. I loved their ideas for themes for the year, much easier to stick to a theme for the year then having lots of resolutions and not being sure which ones were met and which ones were sort of met.

I shared this idea with N, who declared, “Oh yeah I have themes too”. That settled it, I needed to come up with themes. After discussing the potential themes with N I settled on “Learning to do”, in short I’m tired of talking about doing certain stuff. This is the year I do stuff. And that’s the first of three word maxims I’ve come up with in my three days in London.

Then later on today I decided to head to the London Business School library. The library’s great for inspiring and coming across books that I hadn’t heard of. Today I came across what seems to be a great book called, “Out of Poverty” by Paul Polak. Polak is a Psychiatrist, turned entrepreneur, turned poverty solver. He has a great story in the book where he talks about how his father is a survivor, his father left what’s now the Czech republic during Hitler’s campaigns and how when his father tried to convince others to leave the Czech republic as well and how these people said “What about the furniture”, he left those people behind, those people were not as lucky as Polak Sr. So the second of the three three word maxim’s is “F— the furniture”. You lose site of the big picture by focusing on the (relatively) little stuff, so “F— the furniture”.

As if two three word maxims weren’t enough, I came across N again at the library where we were discussing a project she’s working on. She was getting stuck because the idea was starting to spiral out of control and she felt like she was forcing it. My advice to her was to get her idea in front of people and do quick iterations, kind of like Apple was doing with Mac’s and iPhones (N happens to be a big Apple fan so this was a good line of thinking I though), “Be the Mac” I said, get your products out there and out iterate the competition.

And so three days in London and three pretty big thoughts, “Learn to do”, “F— the furniture” and “Be the Mac”. It’s no wonder I miss this city.

With that background I was really interested in reading an economic study on the correlation between conflict and poverty on Vox, the economic research blog/site, today. It’s interesting reading and discusses the links between poverty and violence and how economic hardship can lead to violence.

So as a lot of countries rise out of poverty, like India, there are still too many individuals in countries in Asia and in Africa that are struggling with their own economic progress. People see others rise out of poverty and feel entitled to do the same, and when they don’t have access to wealth they become desperate. Too often we look at religion, or belief, or culture as the driver of terrorism, as the reason why people resort to violence, and we don’t spend enough time or energy examining the economic reasons behind violent acts.

The funny thing is that I thought I would end the post there, until I was writing tags to go with this post and came across the tag “education”. Maybe the investments should be in education in the developing world, which will help others access wealth and escape poverty.

Sure being in the same room as people you work with adds value, it means you’re able to socialise, you’re able to learn more about people and trust people. But how many people do you actually work that closely with? Is it enough to justify large rents in metropolitan locations? Not to mention a lot of times meeting with people or conversations get in the way of productivity.

I’ve worked virtually with lots of folks in past jobs and in my present job. I find getting together once a week with some, once a month with others, and once a quarter with others is enough to build rapport and through the telephone, instant messaging, email, desktop conferencing, video conferencing and other tools we don’t need to be in the same office as each other to work together effectively. I like working from home. I probably should do it more; I bet I’d be more effective.

So my prediction for the near future is that we’ll see a lot more virtual working, a lot more working from home and lot more smaller offices. This will potentially mean fewer meetings, less distractions and a drop in our collective foot prints. Not to mention a healthier bottom line as you don’t have to pay for large offices.

What’s good? What’s bad? Good questions. To me, good companies spend as much time thinking about their social impact and the impact of their mission and vision on society as they do on the bottom line. Bad companies only focus on maximising the bottom line.

If only investors spent as much time valuing companies social bottom line, if only the social bottom line had a more direct impact on the market value of the company. Might be easier to convince companies to be more socially aware in the way they operate but on the other hand some companies are just authentically good and evil. I’m not sure, whatever we change in the market to evaluate companies “goodness”, would help Walmart operate in a way that’s beneficial to its communities and society as a whole.

One such problem is war and violence.  My take is that things like sport and business play a vital part in progress, and that politicking and government intervention isn’t enough.

I was reminded about this as I read a posting on nba.com that talked about the Seeds of Peace basketball clinic.  The clinic invites kids from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and America to learn more about the game and play the game together.  By cooperating on the basketball court kids have to learn more about each other and hopefully form a bond.  The theory behind camps like this is that when these kids grow up they’ll take these experiences and be less likely to resort to violence against other cultures.

But waiting for kids to grow up can take time that we don’t really have.  So companies like New Generation Technology can also provide a helping hand to peace through enterprise.  Getting Israeli money to flow into Palestine links the two regions and, hopefully, means that by destroying one another they actually destroy themselves.  I love this idea.  And it seems like Sir Ronald Cohen is catching the invest in peace fever as well.

I totally think there is a place for governments and peace discussions and whatever else Tony Blair et al are trying to do; I just think roadmaps and peace plans work politically but enterprise and sport actually can work socially.