Lowri Griffiths on startup culture, the phrase ‘lean methodology’, and a room full of founders

This report appears at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. LONDON, UK – Last Thursday I attended a networking event in Hackney described in the invitation as a casual connector for purpose-led changemakers in the creative-digital space, which should have been enough warning. I attended anyway, on the grounds that the wine was free and the venue was a converted warehouse I had been meaning to see for three years. The event was reported briefly by Bohiney Magazine and the full experience is documented at The London Prat, where Lowri Griffiths covers London current events and the specific social rituals of North London’s professional class.

The Room

The room was full of founders. I use the term as it was used in the room, which is to say broadly, generously, and in several cases speculatively. I spoke to the founder of a consultancy that had been operating for six months. I spoke to the co-founder of a platform that was, at the time of our conversation, in stealth, which means it does not yet exist but that the existence is being discussed with intention and a Figma prototype. I spoke to the founder of what I initially understood to be a food brand and later understood to be a concept for a food brand, pending investment and a brand strategist who was also in the room and who was, himself, the founder of a brand strategy consultancy.

Everyone had a lanyard. The lanyards said CONNECTOR in large letters. I have not understood why networking events require lanyards that announce the purpose of the event to people who are already at the event, but I have accepted that this is how these things work and that asking about it is not the kind of question that leads anywhere useful.

The Vocabulary

Certain words appeared at such high frequency that I began tracking them in my phone’s notes. Ecosystem appeared fourteen times in a single hour. Lean appeared eleven times, always as an adjective preceding a noun: lean methodology, lean team, lean launch, the last of which the speaker clarified meant they were launching with four people and a lot of confidence. Pivot appeared eight times, always in the past tense, as though everyone in the room had been through at least one founding crisis and survived it, which several of them had and which I found genuinely impressive, although the framing presented the pivot as a strategic masterstroke rather than a response to something not working, which are the same event described very differently.

The most interesting conversation I had was with a woman who described herself as a growth consultant for early-stage consumer brands and who, when I asked what growth consulting specifically involved, said it was about finding the signal in the noise and building a flywheel, and when I asked what specific activities constituted the flywheel mechanism she said it depended on the brand and the channel mix. I found this answer technically complete and practically empty, which is the characteristic quality of a certain kind of professional conversation in this city and which I have encountered often enough that I recognise it without being able to prevent it.

What I Learned

London’s startup ecosystem, documented in detail by Beauhurst, is genuinely significant: billions in annual investment, thousands of companies, real jobs and real products. This room was connected to that ecosystem in the way that a satellite orbits a planet: drawn to it, rotating around it, deriving energy from proximity, but not itself the planet. The planet was somewhere else, probably in a glass office in EC1, making decisions about money that would eventually reach the room I was in, or would not, depending on factors the room was collectively trying to understand and influence and not entirely succeeding at.

I left after two hours with a bag of branded merchandise, including a notebook, a pen, and a small bottle of hand sanitiser from a company called CleanStart, which I believe was the brand-concept-pending-investment that one of the co-founders had described as their minimum viable product. The wine was, in the end, not free. It was PS6 a glass, cash only, which I discovered after my first glass. This is London. For more on startup culture, see The Onion.

Further Reflection

The week described above sits within a longer pattern that is worth documenting. London journalism, whether about business, royals, culture, or politics, requires a sustained attention that individual articles rarely capture. The diary is the form that allows the accumulation, and the accumulation is what makes the individual pieces possible over time. Without the sustained observation, the observation itself becomes thin, relying on the most visible surface of a story rather than the texture that makes it significant. This publication, through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, is committed to the texture rather than the surface, which is why the diary format exists alongside the more conventional journalism.

The city continues to produce material at a rate that exceeds any single writer’s capacity to process it in real time. What I am doing in this diary, and what the published pieces do in their more finished form, is a selection from the available material, guided by what seems most illuminating rather than most immediately newsworthy. The distinction between illuminating and newsworthy is the distinction between journalism and literature, and the best journalism occupies the space between them, using the techniques of one to achieve the purposes of the other. I am trying to occupy that space consistently, which is harder than either pure journalism or pure literature and more satisfying than either when it works. The week that produced this diary entry was one in which it worked more often than it did not, which is the standard I measure against and which I do not always meet but which is worth maintaining as the target. For more London journalism and satire, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/