The world of finance, funding and investment

When I came up against these attitudes, I was neither annoyed nor frustrated. I'd had a long experience of being a pragmatic entrepreneur where broad commercial principles and practicality came way before technical detail. It made eminent sense to me that these financiers should filter out my kind of proposition. They weren't in the business of being experimenters or pioneers, their overriding concern was return on capital investment or a substantial capital gain.

I understood and appreciated their position because in the early 1970's I'd spent some time in the City of London with brokers and professional investment managers. I'd even written an educational course to explain the principles of investment and financial strategy. It wasn't the financiers and funding bodies who were being short sighted – it was me, because I hadn't taken into consideration the practical criteria upon which their investment decision making would be based.

The realisation struck me that I was faced with a classical 'chicken or egg' problem: which comes first, the chicken or the egg? To get these ideas into operation, I'd need capital. To get capital I'd need to get these ideas into operation to illustrate their practical viability.

I decided to put my intelligent agents on hold, while I tried to work out a way round this dilemma.