Back in March 2020, when the first lockdowns hit, The Hammer and the Dance was published on Medium predicting the future of the pandemic. This is a great piece of analysis. Unfortunately, like my predictions written way back then, this author had an assumption that proved false. Specifically, that people would prioritize life. That people would behave so that the fewest number of people would die...
Some entrepreneurs stand out, clearly destined to turn their vision in reality. Some entrepreneurs succeed despite the myriad of unjust hurdles of world puts in front of them. Hurdles like being born a women. A black woman. In Africa. In one of the many countries no one outside that country cares about. Start off any entrepreneur in those circumstances and 99 out of 100 will end up no better off...
A decade ago The Business Model Canvas made assumptions about business models visible. Today The Ownership Model Canvas does the same for ownership and governance. Unsurprisingly it is Start.coop that brings this tool to the world. Start.coop is the world’s first business accelerator focused on scalable cooperative companies. They have from the start questioned the common ways of doing...
Last week there was a flurry of articles citing MIT’s 1972 study on social collapse. The key graph from the study repeated by the articles is: What those lazy journalists didn’t tell you is that there were four scenarios predicted in the study In two, the model predicts a collapse in industrial production and food, a giant famine, and a drop in population. In the third model, some yet...
Zebra’s may fix what Unicorns break, but that hasn’t stopped the investing world from their focus on hunting unicorns. Maybe a little in the impact investing space, but there the world of young companies is split into “startups” and “SMEs” with the latter still looked upon as potential unicorns and the latter often derided as unworthy of investment. Rather than...
Last month I wrote: There are funds that waste the time of startups never actually writing checks. I won’t call them out publicly by name, but one prominent institutional lender just wasted 10 months of time of one my fledglings, and I’m sure they are sitting around as upset with us as we are of them. I thought that was the end of the story. 10 months of conversations and due diligence, two...
I found the following infographic on Twitter, and this should help the hundreds of thousands of first time entrepreneurs better understand how their 100% turns into what looks like a tiny 17.6% and yet is how some of them will someday end up millionaires. 100% of an idea is worth $050% of an idea-stage company is still worth $037% of a fundable company is worth something. Not much, but not $0.31%...
Neither the political nor business news is covering what may be the pivotal story of the 21st Century. The fundamental change in behavior of the Federal Reserve Bank since the Panic of 2007. That sounds like a dry topic, and I assure you it is. The driest and most dismal corner of economics, itself known as the “dismal science“. But nonetheless something that may change the course of...
I’m ready for the pandemic to be over… just like you are… just like we all are. I survived this disease fifteen months ago. I’m ready to get back to normal life. So clearly is everyone else, but if there is one lesson to learn from this pandemic, it is that very few people understand when the right timing is for removing lockdowns, taking off masks, and calling the...
The flipside to “unfundable” companies are funds that waste the time of startups never actually writing checks. I won’t call them out publicly by name, but one prominent institutional lender just wasted 10 months of time of one my fledglings, and I’m sure they are sitting around as upset with us as we are of them. First and foremost, investors, if it takes you more than...
