I’m not the only one this week looking back 30 years at failed tech gadgets. Today in my news feed was a post on ars technia, Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on. Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a...
This year I’m celebrating 30 years as an entrepreneur, and with that round number reminiscing more than usual about three decades of learnings. My personal journey into startups began a year earlier, in February of 1991, while still a senior in college at Carnegie Mellon. That month’s issue of BYTE magazine focused on the future of laptops, with a series of articles talking not just...
Over at Africa Eats we typically tout growth based on aggregate revenues. Growing from under $1 million to over $16.8 million in seven years is worthy of touting (see below). But this week I started looking at it another way, and that is even more interesting. This week the question came up… how many of the companies are small, medium, and large, and how has that changed over the past few...
Pitch decks need to be compelling, in as few slides as possible. Pitch decks need to suck the reader into the story, only letting go after the ask. Thus pitch decks need to be storytelling, not essays about the startup. The trouble is, schools don’t teach story telling, they teach essays. The other trouble is, investors see thousands of pitch decks, creating an expectation for how those...
While the news is full of stories of the transition to electric cars, soon to be added into that transition is camper vans, as that is now just possible too, and you don’t even need to buy one. The challenge is that camper vans are much heavier than cars, less aerodynamic, and thus need more power to move about. That, plus campers are intended to go out into the wild, away from civilization...
What is money? It’s a simple question to ask but the answer is complicated. I know, as I’ve read and blogged about Wealth, Capital, Debt, Lords, Americana, and America’s Bank, amongst a lot of far dryer, far more challenging economic history books. Then along came Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, and wow, what a difference...
Growing an economy takes power, especially electricity. One major piece of infrastructure missing in most Sub-Saharan countries is a ubiquitous electric grid. Only South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, and Gabon have 85% or better access to electricity, and while I don’t know first hand what the electric grid is like in all four of those countries I do know that while the Kenyan electric grid is...
Most of the entrepreneurs I work with have yet to raise money from an Angel or investment fund (venture capital or debt or any formal institution). It is daunting to sit (face-to-face or online) across the table from an investor, as investors know more about the process of investing than entrepreneurs. Life on the investor side of the table isn’t as easy as entrepreneurs think. The...
You probably don’t send as many international wires as I do, and probably have never thought about how the dollars (or euros, pounds, shillings, etc.) move from your bank to the destination bank. What may surprise you is that the money never leaves. How this works in reality is best described with a so-called “minor” currency, e.g. the Malawi Kwacha. I have a few of these in my...
It sounds like an oxymoron, but it is not uncommon for investors to interview entrepreneurs while at the same time those investors have no money to make investments. This is one reason some funds take months to make investments, as they themselves are fundraising while simultaneously screening and doing due diligence. The reality is that fundraising as time consuming and challenging for fund...
