If you had told me 10 or 20 years ago that I was going to be an entrepreneur and CEO, running a company with 20 employees, I really don’t think I would have believed you. I’ve been a journalist all of my life. I love being a journalist and I really thought that’s what I would do until the end – I joked that I’d go out of the newsroom feet first. But the thing about growing older is that what you want out of life changes.
Thirty-three years is a really long run in journalism. I had a career that exceeded my dreams in every way: reporting from more than 40 countries. I covered many of the biggest stories of our time and I reported on Latin America for ten years. I witnessed real horror as a war correspondent in Iraq and in Libya and elsewhere. I am still haunted by images of the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. But there were many moments that were simply thrilling: documentaries on penguins in Patagonia and environmental issues in the Galapagos.
As the shift to the digital banking grows, financial institutions are facing new challenges.
At HealthUnlocked, whilst we do not focus on people’s genes in the same way Genetics Sciences do, we are building information systems that effectively describe people’s relationships with their health, both as individual and collectives.
I arrived to London 17 years ago, first to study, then to get some work experience only to wake up one morning about 10 years ago realising that this is my home and I don’t want to ever live anywhere else. My love, gratitude and respect for this city is immense. It’s openness, diversity and cultural energy made it the most vibrant city in the world and a magnet for the brightest and best. Now, I’ve always considered myself a radical optimist but I have to admit that recent developments in the UK really put my radical optimism for a test. To say that London’s status is not threatened is at best optimistic but this feels to me more like sheer arrogance and my view is that this arrogance of intellect, lack of empathy and frivolous self-indulgence threaten London’s status more than anything else.
The BorrowMyDoggy idea was developed in July 2012 after I spent the day taking care of a neighbour’s dog, Aston. I realised that lots of dog owners could use a helping paw looking after their dog, and that there are thousands of people who would love to take care of a dog for free, simply because they love them.
