The sombre tones of Chopin’s funeral march is the soundscape to the gathering scores of people, some in suits, most in jeans and trainers, in a room on the fringes of the City of London. At the front, a tall wiry man in a dog-collar speaks to the assembled crowd. “Dearly beloved, we are here today … to show our sympathy and to give our comfort to those who feel the loss most and for ourselves to meditate on the brevity of life.”
“Vicar” Adam Hawley holds up a copy of the “good book”, Eric Ries’s The Lean Start-up. He reads aloud to the congregation: “When we fail, as so many of us do, we have a ready-made excuse: we didn’t have the right stuff. We weren’t visionary enough or weren’t in the right place at the right time.” The reading continues: “After more than 10 years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most.”
So begins the Start-up Funeral, a gathering of start-up employees and would-be entrepreneurs, here at TechHub, the co-workspace and community of tech entrepreneurs, on Google’s Old Street campus. Overseeing the evening’s proceedings is not a real vicar but TechHub’s director of global projects. Two entrepreneurs — Sophie Newman-Sanders and Amit Rai — are here to discuss the deaths of their respective ventures, to be picked over by the assembled crowd in a kind of postmortem.