Building wealth is hard. If it was easy everyone would be doing it and doing it well. Life forces you to make constant decisions with what you do with your money, making the trade off between spending it now on a food shop, movie ticket or taxi ride and saving it to enable some future utility like going on a dream holiday, getting yourself on the property ladder or digging yourself out of a hole if some unexpected life event happens.

With these never ending choices chipping away at your salary each month it can be hard to know exactly…

Why and how I’ll be weighting my portfolio for the year ahead

As 2021 kicks off and people form their investment goals for the year ahead, I want to share the rationale behind five technology verticals I’ll be weighting my investments toward. My sensible hat means that these are all ETFs that I not only think are going to perform well and maximise my financial returns, but that I also believe the rationale behind each one has a broader positive impact on society as well, so it’s a win for everyone.

The usually caveat applies: this isn’t financial advice, just…

The growing use of agricultural land at the expense of wilderness is having a profoundly negative impact on our ability to mitigate the impacts of client change. The accelerating clearing of land for farming is driven by a growing consumption of agricultural products, primarily as a result of an expanding and more affluent global population that wants more and better food. Technological advances have increased the calorie yield of farmlands but struggle to keep up with the world’s appetite.

This farmland has to come from somewhere, and more often than not it is at the expense of wild areas. By…

My literary pursuit to create a place on our little rock spaceship

Dr Seuss once wrote, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”. I like to read a lot, and a lot of the books I read are fun, interesting and more often than not vaguely informative, but every now and then a book pops up that ends up having a genuinely life changing impact…

The six books below have taken me places; their contents have helped me make decisions, redirected my interests or simply made…

I bet it’s more powerful than you think…

The question comes up again and again; what actually is deep learning? To understand deep learning let’s start with a simple use case to frame our explanation around. That use case is one of a self driving car.

A self driving car is an autonomous vehicle that drives itself without any human intervention. This driving is broken down into three primary activities: see, decide, act. For example I see a red light, I decide to stop, I put on the brakes. But in this case the car is doing everything on its…

A brain dump of learnings I’ve sponged up over the last four years

Taking the leap to enterprise grade software is hard. And it’s even harder with a technology that is hitting its adolescent phase, deciding what it wants to do with its life, who it’s going to date, where it’s going to live and what it’s going to apply itself to. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and its difficulty is one of the reasons why blockchain is yet to hit mass adoption.

Moving to enterprise requires a change in mindset and approach from fast paced…

Reflections on a series of articles exploring applications of blockchain to reduce the impact of climate change.

I wrote the Blockchain vs Climate Change series of articles to achieve the following:

1. Explore applications of DLT to reduce GHG emissions and therefore their impact on climate change
2. Educate on the commercial and social opportunities presented by these applications
3. Spark conversation and debate around these and adjacent ideas
4. Inspire readers to experiment with the proposed applications to ultimately realise the described benefits

Throughout the series I have covered 15 applications where I believe blockchain has a valid value proposition that, if correctly…

Exploring applications of blockchain technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across industry.

The US EPA calculated that global industry was responsible for 22% of GHG emissions in 2017. Despite total industrial GHG emissions trending gradually downwards there are still huge gains to be had, particularly through the reduction in waste and the GHG emissions generated through production, transportation and disposal of goods. This can be achieved by greater visibility of product lifecycles enabling better prediction of future supply and demand. Highly polluting industries such as chemical manufacturing must evolve over time to reduce their impact on climate change. …