Dining with Dinosaurs gives us a great opportunity to expand our horizons, discovering new things and thought processes we’d never have otherwise. This was very much the case for this fundamental biologist on 18 November, as I attended the talks and discussion on the British International Investment (BII) fund’s work to “do good without losing money”, helping international development through technology business investment in Africa and Asia.
We began with lessons that Reuben Visiting Fellow and former BII chair, Sir Graham Wrigley, had learned from the DotCom boom and bust in the internet’s early days:
- Be smart: don’t carried away by greed or fear of missing out when stock market bubbles appear: the same fear will eventually cause a crash.
- Have a diverse portfolio: accept that some ventures will fail.
- Invest in the less glamorous infrastructure required for everything else to function.
- Remember growth isn’t forever: values will eventually fall.
After these lessons, Abhinav Sinha, BII’s head of technology and Telecoms, talked about the BII’s investment approaches. Taking lessons from the previous paragraph, BII invest in computing infrastructure such as data centres, power generation, and chip manufacturing. Alongside these were the more intriguing investments, which we would go on to discuss, of companies who were using AI and their knowledge of specific sectors to improve processes and services delivered.
After a brief introduction to a few of these investments, we broke out for our Teriyaki Chicken/Cabbage and noodles (well done catering staff, this was great and went down well!). We were given more details for one of the companies we’d previously heard about, and were tasked with becoming the BII: working out whether we’d invest in the company, and how they might make financial returns while delivering social goods. The example my table got was a company called CropIn, which specialises in models to optimise farming practices for small scale farms, and predict risk within these for insurance companies. The social good of these models is that they might help enhance yields, and would enable covered farmers to get insurance; giving them some more resilience in the face of climate breakdown. We felt that insurance companies would probably like this, and that the business model was both viable and globally scalable. A lot of the success would depend on how affordable the insurance would be, as if no one is buying the insurance then predicting the risk is moot. I was also sceptical that the farmers themselves would benefit from being told when to water/harvest crops: generations of expertise and intricate knowledge of the land underpin their work. Real experience and local knowledge beats artificial intelligence every time for me. Nevertheless, we thought it had potential returns and a clear social good. Our money went in!
I enjoyed having to completely rewire my brain for this DwD, and thank the catering staff, the speakers and organisers again for giving us another fantastic Tuesday night!
