If you took all the maize (corn) farms in the world and put them together, they’d not fit on the British Islands. Neither would rice or wheat. This fun YouTube video shows just how much space each crop takes up:
Today I hosted a delegation of 8 Korean college students brought to Seattle for a week by Kickstart Investment, a Korean business incubator. Sounds exotic, but I host a handful of foreign delegations each year from all around the world, often hosted by the U.S. State Department. It’s a fun way to meet entrepreneurs and people who help entrepreneurs without the accompanying jet lag. We...
Entrepreneurs worry about their product, marketing, sales process, recruiting, finances, and operations, but often don’t think twice about designing their corporate culture. Forget about culture, and successful startups soon turn into The Office and Dilbert. There isn’t yet a The Next Step book on how to design a corporate culture, but I do teach the topic in both my MBA...
The Next Step books are available in paperback and Kindle on amazon.com.
The last site visit for Investors Circle in Nairobi was SunCulture, seller of solar-powered pumps and drop-irrigation systems for small farms across Kenya. Speaking of culture, one learning on this trip about East Africa was the blended nature of the populace. Not only are there dozens of tribes within Kenya alone, but added to that are the 100+ year old history of Europeans and Indians living in...
The Next Step books are available in paperback and Kindle on amazon.com.
At the 10th Sankalp Africa Summit in Nairobi, Kenya a panel of investors, adaptation & resilience businesses, and intermediary institutions curated by GIZ and DFC spoke at “The Secret to adaptation investment”. Panel Participants Eric Onchoga (Irrihub) | Martin Kiilu (Growth Africa) | Rebecca Mincy (Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund) | Luni Libes (Africa Eats) | Peter Fry (Kua...
A few weeks ago I asked the internet why there are no copycats of Berkshire Hathaway, despite Warren Buffett telling the world exactly how he and Charlie do what they do. This week, Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders was published, and now that Africa Eats is copying parts of Berkshire Hathaway’s model, I found it more fascinating than usual to both learn as well as compare and...
The big shift I’ve seen in 2020, 2021, and 2022 is that the default mode of business (in impact investing) is meetings on Zoom vs. meetings in-person. The new normal for my workday is spending a few hours talking to people around the world via Zoom, with 99% of those meetings set by Calendly.com. All those people have the option of a phone call, and maybe once per month someone choose a...
This isn’t how I run my businesses, but one mistake most first entrepreneurs make is to not spend any time thinking about the corporate culture of their company. Fail to plan that, and you end up with Dilbert or The Office, with employees who are there for the job, not to build the successful startup. Nike’s Principals Our business is changeWe’re on offense. All the time.Perfect...
