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...
Imagine I gave you pasta, marshmallows, tape, and some string, and told you to build the tallest tower possible in 45 minutes. As a business leader, how would you do? Certainly better than a 5-year-old, right? But when researchers actually tried this experiment, pitting kindergartners against CEOs, lawyers, and MBA students, it was the kids that came out on top, building towers averaging 26...
I’m back from 12 days in Kenya. That included two days speaking at Sankalp Africa, two days facilitating conversations with the bizi of Africa Eats, and three days driving across Kenya visiting a different company in a different city each day. I’ll save you the long drives, bumpy roads, odd hotel rooms, along with the very long flights and instead give you three highly edited video...
If you read this blog, you know I love to find hidden assumptions that people don’t even notice are assumptions. This time it is one of my own assumptions, and one that I suspect the vast majority of people share. TL;DR: nuclear power plants are NOT controlled nuclear bombs. When a nuclear power station is making power, the term used is that the reactor has gone “critical”...
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...
Over the years I’ve asked many smart people why, after the historic public market crash of 1929 did the U.S. Government then pass the Securities Act of 1933, which disallows the sale of shares in private companies to every American? Not surprisingly, given the hows and whys of laws written before not only the Internet but also before radio are mostly lost to history. But now we have a new...
There are dozen automobile companies. Dozens of airlines. Over a thousand banks. Hundreds of venture capital funds and thousands of mutual funds. There are even two stock markets in the US, and the old rivalries of Coca Cola vs. Pepsi, Visa vs. Mastercard, and Mac vs. PC. But there is just one Berkshire Hathaway. Why? Why after sixty years of near-continuous success is there not just a distant...
Over the New Year’s break, I had a blast watching JetLag: The Game with my daughter. We binged all of Tag Across Europe as well as the Tom Scott Plus bonus video (UPDATE: and a week into the new year we subscribed to Nebula and watched the prototype season too, Crime Spree). Scroll down to watch on YouTube. While three days training across Europe looks like fun, it’s a bit much in...
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...
“The Missing Middle” is what we call the gap in finance the majority of entrepreneurs face in getting from a viable prototype or early customers to a full-scale proven business. In Part 1, Luni explains who he is, and how he came to fill in this otherwise missing middle. In Part 2, Luni jumps back to the history of venture capital to explain the pervasive paradigm that leads to...
