Building Bridges Nicolas Colin

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m delighted to share my interview of Azeem Azhar, tech investor and creator of the successful Exponential View newsletter and Harvard Business Review podcast (of which I was one of the lucky guests nearly two years ago).
In a new book titled Exponential: Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, he explains that while technology continues to develop at an exponential rate, our institutions (norms, policies, organisations) only change slowly, incrementally (if at all), which results in an exponential gap that can explain many of society’s problems.
Azeem and I talked about his life story, his EV newsletter, the process of writing a book, the exponential gap, tech pessimism, the winner-take-all mindset, the future of work, the skills of the future and much more.
On the one hand, there are technologies that develop at an exponential pace—and the companies, institutions and communities that adapt to or harness them. On the other, there are the ideas and norms of the old world. The companies, institutions and communities that can only adapt at an incremental pace. They get left behind—and fast. The emergence of this gap is a consequence of exponential technology (…)
For all the visibility of exponential change, most of the institutions that make up our society follow a linear trajectory. Codified laws and unspoken social norms; legacy companies and NGOs; political systems and intergovernmental bodies—all have only ever known how to adapt incrementally. Stability is an important force within institutions. In fact, it’s built into them (…)
The gap leads to extreme tension. In the Exponential Age, the divergence is ongoing—and it is everywhere. (Exponential)
👉 I also shared some thoughts inspired by Azeem’s book in my newsletter Laetitia@Work: Mind the Exponential Gap. Laetitia@Work
👉 And I recommend Azeem’s book Exponential 🚀 📚
I hope you enjoy this podcast! Do not forget to share it with people who might be interested 👇
Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m thrilled to share my interview with Chris Bruntlett, Marketing Manager at the Dutch Cycling Embassy.
He and I talked about the impact of the pandemic on urban mobility, the Dutch model and its genesis, Paris, London, Berlin, and many other things. I found Bruntlett’s case for more bike lanes very convincing. Urban mobility is not a zero-sum game! We should focus on positive externalities.
Chris and his wife Melissa are urban mobility activists who wrote two great books about cycling: Building the Cycling City and Curbing Traffic. Two years ago they moved from Vancouver, Canada to Delft in the Netherlands to experience the joys of the cycling lifestyle. Chris even made it his day job to champion cycling around the world!
Working at the Dutch Cycling Embassy, he spreads the word about the Dutch model, sharing his new country’s “expertise on building what supports the Dutch cycling culture to those interested”, thus building (cycling) bridges between cities, countries and cultures.
👉 I also wrote about it in this newsletter Laetitia@Work: Why the future of work needs bike lanes:
When you look at the infrastructure decisions made in the Netherlands in the 1970s, you see that they were designed as very democratic and inclusive infrastructures: the old use them, people with disabilities use them, so do families with children. Cycling is cheap. And it has the potential to transform our (work) lives for the better.
👉 For more on the subject, I do recommend their latest book Curbing Traffic which I’m currently reading and enjoying very much 🚴‍♂️ 📚
In the planning field, little attention is given to the effects that a “low-car” city can have on the human experience at a psychological and sociological level. Studies are beginning to surface that indicate the impact that external factors—such as sound—can have on our stress and anxiety levels. Or how the systematic dismantling of freedom and autonomy for children and the elderly to travel through their cities is causing isolation and dependency.
I hope you enjoy this podcast! Do not forget to share it with people who might be interested 👇
Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m excited to share my interview with Roy Bahat, who as the Head of Bloomberg Beta has been “obsessed with how we make work—the thing we do with more waking hours than any other—better”. He’s been an inspiration for me at least since I watched this video in which he speaks about two key drivers for workers: “stability and dignity”.
Roy is used to making short, insightful and actionable pieces of content about work, careers, entrepreneurship and personal development. I recommend his series of to-the-point #thisisnotadvice interviews which you can watch on Twitter. They cover a wide range of topics like “Should I mentor someone and, if so, how do I do it?” or “How can I be the type of founders that VCs want to fund?”.
But I confess I wanted more time with him. I wanted to hear him in a longer format so he could tell his career story, what it means to be a VC specialised in the future of work and so we’d still have time left to speak about the future of work and how we can prepare for it. I’m so grateful he accepted!
As he explains in this podcast, he hadn’t planned to become a VC, let alone one who focuses on the future of work! But after doing tons of reading, talked to thousands of people and given the subject a lot of thought, you could say he’s become quite the expert. (More exactly, he’s reached that level of expertise where you become humble again. It’s a bit like Japanese martial arts: when you reach the highest level, you can wear a white belt again like a beginner!)
I simply love how he adresses the most simple yet profound questions. Here’s how he sums it all up neatly on his LinkedIn profile:
I've had a messy, hand-wringy career (in non-profit, professional services, city government, big media, video games, academia, day-zero startup, investing), where I was never hired for any job for which I was qualified (including starting a company, where I guess I sort of co-hired myself and was still unqualified). Only later did I realize the one thread that tied it all together -- making work better.
In 2013, Bloomberg L.P. gave me the opportunity to turn my obsession with the future of work into my job when we created Bloomberg Beta. I believe the fastest way to make change is to build extraordinary technology companies (and, these days, machine intelligence companies in particular).
We talked about a lot of things, including feminism and why it’s important to embrace it. Among the many themes covered were also the skills of the future. How do you make yourself “futureproof” in a fast-changing world? I asked him because in his book Futureproof, NYT journalist Kevin Roose thanks Roy profusely for the inspiring conversations he had with him. (Check out this article I wrote about the book.) Here’s Roy’s conclusion:
How do we prepare? Most of the past thinking about preparation for the future that I learned growing up what “point preparation”—”here’s what the world’s going to be like: prepare yourself for it” (…) But if you believe that the pace of change is going to be more rapid, then learning is the most essential skill, rapid reinvention… In the tech world, I call this being the CIO of your own life… constantly looking for new tools and trying to integrate them and experiment with them. Another one is setting your own priorities. We don’t learn in school that this is a skill. The third one is the scientific method applied to everything around us. If the world is going to keep changing, scientific method is our best way of understanding how.
I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Do not forget to share it with people who might be interested 👇
Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Laetitia’s Laetitia@Work

Today’s episode of Building Bridges is my conversation with Saul Klein, a venture capitalist based in London and a prominent figure in European tech.
I’ve been connected to Saul Klein for quite some time, because he was a partner at Index Ventures when the VC firm invested in my firm The Family in 2013. But I really got to know him after I moved to London in 2015. His name simply kept coming up as the person I should meet.
* Someone even told me “Saul is the London version of you”. I must say I’m lagging far behind in terms of track record, but it’s true Saul and I have many shared interests: not only startups, but also ecosystem building, the geography of entrepreneurship and venture capital, and the many (and overlooked) interactions between the worlds of tech and policy.
There’s a reason Saul’s name is mentioned so often in London, indeed. He was present at the creation of the contemporary UK tech system, as the founder of Lovefilm and an active angel investor. He then joined Index Ventures, arguably the most accomplished European VC firm, as a partner, before founding his own firm, LocalGlobe, with his father Robin Klein—another prominent figure in London tech.
* In between, Saul was also instrumental, as a cofounder, in launching projects as diverse and impressive as Seedcamp (one of Europe’s most successful seed funds), Zinc (a mission-driven firm that aims to tackle societal challenges), and Newton (a training program for VCs, LPs, angels, accelerators, and tech transfer officers worldwide).
Needless to say he and I talked quite a lot over the years about many tech-related topics. Our conversation in this podcast, however, is focused on something that really stands out in my view: LocalGlobe’s investment thesis, which I wrote about in On Trains and Geography (October 2020), 
Part of Saul’s investment thesis is that his firm should invest in tech startups within a 4-hour train ride from London—which includes cities as diverse and interesting as Cambridge, Manchester, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Here are his arguments:
* 4 hours is far from being a random number. It’s enough time to reach a given destination without being away from the office for too long. You can travel 4 hours to your destination, have a 2-hour meeting, and then travel back to sleep in your own bed, back with your team the next morning. (A bit extreme, but it’s doable.)
* You can actually be productive when traveling by train. Not only is it easier to get an Internet connection when on a train (either through wifi or 4G), but traveling by train also comes with many fewer interruptions than traveling by plane.
* Finally, Saul’s is a bet on the future. From what he told me, he expects plane travel to be less and less tolerated in a business context due to climate change, and at some point governments could decide to revisit the whole cost structure (from tax and other perspectives) so as to make planes more expensive...and trains cheaper.
A key implication of this thesis is that tech people in London and Paris, which despite Brexit are still well connected by the Eurostar, can work on building The New Entente Cordiale 🇬🇧🇫🇷 (in reference to a famous episode in the history of European diplomacy): merging the two ecosystems into one, building on each city’s relative strengths and advantages and ultimately building what Saul calls the “New Palo Alto”. It’s a compelling vision which, I believe, really deserved an in-depth conversation!
In the podcast we also touch upon the following:
* How Saul came to work in tech, what he saw in the growing London ecosystem over the years, and his vision of venture capital as a business.
* LocalGlobe’s office, Phoenix Court, and why Robin and Saul decided to settle in the London ward of Somers Town.
* David Ben Gurion’s lesson on innovation, and why Europe, long a frontier market, is finally becoming an emerging market.
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For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m thrilled to share my interview with Sophie Wade, a speaker, writer (and podcaster) about the future of work who is the author of the book Embracing Progress: Next Steps for the Future of Work. She is adamant: working with empathy is the future!
Sophie was born in England but now she lives and works in the US. She lived in many countries before that, therefore she has a multicultural approach to the subject that I was especially drawn to. She worked as a consultant with numerous executives and acquired a broad, deep knowledge of work-related issues, such as corporate culture, recruiting talent, leadership, transformation and now “hybrid work” and how to make it right. We talked about all these subjects that are part of my own daily research too.What’s the most unexpected work-related transformation brought about by the pandemic? What does “hybrid” look like? What are the challenges associated with it? How do we make the workplace more inclusive in this day and age? How should leadership evolve? How does one change their mindset to become “future proof”? And how much of all this talk about the future of work is determined by culture? What can intercultural comparisons teach us?A few years ago she published this book titled Embracing Progress in which she presents empathy as the solution to a lot of the problems faced by organisations. When it comes to leadership, for example, the battle between ego and empathy is the single most decisive battle. It involves “shifting identity and choice”:
The “ego” of the emerging brand of leadership is not the “command and control” type of autocrat that this word has evoked in the past. Now, it’s more about empathy—creating an environment based on trust and respect—in order to engage the workforce and improve employee ego, stimulating self-awareness and self-worth. Ego here is also about the company’s identity, the values and purpose that the leadership aligns with.
When leaders understand the identity of their company and the workers that comprise it, leading people is more about engaging and guiding them. Values echoed by the leaders of a company offer a clear and more “natural” direction for the workforce to follow in their own actions, relating to everything from daily tasks to long-term goals and career planning.
I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Do not forget to share it with people who might be interested 👇
Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s my Laetitia@Work (about the future of work, with a feminist perspective), and Nicolas’s Colin European Straits (about the Entrepreneurial Age, viewed from Europe).
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com

For this new episode of the Building Bridges podcast, I’m happy to share my interview with Simon Kuper, a British author, Financial Times columnist, and cosmopolitan intellectual whose latest book The Happy Traitor deals with the story of a British spy, George Blake, who defected to the Soviet Union.
Simon lives in Paris but is about to move to Spain with his family for a new experience of cultural immersion. We talked about building bridges across cultures, his multicultural life and identity, multilingualism, mobility… and a few other fascinating subjects (among which football).
Many years ago, he moved from London to Paris surreptitiously because he thought his life had become “too comfortable” and he needed a bit of foreignness to make things more challenging. Thus he became a working-from-home pioneer, paving the way for future generations of mobile workers in search of foreign adventures.
Born in Uganda, raised in the Netherlands, educated in the UK, Kuper is convinced there’s no point in learning a language badly and sticking to superficiality. Instead you should go for excellence:
If you do learn a language, go for excellence. If you have children, immerse them in it from birth. Wall Streeters sending their kids to Mandarin-speaking preschools may be hilarious, but they are choosing the most efficient route (…) A multilingual person can be multiple people, inhabiting multiple worlds. As the linguist Nick Evans wrote, “we study other languages because we cannot live enough lives. It’s a multiplier of our lives.”
Incredibly productive during the pandemic, he has worked on multiple books. His latest book The Happy Traitor was published a few months ago. It deals with George Blake, “a one-man Netflix series, whose life tracked many of the dramas of the 20th century”:
When the 98-year-old double agent George Blake died in Moscow on Boxing Day, my biography of him was long since ready. (…) A Briton raised in the Netherlands, he was a teenage courier in the Dutch resistance, joined the British secret services, converted to communism while a prisoner in North Korea and became a spy for the KGB. He then sent dozens of agents working for Britain to their deaths. His crime so shocked Britain that when he was finally unmasked, in 1961, he was given the longest sentence in the country’s modern history — only to escape in a jailbreak so spectacular that Alfred Hitchcock spent his final decade trying to turn it into a film.
I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast! Do not forget to share it with people who might be interested 👇
Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
* Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s my Laetitia@Work (about the future of work, with a feminist perspective), and Nicolas’s Colin European Straits (about the Entrepreneurial Age, viewed from Europe).
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit buildingbridges.substack.com