There are lessons to be learned about entrepreneurship in unlikely places, including on the baseball field. Or at least in books about how to put together a winning baseball team, like Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. The lesson is simple, your KPIs matter. The What if? asked in Moneyball was “What is the goal of a baseball team, and how can a team best achieve that goal?” The agreed upon goal is to win...
You have a decision to make. If you have seconds to decide, you go with your gut. If you have minutes, you might take that minute to weigh Plan A with Plan B. If you have weeks you might create a pro-con list to help decide between those two – or even three – options. If you have months, you might take the time to brainstorm for some out-of-the-box options. What most people overlook is that there...
A few months ago I was interviewed on a podcast where the key question was “What is your superpower?” Sounds innocuous and simple, but it was one of those moments to reflect on life and not just provide a truthful answer, but something interesting and thought provoking. My answer was “If only”. What if _____? I’ve been an entrepreneur for over thirty years, founding or co-founding 10 companies. I...
Back in the dot-com bubble, my second-ever startup filed the paperwork to go public, but the NASDAQ topped off before we were able to complete that process. It’s long been a life goal to be part of a company to finish that process. That goal was not only achieved today, but by Africa Eats, my eighth startup. I’m now CEO of a public company. 🙂 Africa Eats is an investment company...
George Doriot (dor-ee-oh) was the key to modern venture capital and most of the rest of the early history of the venture capital industry is not documented. This is part 3 of a series. The (Lost) History of Venture Capital Venture Capital Took Decades to be Significant Arthur Rock helped invent Venture Capital The connection is that Arthur Rock was a student of Doriot, as was Thomas Davis. After...
There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...
The GDP per capita metric is helpful to gauge the level of economic development within a region, but misleading in that the metric gets skewed by extraction-based industries like mining and oil (which is why Botswana, Namibia, and Gabon) are higher than their neighboring countries). Visual Capitalist has published a map of the per-capital GDPs of most of the African nations (in most cases rounded...
I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...
The amazing Berkshire Hathaway set two new huge milestones this week: (i) The stock price of the BRKA shares are now more than $700,000 each, up from $7.50 when Warren Buffett bought his first share in December 1962. And with that (ii) the market cap of the company now exceeds $1 trillion. Quite amazing unto itself, but even more amazing when you look at the other trillion dollar companies of the...
