Six degrees of early-stage ventures

Private markets investment volume and valuations exceed the level of the dot-com bubble (PwC and CBInsights, 2019). The available amount of capital surges as investors announce new multi-billion dollar funds (Kruppa, 2019). Even large, institutional funds in the Silicon Valley, who are used to investing in later stages, move upstream to invest in fledgling firms to achieve higher ownership and returns (Clark, 2019a). Despite the high private market liquidity, standing out from the crowd is critical and has become more difficult to achieve, even for innovative entrepreneurs (Planko et al., 2017). Curiously, venture capitalists who expect the latest technology and innovation from new ventures, did not themselves significantly innovate in their approach, including methods of evaluating ventures (Kupor, 2019). Few investors came up with new, differentiated investment strategies, one such example being data-driven investing (Pitchbook, 2018). Although venture capitalists seek to invest in firms which benefit substantially from the notion that “data is the new oil”, few practice to leverage data for their investment process (Parkins, 2017; Dance et al., 2018; Arroyo et al., 2019; Gompers et al., 2020). Instead, the overwhelming majority adheres to the motto “picking investments is an art, not science” and relies primarily on its networks as the most valuable resource (Bell, 2014; Huang and Pearce, 2015; Gompers et al., 2020). Venture capitalists’ focus on their social networks could not only negatively affect investment decisions and returns, but also promote group-think and stifle the progression of their investment thesis (Wuebker et al., 2015). Reviewing the previous works on entrepreneurship, venture evaluation, and venture capital revealed a significant gap in the literature. While investors and entrepreneurs depend heavily on their social networks, these networks play an insignificant role in venture evaluation. The existing frameworks are inadequate to accurately assess early-stage ventures and thus a rethink of methodology is needed to better capture the networked nature of today’s ventures (Miloud et al., 2012; Dusatkova and Zinecker, 2016). This thesis suggests a new perspective for early-stage venture evaluation, with particular focus on formalising the ventures’ social networks. Contributions made by this thesis are fourfold and relevant to entrepreneurs, investors, and academic theorists. Firstly, existing theories that explain venture fundraising success are expanded by adding a social network perspective. Secondly, this research provides a comprehensive overview of stakeholders’ roles and their constellation in social networks around the entrepreneurs and their ventures. Thirdly, for entrepreneurs, different modes of leveraging their social networks for critical business functions are identified. Lastly, an evaluation tool for venture capitalists to the investability of early-stage ventures is developed. In summary, results provide new insights into entrepreneurial strategies for leveraging social networks to enhance operations, differentiate from competitors, send positive signals to investors, and ultimately improve the venture’s assessment by the private market.EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTP

Industry competition in the long-run with particular reference to the petrochemical industry

Imperial Users onl

Systemunterstützung für moderne Speichertechnologien

Trust and scalability are the two significant factors which impede the dissemination of clouds. The possibility of privileged access to customer data by a cloud provider limits the usage of clouds for processing security-sensitive data. Low latency cloud services rely on in-memory computations, and thus, are limited by several characteristics of Dynamic RAM (DRAM) such as capacity, density, energy consumption, for example. Two technological areas address these factors. Mainstream server platforms, such as Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) und AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualisation (SEV) offer extensions for trusted execution in untrusted environments. Various technologies of Non-Volatile RAM (NV-RAM) have better capacity and density compared to DRAM and thus can be considered as DRAM alternatives in the future. However, these technologies and extensions require new programming approaches and system support since they add features to the system architecture: new system components (Intel SGX) and data persistence (NV-RAM). This thesis is devoted to the programming and architectural aspects of persistent and trusted systems. For trusted systems, an in-depth analysis of new architectural extensions was performed. A novel framework named EActors and a database engine named STANlite were developed to effectively use the capabilities of trusted~execution. For persistent systems, an in-depth analysis of prospective memory technologies, their features and the possible impact on system architecture was performed. A new persistence model, called the hypervisor-based model of persistence, was developed and evaluated by the NV-Hypervisor. This offers transparent persistence for legacy and proprietary software, and supports virtualisation of persistent memory.Vertrauenswürdigkeit und Skalierbarkeit sind die beiden maßgeblichen Faktoren, die die Verbreitung von Clouds behindern. Die Möglichkeit privilegierter Zugriffe auf Kundendaten durch einen Cloudanbieter schränkt die Nutzung von Clouds bei der Verarbeitung von sicherheitskritischen und vertraulichen Informationen ein. Clouddienste mit niedriger Latenz erfordern die Durchführungen von Berechnungen im Hauptspeicher und sind daher an Charakteristika von Dynamic RAM (DRAM) wie Kapazität, Dichte, Energieverbrauch und andere Aspekte gebunden. Zwei technologische Bereiche befassen sich mit diesen Faktoren: Etablierte Server Plattformen wie Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) und AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualisation (SEV) stellen Erweiterungen für vertrauenswürdige Ausführung in nicht vertrauenswürdigen Umgebungen bereit. Verschiedene Technologien von nicht flüchtigem Speicher bieten bessere Kapazität und Speicherdichte verglichen mit DRAM, und können daher in Zukunft als Alternative zu DRAM herangezogen werden. Jedoch benötigen diese Technologien und Erweiterungen neuartige Ansätze und Systemunterstützung bei der Programmierung, da diese der Systemarchitektur neue Funktionalität hinzufügen: Systemkomponenten (Intel SGX) und Persistenz (nicht-flüchtiger Speicher). Diese Dissertation widmet sich der Programmierung und den Architekturaspekten von persistenten und vertrauenswürdigen Systemen. Für vertrauenswürdige Systeme wurde eine detaillierte Analyse der neuen Architekturerweiterungen durchgeführt. Außerdem wurden das neuartige EActors Framework und die STANlite Datenbank entwickelt, um die neuen Möglichkeiten von vertrauenswürdiger Ausführung effektiv zu nutzen. Darüber hinaus wurde für persistente Systeme eine detaillierte Analyse zukünftiger Speichertechnologien, deren Merkmale und mögliche Auswirkungen auf die Systemarchitektur durchgeführt. Ferner wurde das neue Hypervisor-basierte Persistenzmodell entwickelt und mittels NV-Hypervisor ausgewertet, welches transparente Persistenz für alte und proprietäre Software, sowie Virtualisierung von persistentem Speicher ermöglicht

Procedural Films: Algorithmic Affect in Research Media Art Practice

This thesis explores the political aesthetics of ‘procedural films’—media works that use generative algorithmic procedures and manifest as moving images. In contrast to long-held techno-positivist understandings of generative art, the thesis reframes procedural films as a critical media art practice aiming to understand the ‘procedure’ as an affective engine of moving image experience. It employs an interdisciplinary approach that borrows from materialist theories of media, experimental film, artificial life and computational culture, and draws on my practices as artist and curator. These processes of making, curating and experiencing serve as enacted research, as a scalable architecture of thinking through and thinking with the technical media. The thesis proposes a conceptual framework for exploring procedural films as techno-cultural artefacts, addressing the ‘apparatus’, the affective space-time of their viewing and their sociopolitical operation. It proposes that algorithmic autonomy brings an affective renegotiation of the traditional roles of the spectator and the moving image, instead seeing it as a complex entanglement of human and non-human agencies, computational temporalities and generative procedures. Furthermore, it addresses procedural mediation and automation as a part of the political aesthetics of media art, exploring the techno-capitalist commodification of attention, time and images. The thesis investigates two case studies—screensaver and game engine—as procedural apparatuses. It explores these media artefacts as sites of labour, design, affect and experience, addressing their techno-cultural construction, as well as their processes of liveness and emergence

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2022, which was held during April 4-5, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 17 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The proceedings also contain 3 contributions from the Test-Comp Competition. The papers deal with the foundations on which software engineering is built, including topics like software engineering as an engineering discipline, requirements engineering, software architectures, software quality, model-driven development, software processes, software evolution, AI-based software engineering, and the specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems, such as (self-)adaptive, collaborative, AI, embedded, distributed, mobile, pervasive, cyber-physical, or service-oriented applications