This was also the aim on Dec 5, 2018 at the launch of Hacking Finance No.1: Movement.
An eclectic crowd of investors, entrepreneurs, academics, designers and artists filled a balloon-laden Unit 6, an art gallery in London’s Covent Garden. Guests with backgrounds in art and banking, design and engineering, fashion and real estate, film and many more got a first look at the issue.
Guests included several contributors to the magazine, like Joanne Ooi, who interviewed Hugo Spowers, the founder and chief engineer of independent hydrogen-fueled car company Riversimple, who was also in attendance. Khary Septh, editor-in-chief of The Tenth, who contributed the essay “Jamestown 3.0”, was in town from New York for the event, as were Hacking Finance creative directors Mark Pernice and Elana Schlenker of Out of Office.
Other founders, including Tom Stubbs and Toby Call of the epigenetic testing platform Chronomics and Ed Leon Klinger, whose Flock offers pay-as-you-go insurance for drones, mingled—and yo-yoed!—alongside Alex Mayall, who co-hosts Hacking Finance’s The Shade podcast with Charity Mendhe. Vincent Heilbron, the developer and co-founder of UNOCO raw coconut water, was there, as was Stable founder Richard Counsell, the son of a Somerset farmer, to talk agritech.
Like so many in attendance, Carlota Perez, subject of a profile in Hacking Finance No.1: Movement, is not today, where she once imagined she’d be. Earlier that evening, during a fireside chat with Anthemis founder Sean Park, she had reflected on her origin story. “I just wanted to be a good civil servant,” she’d said, before describing the road that led her to study technological revolutions’ impacts on society. For some, her views stretch the idea of capitalism, Park suggested. But “capitalism is shapeable,” Perez told the group.
The night, like the magazine, was a live display of the surprising colors and shapes that finance can take. With the party still in full swing, Hacking Finance editor Sarah J. Robbins, who profiled Perez for the magazine, listened in as Spowers told Perez about how he imagines the world will embrace the hydrogen car. The key, Perez and Spowers concurred, over the music and the crowd, was to reimagine the whole system.
