“Here’s the sum­mary. The mar­ket for seed cap­i­tal is clearly bro­ken. Most indi­vid­ual angels will only do about 1 deal per year, which means their port­fo­lios lose money 40% of the time due to insuf­fi­cient diver­si­fi­ca­tion. Even pre­mier angel groups like the Band of Angels say they only do about 8 deals per year. Our math says you need to do 125 to achieve good diver­si­fi­ca­tion. On the other side of the table, only 14% of entre­pre­neurs who want angel fund­ing will find it. Those that do will spend about 6 months look­ing for money instead of build­ing their businesses.”

“Adver­tis­ers face a bar­rier because in social media, human bonds do not require third-​​party spon­sor­ships. There is no exter­nal con­tent to spon­sor. Data col­lec­tors, who now hope to turn Facebook’s social streams into the Exper­ian of the future, also may hit a wall when human con­nec­tions can no longer be intercepted.”

“There’s only one rule at hack day: build some­thing you can demon­strate at the end of the event (Pow­er­point slides don’t count). Impor­tantly though, our hack days are not restricted to just our devel­op­ment team: any­one from the tech­nol­ogy depart­ment can get involved, and we extend the invi­ta­tion to other parts of the organ­i­sa­tion as well. At the Guardian, this includes journalists.

For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, ser­vices and soft­ware that could be used for hack­ing with­out pro­gram­ming knowl­edge as a pre-​​requisite. I’m now updat­ing that list with rec­om­men­da­tions from else­where. Here’s the list so far:”

“The Empir­i­cal Game Analy­sis Toolkit (EGAT) is a project designed around com­pil­ing var­i­ous game-​​theoretic tools into one com­pre­hen­sive suite.”