Peter Cochrane is a respected futurologist, columnist, former BT CTO and serial entrepreneur, known for creating 13 companies including ebookers.com - away from his day job. Now he devotes most of his time to travelling around the world, helping get new companies off the ground. His views on issues such as broadband and peer-to-peer have made him one of the highest profile business and technology commentators around.

What three words sum-up the start-up scene two years ago?
Over-hyped, over-exposed and over-funded.

How about now?
Under-funded, overly pessimistic, unadventurous

Setting up a company today, say why you'd choose the UK as its base - if indeed you'd choose the UK.
There are several things reasons for picking a location. One is a capable workforce and second is technology availability. Another is an advantageous operating regime. On several of these counts we look more attractive than mainland Europe. Taxation is better, our irreverence and rebellion against the status quo is better than the Americans'. What is crippling about the UK is that we can't travel and we have no availability of broadband. I will forecast for you that companies will soon be leaving the City of London because it's too tough and it's too expensive and you can't get in and out of the city and get in and out of the UK.

What deal (any deal) will you admit to having been most jealous of?
Hotmail being sold to Microsoft.

What was the craziest, most height-of-dot-com-bubble business plan you came across?
myhomekey.com, funded by Utilities, ex Enron people. Now the company has closed doors after spending millions. Alternatively, the bloke that bought up all the failing pet food websites before someone told him that Tesco Online's biggest volume product by weight was... pet food.

Who do you consider the successful dot-coms, if it isn't too early to say?
ebookers. I started ebookers and it is a phenomenally successful company. Lastminute.com has been quite successful. Amazon I think has been brilliant and is one of my favourites. They realised that people would put time and convenience above cost. They ran into difficulties with Fedex so they built their own distribution infrastructure. My all time favourite would be any of the peer-to-peer sites such as Napster. It was a roaring success and it was destroyed by the old economy.