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My name is Tim. I like to build and learn new things.
Some companies I've made:
- London Interdisciplinary School (2018) "The most radical new university to open in decades" the Times.
We founded it on two key principles: First, the world is becoming more complex and interconnected. Second, specialisation in the workforce is becoming automated fast. Both of which mean we need more people who can tie together knowledge from across very different fields.
Of course at first nobody got it, who needs more generalists? Then just one year after launching covid hit, demonstrating how brittle and interwoved our global system is. Then a year after that, LLMs were born, demonstrating quickly how higher level thinkers will be the ones crafting the future.
- onefinestay (2009) was the largest distributed hotel in the world. It was messy and complex to scale, but a lot of fun. The team was amazing and have gone on to create many more successful companies. We ended up selling for a healthy nine figure sum.
- snaptalent (2007) came out of one of the first ever YC batches. I was only 19 (so was also one of the youngest YC founders) and what blows my mind is in hindsight how many wonderful people were in those rooms.
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It's thought that Stonehenge took over 1500 years to construct. The hunt for the prime algorithm has been going for at least 2000. You don't always have to see the fruits of your labour to find peace and satisfaction in planting the seed. I find great purpose with doing science, not for publications, awards or money - just so that I know I've added one small brick to the collective temple of wisdom.
My most recent area of research has been complexity and self-organisation (these are a key tenent of the new university). The papers outlined quantitive and practical definitions for both these intuitive and innate ideas. This is so we can better work with toy systems like boids (above), game of life (below), but also more importantly nature, society and climate...
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I'm beyond proud of my wife who worked alongside Prince Harry to build Travalyst. The team got all the biggest names in travel (Google, Booking, CTrip, Visa etc...) to work together to help travellers make better choices.
The immediate carbon impact they've had is already enormous. But for me their real impact is proving that you can get (fierce competitive) giants to work together. We have all the tools we need to fix the climate and society, we just need to agree to use them.
We invest in and advise climate startups. So reach out if there's anything we can do to support.