(The first documented instance of double-entry bookkeeping: Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, printed in 1494)

When Luca Pacioli first recorded the method of double-entry bookkeeping in the fifteenth century, he may not have anticipated the impact he would have on the modern world. He is certainly unlikely to have anticipated the pain felt by countless small business owners today — who find themselves managing cash flow challenges from day to day, and reconciling shoeboxes of receipts and invoices at year-end.

Now, given the pressure exerted by COVID-19, these financial challenges are more acute than ever. It’s a precarious time to run…

COVID-19 is an immense human tragedy. We feel its reverberations not just in public health, but in almost every aspect of the wider economy, as it impacts jobs and industries in ways that few anticipated.

The heroes of this crisis are those on the front line: healthcare professionals, educators, supermarket staff, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and local volunteers bringing food and medicines to the isolated and vulnerable members of our communities. What would we do without the tireless efforts of such dedicated individuals, many of whom have long been under-recognised as critical participants in our economy? …

When reading about the state of retirement savings in Europe, one often encounters the journalistic trope of a ‘time bomb’. There’s some substance behind the hyperbole. Europeans are materially underprepared for retirement, in a convergence of demographic, social, and macroeconomic forces which policymakers can’t resolve alone. Will startups be able to defuse the bomb?

At Mosaic we’re excited about the transformation of the wealth management industry at large. In this post, we’ll focus on pensions specifically. Today, only 27% of Europeans aged between 25 and 59 have enrolled themselves in a pension product, and the continent’s retirement savings gap has…

We’ve all been there. A warning light on your dishwasher panel, and when you open the door, a pool of water that won’t drain away. Or, perhaps, your new speakers fail to connect to your wifi network. You open a manual (or turn to Google), but you can’t do it alone. Then you spend an hour on the phone (half on hold) with a poorly-equipped customer service rep, only to wait days for a technician to show up in a 4-hour window. If you’re lucky, they come early and with the right part. If not … grrrr.

Troubleshooting is troublesome…

Machine Intelligence is one of our main themes at Mosaic. That means we spend much of our time researching and meeting ML-driven applications and enabling infrastructure.

Looking back at 2019, one of the main themes of our conversations was, how do organisations implement ML into their core technology? The question was not simply one about hiring — as ML engineers are notably difficult to find — but rather about structuring their internal processes.

Was their data labeled such that it would produce meaningful results? How could they make feature engineering repeatable and recyclable? How could they monitor the…

Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling’s 1952 “Photo 51” X-ray diffraction image of DNA fiber, wrapped around a paperclip

“We have discovered the secret of life!” Ever since Francis Crick burst into The Eagle pub one February afternoon in 1953, the genetic code has seemed to promise riches. Commercialisation of gene sequencing technologies and the development of computational genomics, predicated on the realisation that evolutionary molecular biology can be conceived as an information science, enabled the Human Genome Project, heralded at its culmination in 2000 as a full revelation of “the Book of Life” — that biblical metaphor originary to the…

Shipamax announced their $7M Series A last week, so we thought we’d share why Mosaic is excited to be leading the financing.

We were introduced to Jenna Brown, Shipamax’s CEO, in 2016, just as she was applying to the fabled Y Combinator program. The referral came from Doug Monro, another founder (of a startup where she was an early employee), whom we knew well and had come close to backing. Doug confessed to knowing little about shipping, but described Jenna effusively — in short, as a star. …

We are blessed to partner with great founders to build breakthrough startups — this is what we love to do.

When we set out to build Mosaic, we talked a lot about our dreams for the firm and the type of partnership we wished to nurture: one founded on intellectual honesty, learning, curiosity, accountability and teamwork. We aim to “do the right thing” by each other, our investors, and the founders we serve. We chose to create a small, collegial partnership, making what can sometimes be complex decisions with limited information, through Socratic conversation. Adding new partners who share these…