For the first twenty years of my career, I (co)founded a series venture-scale software companies, growing each from an idea to a company earning millions in revenue, collectively serving tens of millions of customers.
I now use the knowledge gained from those twenty years to help new entrepreneurs. My goal is to have them increase their odds of success by not repeating the common mistakes that I and my peers once made. I do this in many ways:
The Next Step series of books guides entrepreneurs step-by-step through the process of getting from idea to operational startup, breaking the paradigm of startup investing, and explaining years of lessons teaching entrepreneurship.
The Next Step: podcast shares the lessons from the books plus other advice, anecdotes, and interviews, all in bite-sized audio pieces.
Fledge is a global network of conscious company accelerators, providing intense guidance, mentorship, investment, and support for a small set of entrepreneurs.
Africa Eats is the first spin-off of Fledge, taking a few dozen graduates, all run by native-Africans, all focused on lessening poverty and hunger across the continent, wrapping them in a holding company to provide more even support than than the accelerator.
If all you need is a bit of pitch coaching, I can help with that, on my Patreon. 1-on-1, slide-by-slide pitch coaching or story telling.
Answering questions from entrepreneurs on Quora.
Plus in these various efforts, I do my best to uncover hidden assumptions, break investment paradigms, and seek solutions to income/wealth inequality.
And despite now writing checks to entrepreneurs, I still consider myself first and foremost an entrepreneur, and as such every so often I simply have to create something new. One is investorflow.org, an online network gathering together all the world’s impact investors.
Another is the philanthropic investing service at Realize Impact, a 501c3 public charity that I helped create. This new service lets any philanthropist turn a donation into an impact investment.
Hope something from this long list is of help to you.
Compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) is a very common metric when looking at how fast a startup is growing. Unfortunately neither Excel nor Google has a formula named CAGR. Instead, you need to use the RRI function. When you do this, there is one pitfall to avoid. There are three parameters to RRI. The first is the number of values. The second is the starting value. The third is the ending value...
I teach the important skill of Seeing the Future to both entrepreneurs and investors, but before stumbling on this conversation, I had never before seen this framework of success in startups based on “the long term view”. By necessity, founders are rooted in the “here and now” mental framework required for launching a new startup. But great founders do something different at the same...
The biggest reason startups fail is that they run out of money. No money, no employees, no vendors, no way to serve customers, game over. Pretty obvious, but there are many different ways that startups can run out of money, and not all seem like failure: No customers The most obvious path to running out of money is lack of customers. This is the classic path we talk about a lot in...
One, and only one of my blog posts is viewed every day. Seven days per week. I’ve never figured out why. It’s viewed more than the home page, by almost a factor of two. Here are my most popular blog posts in 2021, as measured by page views. #1 – Selling the first telephoneHow do you sell one telephone, as one telephone alone has no value. #2 – How many entrepreneurs are...
