Work: Availability from July

10.28, Thursday 18 Mar 2021

A rare commercial message:

I’m on the look out for interesting things to do. Projects, yes, but I am also job curious.

Right now, via my consultancy, I’m part of the editorial team on an internal publication with the Google AI folks, bridging their research and product orgs. (It’s the second issue. We did the first one last year. It’s awesome. I have checked I am allowed to say that line, but won’t go into more detail.)

I’ve also been working with a VC, doing due diligence on their prospective new startups from a tech perspective. I dig in with each startup and report back with my views on the strength of the investment and how they’ll need support over the next year. (That’s another repeat gig. They get busy around February/March and call me up.)

Here’s my about page and here’s my consultancy site. My work history is… well, I have no idea what the through-line is. I’ve been MD of a startup accelerator. I’ve built a bookshop in a vending machine that tweets. I co-founded and was CEO of a design consultancy. I co-authored a book about how the brain works.

Why I’m saying this now:

I am very lucky in that interesting projects keep coming my way. I don’t take that for granted, hence this post. If you have thoughts, get in touch! I’m sticking with consulting for the time being.

Except… I would also like to explore getting my teeth into something a bit different, and a bit more longer term. I don’t know what that means.

July is four months away, so that gives a bunch of time for conversations I guess? That’s the idea anyway.

I am product-literate, design-literate, tech-literate, P&L-literate, management-literate etc, and have negotiated deals from both sides of the table, but never specialised. I can get my head around mind-bending frontier tech and invent opportunities. More “special projects” I guess? New product development? I’ve spent a lot of time with startups over the years. That’s why I’ve recently been thinking about labs.

I’m in the mood to work with a team again.

I’d like to focus on something that I already have a viewpoint on, and am already passionate about, when I walk in the door. Maybe it’s full time, maybe it’s not.

I honestly have no idea whether that means diving into a role at a big corp, going further into ventures, setting up someone’s innovation process, writing a column for a magazine, becoming an embedded something-or-other, or what. Like, if you said: we’re making weird new pagers with AI in them and we need to invent what to do with them, I would totally work on that. Or room-sized TVs. Or zero data voice control. Or conversational UIs. Etc. But also if you said: we’re launching a new kind of ventures arm for the circular economy, or an internal startup studio focused on X, or a mid-stage startup in an area I know something about, there’s a conversation to be had there.

I’d prefer to be product-side than client-facing I think, but open minded. I’d like to not think about sales for a while.

I’m planning to stay in the UK.

(Yes I was also job curious at this time in 2020, and some awesome conversations got a decent way down the track… but then, pandemic. So let’s try again because everything is more settled now. And just hope that June 2021 doesn’t bring us, I don’t know, UFOs or something.)

Good ways to talk are email: matt@interconnected.org. Or you can book a call.

Thanks.

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