Posts by Paul Campbell
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I should add that there's a chicken and egg sort of issue here - you want to have local high grade investments here to invest in - but a lot them start out as startups - if you don't have lots of companies starting up (and lots of them failing) now you wont have cool stuff to invest in a decade from now
As I've said elsewhere a lot of our companies like our kids - they grow up and leave home for their OE - but it's largely because they have to sell their souls to overseas investors in order to grow
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It's all very well decrying the lack of VC investment in NZ (and I do all the time .... we do need more) but you need to realise it's a very different sort of investment - it's risky, in fact MOST investments fail - but if you do it right some pay off big time
What you don't want is the guy who's picking stocks and bonds for your Kiwisaver/Cullen fund/401K/etc picking startup companies to invest in - you need someone running a VC fund who understand the part of the biz they are working in who can make an educated guess as to whether the guy you're giving money to is blowing smoke out his ass or not - and who can provide the other sorts of support a VC company provides to its investments
I've worked for startups supported by both good and bad VCs - there's a world of difference
I think in the interests of diversity it's appropriate for an investment fund to place a small portion of its investments in VC funds that have good track records or are run by people they think will make competent decisions (and also have some of their own money at stake)
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I kind of think of it as - the asteroid has hit, nuclear winter is kicking in, the dinosaurs are in denial, they're running around claiming they're OK because they have lawyers - they can afford lots of lawyers - meanwhile the mammals are hiding in the cracks evolving
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"I used to think that Michael Palin was the funniest Palin ...."
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Gareth - that was only half my point - it seems that there's a good parallel between selling pirated DVDs at the public market and sharing pirated files on the net.
The manager of the market can ban the guy selling the DVDs, the police can come in and arrest him - but you don't expect the guy running the market to be required to hire bouncers and have them ban all the pirate's old customers at the entrances - that in essence is what the govt is asking of the ISPs
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So I'm a little confused - we're doing this to the internet because someone pirated Sione's Wedding and sold DVD in street markets in Auckland .... will the people who run the street markets also be required to ban customers who have previously bought dodgy DVDs from their vendors? it's really the same issue and about as hard to implement
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I think Key has to come to Dunedin during the election at some point during the campaign - probably he wants to get in and get out with the minimum of fuss and get it over early so he can spend time in places he has a hope of getting some votes
It's not like the good old days when Muldoon would come to Dunedin, hold a meething in the town hall, and it would be filled up to the gods with people screaming at him
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oh and I wasn't so much wondering about the Key ad in the car but the one on the escalator - I immediately thought "he's going to fall off the end, he's not paying attention"
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well as a parent of one child starting Uni in 2010 and another in 2012 what can I say - consider me bribed (not that it was actually required)
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Craig: I call unfair out of context quoting