Years ago I came across a great explanation of what makes a great entrepreneur. It is someone who is “ruthlessly resourceful”, ignoring the resources at hand but still able to realize their vision. Another trait common to successful entrepreneurs is “pathological persistence”. Not taking “no” for an answer is a consequence of that behavior. Iteration upon...
From 1979… how different will be it be in the office of tomorrow…
… a “text editor” and electronic memos… which will lead to the office workers working from home. A reasonably good prediction of the future… but off by a few decades.
The follow thread popped up on my Twitter feed from Sahil Bloom… my favorites are copied below… A “razor” is a rule of thumb that simplifies decision making.The most powerful razors I’ve found:— Sahil Bloom (@SahilBloom) July 17, 2022 Luck: When choosing between two paths, choose the path that has a larger luck surface area. Your actions put you in a position where luck is more...
I saw this on Twitter… and wonder why none of my English teachers were ever this eloquent? This sentence has five words. Here are five more words.Five-word sentences are fine. But several together becomemonotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing isgetting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record.The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence...
I fell down an 8-bit rabbit hole 45 days ago, looking back at how the computer industry evolved from the Apple ][ in 1997 into the 1980s, up to the first pen computers of 1991. Last week I found the needle hiding in this haystack (mixing metaphors) on why evolution took that path, and now it’s time to put together all the learnings into an alternative history of what might have been, given...
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...
