A foggy Cambridge morning

I’m making a two-day loop through East Anglia, driving between London and Cambridge.  The connecting drives link sessions with investors and directors, course administrators and students, service providers and designers.  Between, the roads ramble through villages and farmlands remote from my usual route on the M11, past colorful streets and quaint gastro-pubs in villages like Thaxted, somewhere to stop on another visit.

Today, my morning started at sunup, while Cambridge was still, silent and foggy.  A breakfast meeting in the City Center and a half-hour’s walk to get there from my College meant setting out well before seven.  The traffic was light; the bicycles nudging me aside were well outnumbering cars.  I filled the enveloping silence with reflections, stopping to take photographs and to make notes for the day ahead, arriving for coffee with time to set a proper agenda.

  

Actually, and with a great deal of work in February, a lot of things are going well in March.  That harvest (hopefully) foreshadows success in achieving market entry with our first products later this year.  Now it’s time to look for people that can help in running that sort of company, who can connect with customers, build an organization, and return profits to investors.

It’s coming to the peak of a journey that started here in Cambridge ten years ago.  Breakfast at Browns goes well, followed by a preview of a fundraising talk that one of my lecturers is planning.  I scribble a few practical notes in the margins of the proposed slides: I’ve learned that startups seldom follow straight, logical lines.

By one, back on the street, the fog has gone and the sun is out.  I’ve got a few hour’s drive ahead to my waiting weekend, but there’s time to ramble through the backs and put it all into perspective. 

   

I still love the familiar views of the Cam and the Colleges, still spend time with my children in Great St. Mary’s, and still believe that this will all come right later this year.