Essays Evaluating the Incomparable: How to Judge a Portfolio of One When evaluating a "portfolio-of-one," the attempt to use standard metrics isn't rigour, it’s category error. From promotions panels to VC offices, our obsession with defensible metric counting often masks the very potential we claim to be seeking.
MBA The Consultants Aren't the Problem Universities don't have a consultant problem; they have a strategic capability vacuum. Academia excels at producing research, but our incentive structures actively punish structural, S-type innovation. It's time to stop outsourcing our strategy and start building S-type leadership capacity.
MBA The Incomplete Map: Why Materials Science Won't Have Its AlphaFold Moment AlphaFold is a powerful interpolator, not an extrapolator. Savage's small vs large world framework explains why - and why the real prize in materials AI is building tools that know what they don't know.
Academia Fail Fast, Learn Faster - Rethinking Talent Up-Skilling I built a decentralized micro-fund to upskill 400+ postdocs. It funded great science, but data revealed broken incentives and AI vulnerabilities. Here is my post-mortem on failing fast in leadership, and redesigning a high-signal skills accelerator.
MBA Marketing Discovery: Whither PhDs? Peter Drucker said marketing makes selling superfluous. Today? We are effectively cold-calling geniuses to accept near-minimum wages for a 20% shot at a job. The legacy PhD model is broken. It’s time to stop selling an academic lottery ticket and start engineering a levered asset.
MBA Sovereign Ambidexterity: A VRIO View from Seoul The UK excels at low-TRL discovery; Korea defines the 'Super-Gap' in scaling. Alone, we face limits. Together, can we create a perfect 'Ambidextrous' partnership? I explore how a transnational VRIO strategy couples these strengths to flatten the deeptech J-Curve.
MBA Scaling the 11th Century Start-up, or, Why Universities Break People 53% of academics show signs of depression. This is a role design failure, not a resilience issue: we are managing 21st-century experts with medieval guild structures. To fix the crisis, we must abandon the 'Lone Wolf' myth and re-engineer the role. Don't blame the players; change the game.
MBA The £13B non-profit: Valuing the modern University "University isn't worth it?" Applying a corporate valuation model to UK HE reveals a £13bn asset - more than Man Utd & City combined. It’s time to stop managing universities like charities and start valuing them as sovereign utilities.
neolab Equity for Equations: The Rise of Venture-Backed Physics I started 2026 with a grant rejection letter. Meanwhile, 'Neolabs' like Periodic and SSI are raising billions without a product. We are witnessing the birth of a new asset class: the venture-backed Institute for Advanced Study.
