I teach the important skill of Seeing the Future to both entrepreneurs and investors, but before stumbling on this conversation, I had never before seen this framework of success in startups based on “the long term view”. By necessity, founders are rooted in the “here and now” mental framework required for launching a new startup. But great founders do something different at the same...
The biggest reason startups fail is that they run out of money. No money, no employees, no vendors, no way to serve customers, game over. Pretty obvious, but there are many different ways that startups can run out of money, and not all seem like failure: No customers The most obvious path to running out of money is lack of customers. This is the classic path we talk about a lot in...
One, and only one of my blog posts is viewed every day. Seven days per week. I’ve never figured out why. It’s viewed more than the home page, by almost a factor of two. Here are my most popular blog posts in 2021, as measured by page views. #1 – Selling the first telephoneHow do you sell one telephone, as one telephone alone has no value. #2 – How many entrepreneurs are...
I’ve been on Gmail since it launched back in 2004 and thanks to Google automatically collecting email addresses into Google Contacts, I have over 8,000 contacts in that service. Trouble is, 8,000 entries in my iPhone’s Address Book makes it next to unusable, as very few people I ever email show up. I searched the internet for a tool that would clean up by Google Contacts, deleting all...
Two years into this global pandemic, many misguided people are still comparing Covid-19 to influenza.
1,600 death in a week in 2018 was tragic, but those influenza spikes are barely visible when compared to the tragic scale of Covid-19, and even more so given a simple cloth mask and vaccines that prevent most deaths.
I’m publicly bullish on Africa (1, 2, and 3). I foresee the continent being the next big economic growth story after the Asian Tigers, China, and India. On the path are some major continental-scale efforts, including the potential creation of the East African Federation, a political union of the existing East Africa Community trading group: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and...
I’ve been teaching first time entrepreneurs about the importance of accounting and financial management for the last decade, and frustrated that whole time that most don’t grok the importance until they hit a financial crisis in their own startup. So let’s try something new… and talk about leaky pipes. The model/analogy to think about is a building, with a water tank on...
Last week I wrote about the ancient system of Bills of Exchange and how useful they were for sellers to get paid sooner than 30, 60, or 90 days after the sale. A 21st Century systemic solution to replicate these benefits would be a marketplace that sells and trades Future Dollars (denoted as F$). A future dollar is a promise to deliver a real dollar ($) in a specific number of days. With this...
Most startup investors chase mythical unicorns, ignoring the real, fast-growing elephants. What do I mean by fast-growing? 50%-100% year over year, with an occasional 3x or 5x or 9x growth spurt to kick that off: Above are four such companies, all fledglings, all now part of Africa Eats‘ portfolio. Four companies that earn over $1 million per year, which solve real problems, and with that...
300 YEARS AGO, when the British Empire was still growing, the first wave of global trade was powered not only by the Pound Sterling, but by trades in Bills of Exchange. How did traders from London buy tea in India, porcelain in Hong Kong, or silks in Singapore? They didn’t haul cases of silver and gold in their outbound ships, trading coins for goods. They had to do that when global trade...
