Welcome to

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:

Books

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.

Podcast

The Next Step: podcast shares the lessons from the books plus other advice, anecdotes, and interviews, all in bite-sized audio pieces.

Accelerator & Investments

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 an investment holding company focused on lowering hunger and poverty in Africa through for-profit solutions. The first spin-off of Fledge, it builds upon the work of a few dozen Fledge alumni who are building the food/ag supply chain across Africa.

More

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.

Latest blog posts

AI is a (misnamed) tool

AI is a tool. A misnamed tool at that, as the AI in the news these days is a complex web of statistics and matrix multiplication that resembles human intelligence, but which is far from actually intelligent. They are big, innovative, step-function-changing tools, like the printing press vs. hand copied books, like the typewriter vs. hand copied letters, like word processors vs. hand typed...

The IRS decided Berkshire Hathaway’s dividend policy

The more I dig into the history of Berkshire Hathaway, the more it looks like Warren Buffett’s strategy is opportunism vs. innovation. For example, the reason Buffett operates one holding company instead of three was a run in with the SEC, as I explained in an earlier post. The reason he runs Berkshire Hathway instead of just owning it through Buffett Partnerships LLC is an even earlier...

Developed, Developing, and other outdated terminology

Hans Rosling was an impressive public speaker, with not just an ability to distill complex topics into easy to understand stories, but to do so with a flair of showmanship. One of the many lessons in those stories was the fact that the world is no longer divided into “developed” and “developing” economies, but is instead is now a world with a continuum of incomes. What...

Logistics ain’t sexy, like tech

It’s been over a decade since I was part of the venture-backed tech industry. The only thing I miss about it is the massive amount of attention it receives, and from that, the orders of magnitude more capital that flows to tech startups vs. any other sector. Meanwhile, there is nothing like a decade of decompression and deprogramming to get a better view of the realities of the whole tech...

Books

The Next StepThe Next StepThe Next StepThe Next Step The Next StepThe Next StepThe Next StepThe Next Step

Podcast

Fledge

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