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We are so thrilled to welcome James Tynan to the team! Below is a copy of James's Medium Post.
Today I’m joining the Square Peg investment team and I’m fired up.
It’s weird to be excited right now. I see how bad it is. I think things are actually worse than most people are saying. We’ve yet to properly estimate the death toll in developing countries where social distancing is harder. Vaccines are a long way off and we need literally billions of them to be manufactured. In the meantime we’ll continue to each undergo various visible and invisible struggles, many hurting for longer and deeper than we can probably predict right now.
Nonetheless I am excited for the future. I’ve spent the last decade on the edge of revolutions that require global societal shifts and those shifts are now happening in unprecedented ways. Here are three examples:
- Nine years ago I was recruiting doctors for Australia’s largest chronic care medical trial. Telehealth was an uphill battle to say the least. Yesterday I had a Zoom chat with my (old-school) epidemiologist who will now handle the majority of her consults remotely.
- Seven years ago I was helping scale Khan Academy into the world’s largest ed-tech organisation. Classroom adoption was the hardest challenge. Today we are seeing more growth and experimentation in education modalities than ever before.
- For the last two years I was running Startmate where we launched the Climate Cohort to bring funding, connections and support to founders addressing the climate crisis. But the reality is that we need a global mobilisation on the scale of WWII to avert the coming calamity. As horrible as it is, this pandemic is a warm up round for the kind of commitment we’ll need to survive.
These are just three examples where our current context is breaking us out of old models and shaking free new opportunities. There will be many more and I’m excited to invest in them.
This pandemic is a call to arms. We need to invest now to build the world we want to live in on the other side.
Critically, our biggest problems don’t respect country borders. Whether it’s COVID-19 or climate change, we need truly global solutions to solve them.
That’s why I’m thrilled to be investing with the team at Square Peg. Obviously they’re a big name in Australia but they’re also the most internationally-capable VC we have with partners and offices in Australia, Israel and Asia and a deep network in the US and Europe. The partnership work as a close, single unit to find and help scale portfolio businesses across the globe and as of today I’ll be helping them do that.
So if you’re an entrepreneur on a mission to build the future on the other side of this pandemic then hit me up at james@squarepegcap.com or on twitter where my DMs are open. I can’t wait to work with you.
