I had an epiphany yesterday related to chess and entrepreneurship. I figured out why chess makes me so frustrated and why when I picked up chess in the pandemic, my chess rating hit a plateau above average, but no where as high as I expected. The problem is that chess is a game of perfect information. The challenge isn’t in predicting the next few moves. The challenge is in finding the best...
This year I’ve hit a lot of milestones. 10 years since the founding of Fledge. The 10th anniversary (update) to The Next Step. 30 years as an entrepreneur. And this week… 20,000 connections in my spreadsheet of contacts, a.k.a. my CRM. I started this list back in early 2012 when I left “tech”, jumped into the world of mission-driven for-profits, i.e. impact companies and...
It took a month of off-hour research and a long long fall down a very deep rabbit hole of computer history, but (mixing metaphors), today I found the needle in the haystack that dropped me into that hole in the first place. Satisfaction is a wonderful feeling. The question I pondered early last month looked back at the early days of personal computers. The Apple ][, Commodore Pet, BBC Micro and...
Where is your horizon? How far away from home does your daily life take you? How far into the past and future do you think about? I live on an island, and know quite a few people whose daily lives never even reach the beach. On the other end of the spectrum (to mix metaphors), few days go by when I’m not talking on Zoom to someone from Africa, if not also calls in the morning from Europe...
There are two reasons for the incredible amount of money focused on tech companies. First, because of the 10 largest companies on the S&P 500, five are tech companies. Tech has made many investors a lot of money since Apple went public in 1980 and Microsoft in 1986. Second, the core technology powering all that software has sped up by a factor of 30,000 since Apple launched the Apple ][ in...
I was asked last week by the Seattle Angel Conference to explain why investing overseas is not as big a challenge nor as big a risk as most Angels think. TL;DR: it’s very similar to investing locally but with much larger market opportunities and far far far fewer investors and thus far more realistic terms. This is one of the topics often covered by The Angel Accelerator, itself inspired by...
I came across this old BBC footage of Arthur C. Clarke in 1964 predicting life in the coming decades, all the way out to the year 2,000. It is difficult enough to predict what will happen in the future, and far far far more difficult to predict when those predictions will be reality, if ever. What I find more remarkable is Clarke’s accurate prediction of a fully-connected world, with people...
Ten years ago I published my first book, The Next Step. This was inspired by a few life changes, including being asked to teach entrepreneurship to MBA candidates at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Washington, and the imminent launch of Fledge, which at the time was one small business accelerator. This first book covered the process from...
I spent the last week diving into how the Apple ][ worked, down to the level of 6502 microprocessor, systems design, and monitor assembly code, all trying to understand what Steve Wozniak (Woz) was doing differently than the other designers of that era, and what he would have done even different if he had hindsight from the early 21st Century. First and foremost, what Woz accomplished with the...
Continuing backward in time (from the Newton, General Magic, and PenPoint in the 1990s) to the late 1970s, my nostalgic trip backwards through technology last week dropped me on the Apple ][, and the big question of why the computer industry repeatedly ran out of memory addresses? My first computer was an Apple ][+ around 1983, nearly 40 years ago. After a week diving into how it worked, and...
