Winning Streak!

Man, oh, man, what a week.

First, we left our potato economy in Macroeconomics and invented money.

See, to understand a few things, it was easier if we had a single market, a single unit of currency, and a single product of production: Potatoes. Yes, folks, I took out $80,000 in loans to study potatoes. One of the principles of Economics is to move only one variable while holding others steady so that you can understand what the effect of that is. Money is, actually, pretty complicated. So my brain got hurt in Macro, as usual.

And no, KP, I haven’t even cracked the spine on my Ecological Economics book. Stop moaning. Up to my eyeballs.

Then I spent all day Saturday competing against my classmates for a slot at the UCLA Global Leadership Competition and… I won! Though I think I seriously disturbed one of my teammates. She was confused at how I could turn anything around to actually be supporting our position in our mock press conference. So I get a free trip to LA in April to UCLA.

Then scrambling to get done all the work for the week as well as having a somewhat raucous Saturday night filled with wine, dancing, and 2-on-a-bike drunken riding around the town.

Tuesday night I competed in the Idea Idol competition, judged by Dragon’s Den Dragon Deborah Meaden, Sebastian Grigg, an MD from Credit Suisse, Katherine Mathieson from NESTA, and Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp. I won first runner-up and had very nice things said about me, my plan, my presentation, etc. It was an honor and a pleasure to meet and chat with Katherine as well and talk about her work figuring out the process and drivers of innovation. And Deborah Meaden is really not at all scary, even if she looks so on the show. Alok and I ended up with £500 and an exhortation to take the technology to fruition, so that keeps that on my radar screen as a possible future technology.

And I got to get one of those giant cheques. Unfortunately, I don’t see the photo up yet. I’ll update it later if it does go up.

Me looking all suited and full of Ideas.

The 6 Finalists, from over 100 starters.

Someone else came up to us afterwards and asked us to make his invention a product and reality. It could actually dovetail quite nicely with what we’re looking at doing so more on that as it happens.

Earlier– a couple of weeks ago? I forget– Sir Tom Hunter came and spoke and was warm and engaging and had a simple message about entrepreneurship and philanthropy and all kinds of things. This guy was really inspiring. He started selling trainers (tennis shoes) out of the back of a van and ended up with £.25Bn after selling his business. After looking around for something to do, he decided to take his cash and start a foundation, which has worked with the Clinton foundation among others, including funding the Make Poverty History/ONE campaign/Live 8 shows.

As he said, “I was looking for something to do with my money. These guys came up and said ‘We want to make poverty history, here’s how, and here’s how much money we need. Could you help us raise the cash?’, so I paid for it.”

Another real pleasure.

It’s MacroEcon again tomorrow, where we continue with money and all that it brings, and I expect my head, again, to break. I’ve got to clean my room and do my laundry and read about 40 pages of a dense yet engaging text, so I’m gonna split on outta here. Thanks for paying attention…

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