MarkSherwood-Edwards

Digital pluralist. Commentator on legal and commercial aspects of tech, online, IPR, data protection, outsourcing, and related.

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Here’s an interesting article on risk, personal motivation and how reducing your risk can (counter-intuitively) increase your motivation.

Most founders have a shareholding in their company and, as the valuation increases through the investment rounds, th…https://t.co/BNDAWw91To

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Interesting data on how many contacts, meetings etc you have to have if you want to raise funding. https://t.co/lXhhFnCcFY

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Steve Jobs clip from 1997. What an impressive person. https://t.co/A4ELFsq6eT

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

I’m often getting asked about typical funding sizes for different stage of investments. There’s a good report from Fundz (link below), and I’ve summarised the key elements in this post.

Note that the numbers are US based, so take off 10-20% to get the U…https://t.co/xOVyJXLBnv

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

The UK has been lagging behind on crypto regulation with the result that some firms are looking to move abroad when the FCA closes temporary registration at the end of this month. See this good article from Bloomberg. https://t.co/zkagjWducA

The EU’s cry…https://t.co/635KLYYu2q

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Interesting article from Hannah Zhang at Institutional Investor on alternative financing for SaaS companies that can show recurring revenues. It’s a bit like factoring, except it’s a step closer to old-school securitisation by maki…https://t.co/yqYlesDSKB https://t.co/aO5yZSw8FH

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

For a lot of companies, cloud costs are their biggest expenses after payroll. If their SaaS or cloud providers go down, or don’t meet agreed SLAs, this can have a knock-on effect on their customers and, depending on what’s been agreed in the customer cont…https://t.co/ehn11aan7t

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

I’m attending SaaStock Remote at the moment. Great session yesterday from Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell (leading analysing of SaaS pricing methodologies – see https://t.co/L0JZpP8gsl – you can download a really useful report on SaaS pricing) and he came…https://t.co/bk9GZ8jTKo

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

https://t.co/5kMudkKSmO

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

https://t.co/UmrjmqCkbD

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

This post will be of interest to FCA regulated companies, and to those that supply them.

Premier FX was a UK money remittance business authorised by the FCA. It told its customers that it was covered by the FSCS (it wasn’t), that it could hold their mone…https://t.co/uHAE0ub3ts

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

I’m getting asked a lot about option schemes. There’s a scarcity of tech talent, and options are now table stakes for any business that wants to attract and retain.

The good news is that option schemes easy and cheap to set up, thanks to companies that o…https://t.co/lyTdcdBAIN

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Y Combinator, probably the most influential incubator/accelerator in the world, is increasing its standard investment.

Previously the standard deal was an investment of $125,000 in return for an equity stake of 7%.

YC is now offering $500,000 split in…https://t.co/776pc3XWjN

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Great visualisation of the mobile phone market in the last 30 years. That's the great thing about tech: it's really hard to stay in contention.

RIP Wordstar, Wordperfect, VHS, Blockbuster.....it's a long list. https://t.co/Q9OaJCxe1h

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Another post on GDPR.

Programmatic advertising is big business. Total global revenues in 2021 are estimated at $151bn but, from a GDPR perspective, the way it currently operates is deeply flawed (as the UK ICO has been saying for years, without doing muc…https://t.co/RPVEDldN9c

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

Clearly the TCF is a flawed system (as the UK ICO has been saying for years), but I think the timelines for change are going to be longer. The IAB has 30 days to appeal: presumably they will and then things will slow down. It took Max Schrems about 7 year…https://t.co/u8bgTfCXqj

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

One of the things about GDPR is that it produces interesting stories.

Here’s one.

Right at the end of 2019, the Cabinet Office published the new year’s honours list. This was distributed to the press in the normal way, but also posted on…https://t.co/eiXnD6HuRu

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

The UK has a National AI Strategy which intends “to make [AI] technologies central to [the UK’s] development as a global science and innovation superpower”, and “will signal to the world [the UK’s] intention to build the most pro-innovation regulatory env…https://t.co/0EQ5joUGWG

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

It was a pleasure to act for Kneip on the legals of this acquisition. Congratulations to all involved on what will be a great success!! https://t.co/hmEVRd1h38

[MarkSherwood-Edwards @MarkSherwoodEdw]

In the run-up to Christmas I acted for Kneip on the acquisition of Dataglide, a UK technology company specialised in data transformation and cloud-based automation. There are a lot of impressive elements to this deal, but one of the main ones is that we w…https://t.co/Nt20DzZgku