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 building the food/ag supply chain across Africa to lessen hunger and poverty, wrapped as an investment holding company to provide capital, guidance, and support beyond what is typically done within a business accelerator.
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 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, such as:
The philanthropic investing service at Realize Impact, a 501c3 public charity that I co-founded, which lets any philanthropist turn a donation into an impact investment.
I hope something from this long list is of help to you.
Newer is not better. Older is not better. Better is better. Just because something is old does not mean it is bad (or good). Just because something is new does not mean it is good (or bad). Evaluate each proposal on its own merits. – Unknown (internet)
@mattschnuk on Twitter shared an anecdote on teamwork. It’s a good story, but Matt’s conclusion is wrong in an interesting way The thread goes on to explain an experiment where team of kindergartners, CEOs, lawyers, and MBA students are challenged to build the tallest tower out of pasta, marshmallows, tape, and string, presumably in a reasonably short amount of time. The result is not...
Warren Buffett shares advice to investors every year. One big theme: Stop thinking that there’s a magical secret formula for making tons of money overnight. Or in short. get rich slowly. This is true not only for investors, but also for entrepreneurs. The world celebrates the overnight successes. Groupon. Facebook. Uber. AirBnB. Enron. The world keeps doing that, no matter how many times...
The following video does a great job of quickly summarizing the typical problems with foreign aid… So… if that doesn’t work, what does? For-profit capitalism. That may sound backwards, but it truly does work, when implemented correctly. I’ve seen this first-hand, as this is what I do as my main job. I find overlooked entrepreneurs in Africa whose work alleviates hunger and...
