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 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.
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.
Hi, I’m Luni. I’ve been entrepreneuring for the last 35 years. Software companies for the first 20 years, one at a time. The first funded by my leftover college fund, then a super-Angel. The next four by California-based venture capital funds. Only the first shut down. The acquired. One big win. In 2011, while running my last software company, I stumbled upon Bainbridge Graduate Institute, the...
Have you ever noticed that if something is older than your grandparents, it feels like it has been around forever? So much of modern infrastructure and modern conveniences fall into that pattern. Things we take so much for granted that no one bothers to question where they came from. Especially boring bits of infrastructure, like buses. The Tim Traveler has this answer, and hundreds more videos...
For institutions whose ages are measured in centuries, the day-to-day inner workings of the stock exchanges are amazingly undocumented. I’ve asked numerous traders and others in the capital markets, and they all tell me they learned those details “on the job” from their peers. Almost a year ago I found The Work of the Stock Exchange, which did document quite a bit of the...
Back in 2019 I posted What is Money?, and it included a link to Perry Merhling’s course on Coursera. I had originally found his lectures on YouTube, which were at some point taken down. Today I found them, edited into two 6-hour pieces:
I found these from today’s’ post on substack, The Hierarchy of Money. If you like my writing, subscribe to that feed.
