A few months ago, I saw a remarkable documentary on the fashion industry called The True Cost. It had a similar kind of chilling effect on me as Earthlings. Earthlings is not the type of documentary for people with a faint of heart. It has very explicit, unapologetic, heartbreaking scenes, and not for someone who wants to watch something light-hearted and entertaining to unwind after work. For the record, I saw Earthlings for the first time earlier this year with my father, and I'll never forget what he told me: "Humans are the cruelest animals."

I think as consumers of products, we are primarily concerned with cost-value and oftentimes, we don't think about the production process behind the items that we buy, and we often never think about the people who made them. The True Cost weaves a narrative around the world of fashion: its production, its consumption, and the current world we live in; in which there is a distinct separation between producer and consumer.

Currently, eCommerce startups have been on the rise. Since 2011, there have been an influx of funding that has been given to eCommerce startups- that which have effectively doubled in the last few years alone.

We have an entire ecosystem of differentiation between eCommerce startups- and there are around 4K startups in Northern California alone that revolve around the reselling of inventory that gets unsold in larger fashion brand companies. In the UK, there is more of an emphasis on luxury brands, as the UK is home to the most high net income individuals in the global world with China as second, and the US as third in rank.

London based startups such as FarFetch (with a current valuation of $1 billion+) not only sell new luxury items, but second-hand luxury items.

Then there are companies that aggregate inventory from thousands of brands such as Lyst, Nuji, Girl Meets Dress, Secretsales, Mallzee, Grabble and others. Then there are companies that aggregate inventory from brands via a stylist or AI recommendation: Chic by Choice, The Chapar, Thread etc. Then there are a relative few moving into the realm of on-demand fashion: UK's Wool and the Gang, SavageLondon, MyOwnShirts, China's Modern Tailor, Canada's Indochino and even 3D fashion such as Metail with virtual fitting rooms. The list goes on and on. 

But the question still remains: of where was it made, and who made them still come to mind.

One of the biggest problems with the fashion industry is that since the era of fast-forward fashion, a business model started by Zara in the early 2000s in which propagated a high turnover of new clothes on an annual basis (52 seasons per year) - landfill waste has exceeded tremendously in that the current business model has no longer become economically feasible nor environmentally unsustainable.

It used to be fashion only had 3 seasons per year- 1) fall/winter 2) spring/summer and 3) cruise- now, with the advent of fast-forward fashion, there are now 52 seasons in a year- with new inventory changing on a weekly basis and as much as 30-65% of fast-forward's unsold inventory going directly into the trash.

Since now clothes are made cheaply, with low-quality materials, and often with sweatshop labour, we could accumulate all the junk from fast-forward fashion's high street shops via non-stop ongoing sales and even buy them from a multitude of different mobile apps that aggregated all their unwanted inventory, and even though perhaps more than half their inventory went directly into the trash, they are still able to become profitable companies because so little went into the actual manufacturing of their products.

However, the injustice ultimately went to us, the consumers, who would buy these environmentally unsustainable, cheaply made products, and the producers, the women exploited in the process; the ones who worked 60-80 hour shifts per week outputting these poor quality products in unfathomable working conditions.

In an era of instant gratification, we often don't think of where our items come from; where our clothes and shoes and bags were made; but we should all think for a moment, and ask ourselves, "Who is the person who made our shirt? Our dress? Our bag? Our shoes?" And if we don't know the answer, we should think twice before pressing BUY. Caveat emptor.

According to CB Insights, the current funding for eCommerce startups soared 136% in just the last 5 years alone.

eCommerce has disrupted the way we shop. I hope that eCommerce can also disrupt the way we produce those goods that we shop for so that we may know all the people who worked to make those goods for us, so that they are no longer just the "faceless people" behind a label.


By Sierra Choi

Also as an Apple (AAPL) update to my previous post, as expected, it has made a correction and moved into the pullback area a little sooner than anticipated. I surmise that there is a strong possibility of consolidation near the 100% fib retracement line and the secondary support near 86.91-97.07. I would be on the lookout for a similar consolidation pattern from 2013 for the next several weeks. In any case, there should be a lot of volatility within the next couple of months.

I find that when people talk about the stock market on twitter- there is a tendency to panic, simply because although we are separated by geography, we are tuned into each other's thoughts via the interwebs, and Wall Street abides by groupthink. I find most financial reporting to be generally unreliable, minus a few exceptions, and twitter is a great place for people to catch people's first impressions, but most likely not for in-depth analysis.

The great thing about a correction is that it may also present a buying opportunity after consolidation, and looking for that bullish indicator can be kind of exciting, like anticipation of something one has always wanted. In any case, if there is any doubt, I always trust my own judgement, but I find visual information and visual analysis are always ahead of information given via macroanalysis, statistics and analysis of a stock via its highs and lows, moving averages and other data based on numbers alone. Also, I find most algos to be insufficient in determining the direction of a particular stock although many hedge firms may disagree with me.

In any case, taking a step back and not riding the wave of twitter and other social media is sometimes better for one's sanity, unless one prefers to be engulfed in the tidal wave, and I don't think I know of anyone who prefers pain over pleasure. 

By Sierra Choi

DISCLAIMER: This analysis was for educational purposes only and not for any intended stock advice.

Ever since the NY Times article came out last week regarding the dictatorial high turn-over corporate working environment at Amazon, I have noticed an influx in blog entries by prominent people defending the Amazon corporate model and asserting that working long, arduous hours at the sacrifice of personal life is the only way to succeed and that the new technocratic class of Gen Yers who demand more of a work/life balance do not understand the ethics of work.

Let's look at the facts.

First of all, despite the hype of Amazon and the rise of eCommerce startups and companies in general; overall, Amazon has not been a profitable entity in the way Google or Netflix have. In fact, Amazon has not reported a meaningful profit in the last 20 years. Although they posted a $92 million net income in their latest quarterly report, primarily they have been vacilliating between net losses (eg, -$126 million (Q2 2014) -$437 million (Q3 2014) $214 million (Q4 2014) -$57 million (Q1 2015) and $92 (Q2 2015) etc). 

Currently, Amazon has between 1%-1.5% of the US retail market by value and utilising its cash flow for capital expenditures, in its bet to capture a larger segment of the global retail market.
This strategy is parallel to Uber Technologies and other US startups such as Snapchat, in which the primary focus is on growth and not net income. In essence, these companies are betting on the assumption that they will be able to capture the larger global market and gain tremendous growth in the process, while all of their free cash flow (FCF) is spent on capital expenditures (capex).

Obviously this strategy becomes problematic because a lot of the burn is directly financed by investors who are often told that their return will be astronomical on the assumption that these companies will be eventually able to capture a large segment of the global market.

However, in practice, what often happens is that a significant portion of companies fail because they expand too quickly into global regions, whilst their capex rapidly increases with a negative FCF, and many clone companies crop up in which competition becomes too fierce. This is something that happened with Groupon, and all of its clone companies; expansion at a rapid rate with skyrocketing capex, whilst its FCF turned negative. Amazon has not reported a positive FCF throughout the last 5 quarterly reports. (source: Google finance)

Google is a company that has a history of strong net income and also was able to expand into many global regions through a variety of methodolgies in addition to having a positive FCF while also spending around 25-50% of their FCF into capex.

However, that might be the difference between the leadership styles of Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos.

As Google was in its early expansion phases in the late 90s and early 2000s, then CEO (and now chairman) Eric Schmidt, along with the Google founders created a corporate culture that went directly against the traditional corporate culture that Amazon exemplifies. Instead of treating employees as an infinite series of shifting bodies with a high turnover, the trio (Schmidt, Brin, Page) instead began a culture of what we know today as that work-life integration, when work automatically merges with personal life, where there is high level of flexibility in the working environment and the end goal is project driven, and not micromanaged by how many hours one puts into the office.

In fact, a study from researchers at Maastricht University and Erasmus University in the Netherlands have written that:


"The culture of working enormously long hours is ingrained in many workplaces. But for men in particular, it also has a lot to do with comparing themselves to peers. When men don’t work as much as colleagues and friends, they report being unhappy and shift their work schedule to match or better them."

And that peer-matching isn’t about being as productive. It’s all about perceived status. The authors call it “conspicuous work.”

I think this delineates a very important distinction between thinkers who abide by post-Industrial 80s corporate America and the new technocratic generation of thinkers who see productivity as more important than "conspicious work" or what I call "busywork".

As a personal anecdote, many friends from Samsung have related similar experiences to me, in which simply the appearance of being at the office and sitting at one's desk doing nothing is perceived as being a good employee as opposed to accomplishing goals set by the company. As one current female Samsung employee told me:

"Samsung does not like outliers, they don't like people who are high achievers, they prefer people who are good at taking orders and able to put in late hours at the office and on the weekends." -Female Samsung employee

This lack of innovation policy might be one of the reasons why Samsung is unable to create any new products on their own- rather, what they are best at doing is copying other company products sold at a cheaper price. Another current Samsung employee told me that although they technically have a gym that employees are able to use at any time, it is frowned upon that anyone uses the gym until after working hours. The company is also so paranoid that their own employees will leak information to other companies that they also have in place a policy in which one has to cover up their camera phones with stickers when they enter the building, so that no employee can take photos of what they might be working on.

These kinds of practices are indicative of a bygone era: post-Communist Russia and China, and post-Industrial 80's America when workers were seen as exchangable entities and not valued contributors to the company.

Although currently Amazon has been idolised in the media again due to their skyrocking equity shares even at the lack of significant profitability, one really does have to wonder, at what price are people willing to idolise that particular Amazon model, in which a significant portion of their employees despise their own corporate culture, when the model proven by Google, Netflix and others move towards a future when "work" isn't about putting in long hours at the office in the evenings and on the weekends but working smart?

"Working smart" is a more significant gauge of productivity than "working hard and long," and are contraindicative of each other and Google understands this concept, but Amazon does not.

"I would hearken back to the quote that we have in the book from Marissa Mayer, where she said that resentment comes from being told what to do and when to do it. I think you really want to give people the flexibility to manage their own time relative to their own work deadlines and strike their own dynamic in terms of how to be spending their time." - Jonathan Rosenberg, Google Executive

After all, what might take one person 10 hours to do something, might take another person one hour to accomplish. I have seen many people, who supposedly are experts in IT in the US, simply struggling with getting the basics of their printer to work from their laptop week after week, whilst bragging about all the hours they put into the office whilst pushing employees to skip lunch. Others I've seen just sit in front of their computer whilst reading non-essential emails all day, pretending to be busy. Work isn't really quantifiable by hours, but by a personal methodology around a supportive environment that embraces flexibility.

I, however, do admire colleagues such as one of my Co-Founders, who sits as a Non-Executive Director for one of my startups, juggles many projects at once, and also is a Managing Partner at McKinsey & Co and formerly a Managing Director and Partner at Accenture. He is someone who works hard, but also works smart, never misses a meeting without advance notice, travels a great deal, but understands the work-life balance, and also spends a lot of time with his family planning incredible holidays around the world. He understands the meaning of work without sacrificing the humanity behind work. I think there is a misconception that success comes at the price of renouncing time with your family. When flexibility becomes an integral part of the workspace, then an inherent work-life balance becomes more evident in which work naturally blends with one's life.

For women though, that decision most likely revolves around planning a family. One of my cousins, who has her own medical practice in New York City and is a professor at NYU, didn't start a family until she was in her 40s. It wasn't until she had the flexibility of starting her own practice that she made the decision to have a child. She still works just as hard, and just as smart, but inevitably one of the key aspects of being the head of your own business is deciding when and where to work. Also, Kathleen Kennedy, whom I consider a world class Hollywood producer, and one of the first people I had met when I lived in Los Angeles, also followed a similar kind of career trajectory. She also delayed having children until after she started her own production company, the Kennedy/Marshall Company with her husband after working with such directors as Steven Spielberg. I remember one of the best advice she gave me was, "You have to follow your instinct, and don't do what other people think you should do."

Last week, Fortune published an interesting account of the failure of the startup Zirtual.

Zirtual is a virtual assistant startup that matches up people with, well, virtual assistants. India has many startups in this sector, and it has largely been popular with entrpreneurs. 

Dan Primack wrote in his blog last week that the reason for the failure was that Zirtual had switched over to give their contractors employee status which included giving them benefits, which added to more of their burn rate.

The reasons that the Founder CEO Maren Kate Donovan gave was that she had outsourced her CFO functions to a consulting group- Keating Consulting Group, and they had missed several pay periods, so their burn projections had largely been inaccurate.

Ryan Keating from the Keating Consulting Group then gave his side of the story: 

As to those burn rate projections, Keating expressed surprise that Donovan is using them to explain the company’s collapse. Yes, he created Excel spreadsheets that only had two pay periods per month (i.e., 24 pay periods rather than 26). But he insists that the cash projection in each pay period was artificially higher (on a sliding scale) to make up the difference, thus meaning that Zirtual shouldn’t have suddenly had to come up with hundreds of thousands of unexpected dollars. “These are projections and they’re never right on the nose but I can’t imagine that this had a big impact in them getting through August 15,” Keating says.


Here, he admits two things: 1) He did not include all the pay periods 2) He "inflated" the cash projections for each pay period by making them "artificially higher" (although it's not clear how much higher) therefore, these cash projections weren't even remotely accurate.

First of all, what kind of financial services professional can't tell the difference between 2 and 3 pay periods, and what would motivate him not to include several pay periods? Who can say for sure, perhaps Mr. Keating had been inebriated and had a drink or two when he made the excel chart with his projections. I, for one, would not feel comfortable with a guy who says he's a financial services expert and purposely omits pay periods whilst inflating other numbers on a sliding scale.

Secondly, the problem with Zirtual is not one that is related to switching over their contractors to employees- rather, I think that was a step in the right direction. The fundamental problem with Zirtual was that it only wanted U.S. university graduates to work for $10-11/hour. I remember my first job, when I was 15 years old and worked at bakery at the local mall, and my pay was $8.50/hour, which was about 15+ years ago. If U.S. University graduates in this day and era are only paid $10-11/hour, well it seems quite obvious that this revenue model will be unsustainable- primarily because any smart U.S. university graduate will look for more competitive positions, and there will be a high turnover rate at Zirtual in which a large part of its burn goes to initially training these new employees. That is time and money wasted, right there.

These U.S. University graduates are better off working for McDonald's and Costco, both companies that give a higher pay rate + benefits than Zirtual; except McDonald's and Costco doesn't expect their employees to have U.S. university degrees.

CEO Maren Kate Donovan says that her mistake was that she didn't hire the right CFO. I think she is right. She also should've started fundraising at least 6 months before she ran out of money, and not the weekend before. However, one thing is clear, all the companies that outsource their CFO functions to the Keating Consulting Group  should doublecheck their figures to see if he purposely left out any pay periods whilst inflating other numbers on "a sliding scale." To me, that is pure negligence and completely unacceptable for a financial services group to do.

By Sierra Choi

Travel tech – yet another sub section of the tech industry.  I seem to be writing on sub sections of 
the technology start-up world on a regular basis but this isn’t just a fancy naming exercise; the depth of the London tech sector allows things to be segmented.  I don’t see the segmentation as a 
negative, instead I see it as a positive, specialization allows communities closer to the heart of the 
matter grow and nurture themselves. 

Back to Travel Tech -now, most of us have already witnessed a massive change in how the travel 
industry engages with its customers.  First off was the move to online booking, taking hotel, flight 
and car reservations out of the hands of the travel agents and placing it within your control from a 
web browser.  Then came the online replicators of the traditional travel agent, Expedia and Orbitz 
which were somewhat replications of traditional travel agencies aggregating a wide variety of travel products under one banner.  Next came the specialized search engines, such as Kayak and 
Skyscanners who aimed to make sure that you were always getting the best deal possible.  More 
recently the rise of social media has created the likes of Trip Advisor.  Finally, there has been the rise of AirBnB which is upending the traditional model of how we find accommodation.

So is there any more room for Travel Tech?  London & Partners, the government organization dedicated to promoting and building London business certainly believe so.  They have launched the Travel Tech Lab at their headquarters in More Place on the South Bank.  This co-working space is designed to help connect the travel industry with technology start-ups.  

Recently, I sat down with Alex Grant, CEO of Touriocity,  who are currently housed at the Travel Tech Lab. Touriiocity are trying to provide bespoke, personal tours across major cities in Europe at an affordable price.  Imagine you are visiting the Vatican and instead of choosing to see it by yourself or going on some gigantic general tour group you could visit accompanied by your own private tour guide (at a reasonable price)  You could combine a number of different personal tours together still leaving you the freedom to  other attractions at your leisure.  

This is the gap they are trying to fill. Why do I find this model interesting? I remember a few years ago, when I visited Egypt with a group of friends –one of whom is now was a lawyer but had done his undergraduate degree in Classics, so was well versed in Egyptian antiquities and with a clear view on what he wished to see.  Making the trip from Canada is a fairly big undertaking both financial and time wise –the proverbial once in a life time trip.  Therefore, we certainly were not going to a mass market tour bus being given the standard tour of the Egyptian sites.  We managed to arrange for separate private tour at the areas we wished to see: Cairo, Luxor, the Valleys of the Kings & Queens et al with extremely knowledgeable local tour operators who were able to give us the experience that we were seeking.   

I can remember how incredibly complicated and time consuming the process was and difficult as we were so many thousands of miles away.  For independent travellers, comfortable in arranging flights and hotels on the internet, arranging personal tours over the internet fills an interesting niche.  I feel there is still more disruption to come to the travel industry.

By Ashok Parekh

Google's announcement yesterday about the restructuring of its company might have come off as a surprise to many, but it was actually a strategic move to protect its core revenue stream. 
As one might be familiar, governments around the world have an annoying way of trying to take a cut of profits if a company becomes too big. Take the following examples:

US government vs. Microsoft (an anti-trust lawsuit that Microsoft lost in 2007)
US government vs. Electrolux (for its acquisition of General Electronic's appliance division, 2015)
European Commission vs. Google (anti-trust lawsuit against favouring its own companies in search results in April 2015)


“Dominance as such is not a problem,” said the EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager,“However, dominant companies have a responsibility not to abuse their powerful market position.” Source: Ars Technica

Google has been accused that it had breached breached antitrust rules by diverting traffic from rivals in order to favour its in-house services. If they are found guilty, Google stands to lose up to 10% of its annual sales and restructure its business model.

Similarly, Microsoft lost a similar lawsuit in 2007 and had to pay $670 million in fines and change its Windows package to make it more compatible with other systems. In 2009, Intel was fined $1.45 billion for stifling competition and limiting customers’ options by giving several computer manufacturers rebates in exchange for exclusively purchasing the company’s microchips.

However, why not just restructure its business model BEFORE the case outcome? By making Google, a subsidiary of its now-parent company, Alphabet, Google would be effectively shielded from lawsuits stemming from an anti-trust nature. Its other divisions, eCommerce, X-labs, Ventures, NEST et al will all be separate subsidiaries, and it can no longer face similar sort of anti-trust lawsuits, since Google (the search engine, ad revenue, and mobile cash cow) is now a separate entity from the other companies it had previously acquired or invested in. 

But one confusing thing about this new restructuring is the Google stock that trades under GOOG and GOOGL. Not surprisingly, exactly a year before the EU Commission's anti-trust lawsuit against Google, it split its stock from GOOG to both GOOG (class C) and GOOGL (class A) shares. 

However, GOOG stock symbol is now representative of Alphabet Inc, and not Google Inc. 

Bloomberg has to say about the restructuring of Google into Alphabet: "For anyone who owns shares of Google now, no action is required. The stock will automatically convert into Alphabet shares that represent stakes in the same collection of companies that exists today, just arranged differently. The change won’t require a shareholder vote or create any extra taxes.

“The conversion will occur automatically without an exchange of stock certificates,” according to a regulatory filing. “Stock certificates previously representing shares of a class of Google stock will represent the same number of shares of the corresponding class of Alphabet stock.”

Google sets an interesting precedent once again, this time in the legal history of anti-trust lawsuits. King takes pawn. 

By Sierra Choi

NOTE: My colleague, Ashok Parekh commented that the EU has rather broad antitrust parental liability of private equity management companies however, the condition: "a parent company and its subsidiaries will constitute a single economic unit when the parent can exercise decisive influence" over the subsidiary, must be satisfied and the standard of proof being that the subsidiary carries out, in all material respects, the instructions of the parent company." Although the antitrust parental liability of private equity management companies is broad, this remains to be seen if the same would apply to Google's restructuring of Alphabet. I would be interested in what an EU anti-trust barrister says on the matter, however, Google's team of legal advisors at Cleary Gottlieb, are experts in anti-trust litigation on both sides of the Atlantic, and had advised Google of its Alphabet restructuring. 

One of my friends, a Founder at a FinTech company, recently told me that he was moving offices from Wimbledon to Central London to accommodate the 20 new hires in his startup. The office he and his team will be moving into is part of WeWork spaces, and offers such perks as free coffee and beer on tap in their shared kitchen spaces along with a flexible monthly leasing plan. 

For those Londoners with startups who have thought office spaces in central London were too expensive, there are quite a few alternatives in London as many businesses have extra space that they want to let:

iHorizon is an accounting firm with space for 20 extra people (£340/ person/ monthly)

Metail is a fashion startup with space for 15 extra people (£200/person/monthly)

Widegate studio near Liverpool Street is another share workspace with room for 6 more people (£300/per person/monthly) and houses 7 different startups in design, marketing and architecture. 

Innovation Wareouse has space for 10 people with £150 per person/monthly. They are a share workspace that caters primarily to solopreneurs and located right in EC1 on top of Smithfield's market.

Cooks Yard in Stepney Green has 16 available spots for £180/per person/monthly and allows people to bring their pets.

Most of these spaces have lockers, a kitchen and 24 hour access. One of my favourite spaces is Greenwich Innovation Space, where an acquaintance of mine, Julian McCrea, founder of Portal Entertainment was headquartered until he moved to Los Angeles several months ago. Hackney and Silicon Roundabout is getting increasingly crowded and rising in prices, and a great alternative is Greenwich, where a lot of new interesting architecture is being built to cater to small businesses and startups. 

With the increasing popularity of shared work spaces in every major city around the world, the Future of Work looks to be catering to the rise of small businesses. One VC who is advising my startup told me that Millennials don't want to work for others, they want to work for themselves, therefore talent retention is getting increasingly competitive and offering a nice equity package to new employees rarely keeps them for more than 2 years. I wonder though, if in the near future, when a majority of the jobs we know today eventually become automated, then what will work actually look like? 

Sophie Wade, Founder of Flexcel Network thinks that businesses will increasingly cater to flexible working environments. The 8 hour workday was an invention of the post-Industrial era which promoted the 8 hour work + 8 hour rest + 8 hour sleep work ethic. However, as small businesses are growing, and more and more jobs being automated, the 9-5 work day may no longer apply to the Future of Work. 

I can't help but think of Timothy Ferriss' The 4 Hour Work Week, in which he lists the ways he has automated his job so that he doesn't have to be in the office everyday. Although he has received a backlash of criticism, his particular philosophy seems to be representative of the movement away from the 9-5 salaryman that had dominated global businesses for the last 50 years and with the advent of telecommuting and AR, perhaps some of his theses might come into play within the next decade.

In the  key findings of Future of Work study by the UK government:

"The idea of a single education, with a single job, with a single pension is over." -UK policy maker

"Growing desire for a better work-life balance Faced with growing complexity and performance pressures in the work environment, individuals are increasingly seeking a more suitable balance and better boundaries between the requirements of work and private life. A majority (57 per cent) of employees say that the availability of flexible working in their workplace is important to them; this proportion is growing over time and is significantly higher for particular groups including parents, workers with caring responsibilities and the highly qualified. Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 2000 and have grown up almost entirely in the digital age) will further drive this trend, with 92 per cent identifying flexibility as a top priority when selecting a workplace."

Another key implication of this scenario is "Entrpreneurism as a lifestyle": "The desire for more flexibility is not confined to business. Demographic factors, family care responsibilities, and a search for a better work life balance increase individual demands for more flexibility. Individuals pursue “micropreneurial” approaches that offer earnings potential, often alongside more conventional modes of employment."

This suggests that in the future, there will be more methodologies to increase passive revenue sources whilst people spend more time doing things that they love, instead of the mindset that doing things that one loves is not an economically feasible option. In fact, I supported myself for a year and half simply trading US stock options as a hobby, which gave me a significant amount of time to focus on other creative pursuits when I was living in Los Angeles, before I got tired of the repetition and moved to a different time zone to join an exciting EdTech startup. Having a passive source of income is one of the most important things in having the freedom to do what one wants, but I also think that for many people, such as myself, we also need a purpose in life, and having a community that builds upon that vision is equally important. 

By Sierra Choi

Yesterday, at 6:30pm marked the start of yet another strike by unionised tube drivers in London. 
With pay of £50k a year and nearly two months holiday, and a 36 hour week, the Unions are upset at the introduction of the Night Tube and the disruption this will cause to work-life balance. Thankfully for them, their employer is almost 100 years past being a startup… It certainly doesn’t work for most of us in 2015.

I have had to reorganise ten meetings and a dinner date, and I l am fortunate to live in Central 
London, so it is much easier to get around the strike. For many others, the disruption is even more costly.

There seems to be an obvious solution to this continuing disruption – driverless trains. In a city that aims to be both a technology hub of Europe, and a showcase for a new generation of smart city, it really is a no-brainer. The outlook for automated trains, however, is not good. Some existing lines, such as the Victoria and Jubilee lines are already operated by a form of automatic train control, although not fully automated. The driver simply opens the doors. There are a number of upgrades apparently coming to the network. Starting with a technology upgrade to the Circle, Metropolitan and District Lines that will allow driverless control.

Thales just got awarded the contract and it will be delivered in 2022. But don’t hold your breath, this is the same contract that was awarded to Bombardier in 2011, due for completion in 2018 and ripped up by TFL at a cost of £85m because they didn’t believe that they could actually deliver the contract. Next up are new trains on the deep level lines, starting with the Piccadilly Line in 2022. Unfortunately, although capable, not actually I would have thought that the city that dominates in tech innovation would be able to push ahead farther and faster with tech advances, on the infrastructure under our feet, which allows this city to function. 

By Ashok Parekh