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.
When the lockdowns began and all meetings, conferences, and training programs moved online, I knew what to expect, as I had purposefully experimented with virtual programs back in 2015. After nearly two years with everything virtual, this week was my first in-person gathering. One that gathered together the founders and managers of the 27+ companies of Africa Eats. One that was a gathering of...
Naming is startup is hard. Harder than naming a baby you’ve yet to meet. Back in 2017 I posted a lesson in how to find a great name. Today (2021), Facebook shows us just how difficult it is to brand a company, especially an established company. Back in 2015, Google demonstrated the same mistakes. Mistake #1 – Naming by Committee No good name has ever been created by committee...
I keep seeing stories about a new lamp that is “powered” by salt water. The claim is that you’ll get 45 days of lighting using nothing more than half a liter of salt water… What I want to know is why none of these journalists ever check with an engineer or physicist or high school science teacher on whether such a claim is possible. If it’s not obvious to you, the...
Over at The Angel Accelerator I’ve been teaching new startup investors the history of venture capital. It’s one of those industries that feels like it’s been around forever, maybe inherited from the Roman or British Empire, but in reality, in its modern form, was created in my grandparents generation, after my parents were born, and wasn’t a mature, robust, big industry...
