About

Who is Peter Hempsall?

I am the CTO of Deloitte Ventures, and lead our Consulting business’s Product Engineering team. I was part of the founding team of Deloitte Ventures back in 2015.

Whilst the writing on this blog reflects my views and not my employers, there is obviously a lot of overlap with my world of work. It may give you an idea of the type of team we are, what we care about and how we work.

Why MoneyBBQ?

This blog mostly focuses on the topics of corporate innovation, technology and product engineering. Over the years, as part of my job, I’ve been pitched a lot of ideas. Or, if we’re being grand, investment opportunities. Sadly not all of these are well thought through and not all of them have a reasonable chance of return on investment.

And yet, inexplicably, lots of very marginal concepts do get funded - either out in the wild (with a boom in seed investing) or within corporate incubators.

To illustrate this point, I created a benchmark pitch: The Money BBQ. The concept is simple: you give me your money, I’ll burn it on a BBQ. If you can’t explain how your concept is going to generate a better return than the Money BBQ, then I’m not interested.

Yes, this is a very low bar.

I also bought a desktop bbq (who knew they were a thing? I wouldn’t actually try and use it on a desktop) and some fake money and set up a grilling station in the office. It became a bit of a talking point.

Consider this to be the innovation equivalent of the brooms strapped to the back of the broom wagon in cycle races.

So why use this as the name of my blog? Well, it’s short and the domain was available.

A collaborative experiment

The posts on this blog are always the result of conversations. Often conversations and arguments that have been repeated and refined over time, with many people. They should therefore be seen as a snapshot of an ongoing discussion. And writing them down and sticking them on the web is not the end of that discussion.

Particularly on technical topics, I welcome discussion and debate. If I can facilitate that, or present multiple viewpoints, then I’ll try to do that. Please see the Contribute page