Kicking off the main stage was Aon’s global president Eric Andersen. In her introduction, Future Human curator Ann O’Dea explained that she flew out to New York to sit down with Andersen to discuss the future of leadership, saying: “Here’s one we made earlier.”

Throughout the fireside chat, Andersen talked about what leaders need to think about as we move into what we have come to know as the new normal. “How you lead the people…starts with the right culture,” he said.

Andersen was followed by Prof Catherine Welsh, chair of strategic management of Trinity Business School. She shared really valuable insights for start-ups and entrepreneurs around how they can mitigate risk as they scale.

She called out Atlassian in particular, a software company that de-risked by prioritising product over sales and marketing and became known by word of mouth. While she did talk about the risks that start-ups can face, she did end on a positive note, simply saying: “I’ll end on the word opportunities.”

The audience was then treated to a fireside chat between SiliconRepublic.com editor Elaine Burke and Enterprise Ireland’s Jenny Melia, who manages the technology services team.

Melia discussed the start-up ecosystem as well as sharing more wisdom for any leaders, entrepreneurs and budding start-ups. “When start-ups are formulating their idea, it’s important to build it for an international audience, not just an Irish audience,” she said.

‘If you don’t bake in inclusive behaviour at the early stages, it is much harder to do it later’
^{– SHARON VOSMEK}

The event then shifted focus towards accessibility and healthcare, starting with a fireside chat between Burke, Trevor Vaugh and Keith Davey.

Vaugh is the principal investigator at the Maynooth University Innovation Lab, also known from RTE’s the Big Life Fix, and Davey is the co-founder and CEO of Marino Software.

Together, they are the inventors behind the software that has given Charlie Bird back his voice. The audience enjoyed a fascinating discussion about voice banking technology and the benefits it can bring to those with motor neuron disease.

As part of the discussion, the audience also got to see an exclusive clip from an upcoming documentary about Bird and technology, which will air on RTÉ on 13 June.

While the audience was already on a high from that fascinating conversation, they were then introduced to Jack Kavanagh, a disability advocate who suffered a spinal cord injury in a swimming accident.

The entire room was captivated as Kavanagh shared his story of how he “went from being a person to being a patient” and how that experience completely reshaped his mindset and how he viewed health in our society.

He closed his discussion by talking about the negativity bias we all have and how it’s important to change that mindset by bringing positivity, gratitude and compassion into our lives.

Next up was Alice Pannier, who leads the geopolitics of technology programme at the French institute of international relations, Ifri. Pannier gave a intriguing and timely talk about how current issues within the geopolitical system can effect the tech world and vice versa.

To close off the main stage, Astia Fund CEO and managing partner Sharon Vosmek dialled in to give an honest insight into the problems with inclusivity. “If you don’t bake in inclusive behaviour at the early stages, it is much harder to do it later,” she said.

After the main stage closed, attendees were treated to a brand-new experience with masterclasses, which were available for both online and in-person attendees.

Classes ranged from disaster forecasting in a changing climate, mitigating the risks of trade secret threat and the deployment of robotics in healthcare – which featuring Mylo, a monitoring companion robot for vulnerable people.

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Born in New York as a spin out of another software company, Fog Creek Software (now known as Glitch) in 2011, Trello was acquired by Australian software player Atlassian in 2017. These days it co-exists alongside that company’s tools such as Jira and Confluence.

Trello’s layout is user-friendly and designed to be visually appealing. It follows a Kanban layout like Jira and other productivity and collaboration software tools such as Kanbanize, Kanboard, Kanban Tool and Wrike.

Kanban boards typically feature a series of vertical columns underneath various headings. Tasks are added to individual cards and grouped together under the headings. They can be swapped and moved from one column or heading to the next depending on completion status.

Trello’s free plan lets users have unlimited personal boards (viewable by a single person) and 10 free team boards. It also offers unlimited cards, unlimited lists, 10MB per file attachment on task cards, and one Power-Up (what Trello calls its third-party integrations and extensions) per board.

Its three paid plans allow unlimited boards and other features such as increased storage and help, depending on which plan you opt for.

For the purposes of this piece, we will focus on the features the free plan offers and how beginners can get the best out of them.

How to use Trello

First of all, it’s important to bear in mind that if you are using Trello for work and for personal projects you should try and keep those separate, so your holiday plans don’t get mixed up with your work.

For team boards, each member of the board receives their own individual email for sending information to Trello. They can add emails to a designated board to create cards. The subject line of the email becomes the title of the card while the body of the email can be viewed once you click into the card for the ‘Details’ view. Email attachments and images are also included and links and other info can be added by clicking ‘edit description’.

Cards can also be added manually by users and users can join a card to claim it and show their colleagues what they are working on. Due dates showing time-stamps can also be added.

Trello board example. Image: Trello

Depending on the status of a particular task, cards can be moved between the vertical columns eg from “In progress” to “Done”. How you choose to name the columns is up to you, and you can have as many columns as you need.

Labels can also be added in different colours to help distinguish between task types. For example, a red label can be added for priority, or a blue label can be added for a task that is related to a social media update.

Trello’s labels feature. GIF: Trello

Once you have completed a task you can tick it off as done. Cards can be archived or deleted (which means they cannot be retrieved). Archiving a card means it disappears from the main board. However, if you type a keyword into the search bar at the top right-hand side of the board you can retrieve all your archived material that corresponds with that word.

Right beside the search bar, on the extreme right-hand side of the screen, you can see your Trello notifications panel, which looks like a bell. The bell turns red when you have notifications. You will receive a notification, for instance, when a colleague comments on a card that you have joined or if someone mentions your name in a comment.

You can mark the notification as read or unread to come back to later, depending on what is priority. You can then select “Filter By Unread” to come back to those cards earmarked for later.

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Musk made the statement via Twitter and linked to a Reuters article from 2 May, when Twitter made the estimate on the number of spam accounts on its site during the first quarter of 2022.

In its first quarter earnings report released last month, Twitter said it performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimated that the “average of false or spam accounts” during the first quarter represented fewer than 5pc of its 229m monetisable daily active users.

“In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated,” Twitter said on 28 April.

Musk said that the deal is on hold as he wants to see the company’s calculations that confirm this percentage.

Following the statement, Twitter shares fell by nearly 18pc in pre-market trading, their lowest since Musk first shared his plans to takeover the company in early April, Reuters reported.

The share hit is another blow for Twitter, as it was recently revealed that the company has paused most hiring and is reviewing all existing job offers to determine whether any “should be pulled back”.

In a company-wide memo seen by Reuters, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal attributed the decision to pause hiring to Twitter not being able to meet previous growth targets.

Agrawal’s memo also told staff of the departure of two of the company’s senior staff members.

Kayvon Beykpour, general manager of the consumer product division, and revenue product lead Bruce Falck, both tweeted that leaving Twitter was not their own decision.

Musk and Twitter

Since the start of April, a lot has ensued between Musk and Twitter. First, he became one of the company’s biggest stakeholders, and there were plans to have him installed on the company’s board.

Days after it was revealed that Musk would not become a Twitter board member after all, he offered to buy the company and take it off the stock market.

“Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it,” he wrote in a letter at the time addressed to board chair Bret Taylor. He added that he believes in Twitter as a platform for “free speech” and said it “needs to be transformed as a private company”.

Musk has been critical of Twitter in recent months. At the end of March, he asked his more than 80m followers in a tweet whether the platform “rigorously adheres” to the principle of free speech.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de-facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” he added in a follow-up tweet. “What should be done?”

He then asked followers whether a new social media platform was needed, and said he was giving “serious thought” to building one.

These tweets came after Musk had started building up a stake in Twitter – a move that has also come under the microscope. Last month, a Twitter shareholder sued Musk for failing to promptly disclose that he had bought a significant stake in the company.

Musk had been acquiring shares since January and acquired 5pc by 14 March, meaning he needed to notify the SEC by 24 March under the US agency’s rules. However, the lawsuit document stated that Musk continued to amass shares before notifying the SEC.

The deal includes a clause whereby if either party ends up terminating the agreement, they have to pay the other a $1bn fee. The filing also states that if the deal isn’t closed by 24 October, both sides could walk away without a takeover.

Elon Musk in 2018. Image: Daniel Oberhaus via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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Today (13 May), the company announced that it has secured €1.5m in a funding round led by Delta Partners, with backing by Movidius co-founder Sean Mitchell, Amici Ventures and Vincent Nolan, who is a former CIO for some of Ireland’s biggest retailers.

The start-up also revealed that it is rebranding to a new name, VisionR.

VisionR’s founders said the funding boost would be used to expand its development team and support its growth in Europe.

The company aims to give clients in the offline retail industry online insights. It works with brick-and-mortar retailers in the grocery, convenience and fashion spaces, with customers including Dulux Paints and BWG Foods.

It has also partnered with Spar International, which will roll out the company’s tech across its 13,500 stores in 48 countries.

VisionR uses a next-generation AI plug-in tool called The Scout to take data straight from a retailer’s shop floor so physical transactions and customer interactions can be logged and converted into online data that retailers can access.

“It’s focused on retailers,” co-founder Shane O’Sullivan explained to the Irish Times. “Retailers everywhere are used to getting rich datasets online from e-commerce, but those datasets don’t translate to their offline stores.

“The online stores can optimise layout using this data, they can reduced abandoned baskets, they can personalise shopping – all the stuff that maximises revenues. But for physical stores, the same optimisations can’t be done because that same data set has never existed when it comes to the physical store.”

The company uses computer vision and machine learning, and can capture customer data without using facial recognition. It uses facial detection instead so as not impinge on customer privacy, and the tech was developed in 2017 as GDPR came into law.

VisionR previously raised €550,000 in 2020 and has been backed by Enterprise Ireland.

The start-up has recently moved into new offices in Merrion Row in Dublin, which it hopes will give it room to expand further in the coming years.

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“One of my comments when I was walking around, in terms of start-ups located there, they can only go down from there. In terms of location, you would absolutely have location envy walking around it,” she told the audience at Future Human today (13 May).

The RDI Hub in Kerry is one of many spaces across Ireland that support the country’s thriving tech start-up ecosystem. Also playing a big role in this ecosystem’s development is Enterprise Ireland.

Melia is technology and services division manager at Enterprise Ireland and has previously worked with its high-potential start-up team. Having been with the organisation for more than a quarter of a century, she has seen the community change and evolve like few others.

“We’re very much about growing the indigenous client base and then building the footprint of that client base in international markets across the world. It’s also about creating jobs in Ireland, across all the regions.”

Beyond Dublin

Speaking of regions, Melia much prefers a balanced regional focus over a Dublin-centric development of the community.

The west of Ireland, for instance, is home to a buzzing medtech scene with both established, multinational players as well as local start-ups working side-by-side in an innovation cluster.

“I think it’s fair to say that over the years some of [the clustering] has been organic. If you look at the medtech cluster in the west, a lot of it was driven by the companies themselves,” Melia told the Future Human audience.

And driving that focus around Galway has been the region’s abundance of talent as well as that clustering of SMEs adjacent to multinationals – driving collaboration on innovation across the ecosystem.

In all, Enterprise Ireland has nine regional plans in place at the moment, with a strategic investment of around $180m going through the Regional Enterprise Development Fund.

“It’s important for us that all the local stakeholders are involved at both the public and private level. It’s very much driven then by local business leaders.”

Ireland and beyond

When asked about successful businesses that give back to the ecosystem that churned them out, Melia thinks Ireland is a specifically good example.

“I think Irish entrepreneurs are very good at that, in my experience with Enterprise Ireland for 20 years, in terms of people throwing the ladder down,” she said. “But it’s not all one-way traffic. The more established companies are learning from the younger companies as well.”

And the strength of this ecosystem has come a long way in Melia’s two-decade career, in terms of the funding and non-financial supports now available to Irish business in their early stages.

“We need to have funds on the scale that we see in other countries and to give founders and management teams a fair valuation.”

‘If you can see it, you can be it’

But in terms of start-ups choosing Ireland as their destination, Melia thinks we have a big advantage because of the money coming in from abroad.

“There’s a lot of competition around Europe to attract mobile start-ups, and we’re absolutely at the table,” she said. “And one of the biggest strengths of the Irish ecosystem is the size of the multinational and FDI footprint.”

This has made Ireland very different from the country it was when big players such as Stripe and Intercom first started off, she said responding to a question about how Irish start-ups are now not just acquirees but also acquirers.

“The ambition levels are definitely there, and companies tell us about accessible role models,” she said, citing Irish tech unicorns such as Wayflyer and LetsGetChecked.

“They can see the Intercoms, they can see the Stripes, and there is that concept of ‘if you can see it, you can be it.’”

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A version of this article was originally published by The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)

On paper, networking is a relatively simple task. Mingle with like-minded professionals while sipping wine and you greatly increase your chances of landing a coveted role or building your dream career.

Pre-Covid, gearing up for a networking event, you would probably have walked into a venue thinking, “Smile. Remember your elevator pitch. If all else fails, talk about the weather.”

Now though, many of us are faced with a slightly different predicament: how to network while working remotely. Operating out of makeshift home offices, with children demanding tea or pets stepping on keyboards, we have collectively become BBC Dad, AKA Robert Kelly. The Busan-based political scientist famously went viral in 2017 when his children interrupted a live interview he was doing on television, and his wife had to scramble to get them out of his office.

As tricky a proposition as it might be to meet people in such circumstances, research shows that rising to the challenge is worth it. According to one online survey, networking accounts for up to 85pc of all filled vacancies. It can also lead to substantial pay rises, as evidenced by the recent story of how one employee secured a £24,000 pay rise solely through networking.

My research shows that in early 2022, 44pc of young people used social media to look for career information – up from only 19pc a decade ago – and 42pc consulted their social networks when looking to make a career decision. Online networking, even before the pandemic, was a crucial tool for career development.

How to network online

Remote working has of course seen video-conferencing become the norm. Online networking events are now routinely held on platforms including Eventbrite, Slack, Yammer and Instagram Live.

So first, do your research: identify the organisations, associations and causes of most interest to you. Find the blogs and forums that are relevant to your field of work, and sign up to as many mailing lists as you can efficiently handle. Find your people and follow them on social media.

The goal of this first step is to increase the volume of information that you receive passively. This creates what is known as environmental affordance: the possibility for action afforded to you by your environment. The more regular updates about relevant events that you receive, the more likely you are to attend them.

Second, be strategic. In a world where conference dinners and impromptu water cooler conversations have been replaced by Zoom catch-ups, things aren’t as spontaneous as they were before. Scheduling is key.

Create a personal networking plan. Decide how much time you are going to devote to online networking and note down your goals: how many people you want to speak to; which companies you want to find out more about; which specific people you need to seek out to discuss specific topics. Make sure to schedule in time to maintain your online presence. And opt for a variety of engagements such as webinars, online recruitment fairs, one-to-one Zoom meetings, and online conferences.

Third, research shows that the most prolific networkers possess proactive personality traits, and are likely to score high on extroversion – a trait associated with being outgoing and seeking out new experiences – in personality tests. That does not mean, however, that you have to be an extrovert to succeed at networking. You just need to be proactive: proactive behaviour is the strongest predictor of networking success.

If there is a specific person or a group of professionals that you would like to build a relationship with, get in touch with them directly. Email them, message them on Twitter, set up a Zoom meeting, or research the online networking mixers they might take part in.

Why networking is critical to success

Networking underpins two key aspects of professional advancement: employability and self-directed career development.

The first, employability, pertains to what economists refer to as the human capital of a potential employee: their external marketability and the relative value of their educational background, technical skills and soft skills – such as communication, time management and creativity – on the job market. Networking makes your human capital readily apparent to employers and prompts hiring decisions.

Self-directed career development, meanwhile, is an ongoing personal development project, whereby you seek career information and take action towards long-term career goals. Here, networking is a crucial means for obtaining career information. This both helps you raise your personal aspirations and figure out whether a particular job, company, or sector is right for you. The first-hand experiences of other people working in a given profession can be helpful in gauging whether you too would be a good fit.

Networking also helps to build relationships with mentors and role models, and gives access to peer support communities and professional groups. This is about more than just securing a job. It creates a sense of belonging and of professional identity, and in doing so develops what social scientists term ‘social capital’: shared norms, values and beliefs in professional communities.

Networking involves a number of skills – approaching others, finding common ground, maintaining relationships – that can be practised and learned. Of these, listening – not talking – is perhaps the most important. Express an interest in other people’s work and ask them questions, and you’ll be well on your way to making meaningful connections that benefit not only you as an individual.

Because they bolster knowledge exchange and collective problem-solving, they benefit your community too.

By Marina Milosheva

Marina Milosheva is a PhD candidate in social informatics at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research focuses on young people’s career decision-making and career information literacy skills.

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Speaking about the future of business, Welch explained the paradoxical nature of the risks that businesses face from internationalisation. While it has become easier for a company to set up a website and go global, it is also riskier than ever to do so.

Welch noted that tech companies in particular have an added set of risks when it comes to expanding, not only because of the volatility that the world is currently facing, but also because “innovation is inherently risky”.

“You don’t know if your technology is actually going to end up doing what you want it to do,” she said. “And even if you solve that problem, you’ve got the next problem – which is, it may work but do customers actually want it? Often that’s something you only work out a little too late.”

In order to adapt, Welch said tech companies have to de-risk. Businesses still have to work towards going global as “we have global markets, technology is global”, but risks have to be taken into account.

How can this be achieved? Welch said “it depends”, drawing chuckles from the crowd when she added, “That’s the classic academic answer, isn’t it?” She explained that it depends on what type of technology a company is trying to bring to market and provided two contrasting examples.

SaaS-style companies

The first company example was represented in a Future Human fireside chat yesterday with Intercom co-founder Des Traynor. Welch said companies in SaaS and software development don’t usually work with groundbreaking technology, instead they offer “novel applications and recombinations of technology that’s already out there”.

She added that this allows companies to start out globally very quickly, with a very optimistic outlook initially, finding customers who are enthusiastic about the new product around the world.

But the problems begin when these companies try to move away from these early adopters, and try to develop an offline presence as well as an online presence.

“That’s when it starts to become very expensive,” Welch said. “Not only that, but you have to invest in this presence often ahead of getting a return. For some companies, this is not going to be a period that they survive, so it’s a real pressure point for companies and getting it right is very difficult.”

In order to de-risk, Welch said these companies need to plan “lean internationalisation”, which is finding cost-effective ways to deliver value when expanding.

Welch gave the example of Australian software company Atlassian, the maker of Jira and Trello, which was able to develop a global reputation without a large sales and marketing team but through the power of “word of mouth”.

“I’m not suggesting you go out and fire your sales and marketing team,” she said. “But what I am suggesting is you need to think very carefully about where you’re going to invest.”

Deep-tech companies

The second example Welch gave were deep-tech companies, which have a different set of risks and pressure points.

“These are companies that are trying to bring to market a product that is based on a scientific breakthrough,” she explained. “So these are companies that are new to the world and their product is new to the world.”

Welch said the biggest issue for these companies is that it can take decades to get something that is a breakthrough innovation to market. The example she gave were vaccine manufacturers.

“These companies, which are now household names, were pretty much on their knees at the time that Covid-19 first hit,” Welch said.

“The rest is history but it just is a reminder to us that this sort of technology, these sort of innovations, take a long time to get to market, if they ever do,” she added.

This often means that the first innovators “are not the ones to reap the rewards” of the new products they’re trying to launch. She added that these companies need investment, people to have faith in the vision and “patience, a lot of it”.

For these companies, the best way to handle these risks is “learn from those who have been there and done that before”.

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The self-confessed optimist was speaking to Future Human’s Ann O’Dea about the future of leadership and all that entails.

Aon has a workforce of around 50,000 people spread out all over the world, as chief people officer Lisa Stevens explained yesterday. Andersen told O’Dea that he felt he had grown closer to his staff over the past few years thanks to seeing their home lives during online meetings.

“You used to work with people for 20 years and know nothing about what their personal life was like. They were just work colleagues. Today, you’re in their kitchen … you see the kids walking around, the dogs.”

Andersen added that this increased intimacy has worked both ways, and that his staff now know more about him and other leaders, too. The “square screen” has also taken away some of the “pomp” and “trappings of success” associated with the traditional office environment.

‘I think there’s the need for business leaders to look at individual colleagues as whole people, understanding what they bring to work’
^{– ERIC ANDERSEN}

“You can look at these individual colleagues more holistically,” he said of hybrid working.

“I think there’s the need for business leaders to look at individual colleagues as whole people, understanding what they bring to work.

“Work is just a part of it. And so, how you lead them, how you manage them, how you train them and develop them … You really have to step back and think about all aspects of them, not just the eight or 10 hours you’ve got them when they’re working.”

People are as important as tech

Andersen described Aon as a “people business” in that it provides advice and services to clients. Therefore, it continues to be important for the company to get its own internal workplace culture right. It is as important as investing in new tech, he said.

“How you actually lead the people who you train and develop starts with having the right culture and ultimately the ability to draw people into our firm who are committed to the way we want to work and the value that we want to bring to clients. That has become the most important part as we step back and think to our strategy for this year in the next three to five years.”

From his point of view, Andersen said the change in leadership culture in general over the past few years is helping him and other leaders deal with pressing problems facing all of us in our working lives. These range from cyber to climate to health and wellbeing.

“When I look at the topics that we are wrestling with, to create that human-centred world, around climate, around cyber, around health and wealth and all the big issues, I feel like our firm is positioned where we can actually make an impact, which ultimately drives confidence and optimism around what we’re doing.”

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Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said in a company-wide memo, seen by Reuters, that the social media giant would pause most hiring and review all existing job offers to determine whether any “should be pulled back”.

Agrawal’s memo also told staff of the departure of two of the company’s senior staff members.

Kayvon Beykpour, general manager of the consumer product division, and Bruce Falck, revenue product lead, both tweeted that leaving Twitter was not their own decision.

Beykpour said yesterday (12 May) that he was leaving the company after seven years.

Interrupting my paternity leave to share some final @twitter-related news: I’m leaving the company after over 7 years.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) May 12, 2022

Falck also thanked his former co-workers for their support during his five-year stint at the company, adding that “building and running these businesses is a team sport”.

He singled out the “unsung heroes” such as the “dedicated IC engineers who seldom see the spotlight or get the recognition they deserve”.

Jay Sullivan will now become head of Beykpour’s former division and will also lead the revenue team temporarily. He had been leading the consumer team while Beykpour was on paternity leave.

In the memo, Agrawal attributed the decision to pause hiring to Twitter not being able to meet previous growth targets. In its most recent earnings, Twitter reported revenue on the lower end of the prediction it made earlier in the year, a figure that fell short of analyst expectations.

“We need to continue to be intentional about our teams, hiring and costs,” Agrawal said in his memo.

The Financial Times reported that Agrawal faced criticism from two of Twitter’s biggest shareholders, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, for a “misalignment between CEO pay and company performance”.

Agrawal may have to defend his $30.4m pay package at the company’s annual meeting later this month, after shareholder advisers recommended voting against his remuneration plan.

The news comes as billionaire Elon Musk is looking to close a $44bn takeover deal. If the deal goes through later this year, Musk will take the social media platform private.

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In a tweet yesterday (12 May), Marcus said that the start-up will “explore, build and extend the capabilities and utility of bitcoin”.

While there’s not much else known about Lightspark at this point, Marcus said that he is now assembling a team “to dive deeper into the Lightning Network”, which is essentially an additional layer of payment protocol over bitcoin that enables faster transactions.

I wanted to share that we are starting a new company called @lightspark to explore, build and extend the capabilities and utility of #Bitcoin. As a first step, we’re actively assembling a team to dive deeper into the Lightning Network. (1/3)

— David Marcus (@davidmarcus) May 12, 2022

Marcus, who was once at the helm of PayPal and most recently led Meta digital wallet Novi, is joined by some former colleagues from in co-founding and leading Lightspark. These include former VP of brand and marketing at Novi, Christina Smedley, and former VP of engineering, James Everingham.

Leading the investment side of things is Silicon Valley-based VC firms Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm – which are both betting big on crypto. Other backers include Thrive Capital, Coatue, Felix Capital, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners and Zeev Ventures.

Bad timing?

Marcus’s return to the crypto scene has been anticipated since he left Meta last November and hinted at starting his own venture.

“While there’s still so much to do right on the heels of launching Novi – and I remain as passionate as ever about the need for change in our payments and financial systems – my entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it,” Marcus tweeted at the time.

However, his timing of launching Lightspark may not be ideal. Cryptocurrencies across the board have plummeted in value this week – with one, Luna, losing roughly 96pc of its value.

But Marcus defended the timing of his launch.

“Downturns are good moments to focus on building and creating value with mission-aligned people. We’re excited to dive into Lightning, learn more and work alongside the community. We’ll share more about our work as we make progress!” he tweeted.

Investors appear optimistic too. Andreessen Horowitz, in an announcement of its investment in Lightspark, hailed Marcus as “nothing short of a legend in the payments and crypto industry”.

“When David spoke to us about Lightspark and the early team he had assembled, several of whom we had tried to hire ourselves, we couldn’t have been more thrilled,” the VC firm said. “This is the sort of team and audacious mission that doesn’t come around often.”

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David Marcus speaking at LeWeb Paris 2013. Image: Adam Tinworth/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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