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Comment by ukthrowaway314 | Hacker News Reader

This just looks like a typical UK 'jobs for the boys' venture - draw a salary for three years, wrap it up, move onto the next one. Little surprise to see NESTA throwing money at it:

Bethnal Green Ventures is co-ordinated by Paul Miller. Paul has spent the last seven years learning how to start new organisations that use technology to solve social and environmental problems, primarily through School of Everything and Social Innovation Camp. Before that he worked at the think tank Demos and the sustainability charity Forum for the Future.

So basically he's a quango man, who's added a few tech names as 'advisors'.

Nothing will come out the other end. But it will keep a few Shoreditch hipsters gainfully employed.

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Thanks for your support. I've actually worked to get this off the ground - unpaid - for the last two years but it's a ten year play for us.

Many more Team Advisors to come... just ran out of time in updating the site I'm afraid.

I wish you the best of luck if it's a real programme and not just grant & subsidy milking. That sounds really offensive, but it's not meant to be.

Do any of the alumni have a web-presence? Perhaps you could either link to their websites; or you could host small "about" pages for them?

You're going to get people thinking that this is just another quango product - something created to use a budget from some government organisation - so how could you address those concerns? How can you show that you're different?

I've popped links into our alumni page but with the caveat that the first test run was very different.

I guess I understand the concern that I'm just a quango/think tank guy but most of the useful stuff I've learned was as co-founder and CEO of School of Everything (www.schoolofeverything.com). We built a product, were finalists in the first round of Seedcamp, raised seed investment from angels including Esther Dyson and have a whole load of happy customers. We never became Google but the site does ok. I'm the first to admit I made lots of mistakes along the way which I hope I can help our teams avoid making again.

Would definitely welcome advice on how to show we're different.

Putting the info about your startup experience from the above comment on your part of the 'people' page would help. The reason people trusted YC early on was because everyone knew pg, rtm and tlb did Viaweb together, so they'd been through the whole of the startup process themselves.

So if you consider advice and mentoring a major part of the investment into the startups you fund in exchange for a lower cash valuation, you'll have to be very convincing that it really will add that much value.

(just hoping you'll take a look at my very-new website which, I hope, will be a great way of getting programmers to help your efforts: http://giving.github.com )

Wow, such a negative comment. Some great organisations have been spun out of this, and it's predecessor, Social Innovation Camp (look up the Good Gym, Enabled by Design, My Police etc). Many of the people working on these social ventures do so for no money, in their spare time, trying to use their skills to change the world. This is absolutely the opposite of 'jobs for the boys', and the small amount of money that NESTA put in is insignificant compared to the time that these highly skilled people are giving up. Just to be clear, I have nothing to do with the programme, but I do know some of the people who have been involved, and they are some of the nicest, and kindest people you will meet.

I don't know Paul beyond following him on Twitter, but SICamp is a respected hackday and School of Everything is an angel funded startup (with funding from Esther Dyson and JP Rangaswami among others).

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