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.
The flipside to “unfundable” companies are funds that waste the time of startups never actually writing checks. I won’t call them out publicly by name, but one prominent institutional lender just wasted 10 months of time of one my fledglings, and I’m sure they are sitting around as upset with us as we are of them. First and foremost, investors, if it takes you more than...
This week I taught The Realities of Funding to the entrepreneurs at The Land Accelerator. It’s a depressing topic, as it continues to be true that there are orders of magnitude more good startups than funders. In that talk the word “unfundable” takes a prominent role. This is a word that venture capitalists and many Angels use to describe the 99% of startups that they pass over...
I do a lot of teaching and the latest topic for me is teaching early-stage/Angel investing. As part of that we talk a lot about “norms”, as most of system for investing in startups is wrapped around norms more than logic. I’ll go into why that is some other time. What struck me a few moments ago was an LLC Agreement I was reviewing for an investment. Normally the reasons listed...
One of my lessons in The Angel Accelerator is called “Seeing the Future” and the main theme is the fact that entrepreneurs need to be able to predict what is needed by customers a year or two or three from now. Along the way we talk about how almost no one predicted the pandemic in 2007-2009 when the financial markets nearly collapsed, we talk about flying cars and self-driving cars...
