Predicting the coming year is next to impossible. But some predictions of the coming decade and century are easy, obvious, and 99% likely to come true. I’m enjoying an early view into one of those: battery-backed solar. It is dim, drizzly, and chilly in Seattle, the opposite weather of every image you’ve ever seen for solar power. We will literally get less than six hours of daylight...
Sitting in my inbox today was an email whose subject asked “How stupid can one be?” The email seemed to answer the question itself. If interested in supporting me, I appreciate you forwarding this email along to help bypass the censorship of conservative/capitalist reports & opinions. With 100,000 followers on board, my team and I are committed to start changing the narrative in...
The last government antitrust breakup was AT&T back in 1984. It followed the model of Standard Oil back in 1911. Business and technology have changed a lot since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was written and passed 130 years ago, in 1890. It’s time we update what we mean by trust-like behavior and how we remedy those consequences. Note that the breakups of Standard Oil and AT&T were...
Nine months ago this week I was recovering from what seemed to be a mild case of the newly named Covid-19. What have we learned since then, what we’ve failed to learn, and what does the end game of this pandemic hold in store? What we learned Exponential growth is not intuitive. The 70 national daily cases looked troublesome back on March 9th. Today, 70 cases in a single city would be...
What I glossed over in Selling the first telephone is the fact that AT&T didn’t actually sell any telephones. Until the breakup of the company in 1984, telephones were rented as part of the monthly service. Renting was a choice to seemingly maximize profits. The excuse AT&T gave the government disallowing customers from owning their own phones was that AT&T was protecting their...
I saw this on Twitter yesterday: These days I spend more time with entrepreneurs who have products in the market and paying customers, rather than the dreamers who are still struggling with their minimal viable productions and first sales. In either case, what I teach entrepreneurs is that they need to not only worry about that first initial design for customers, but every incremental design...
Entrepreneurs are farmers of ideas.Farmers who are living in a perpetual drought.No matter how well we teach entrepreneurship, the drought creates year after year of failed crops. The fix has little to do with more and better incubators, accelerators, and startups labs. This drought is the lack of capital to support the existing startups. Just as we can’t solve a regional drought by...
Back to understanding money and economics, I started reading The New Lombard Street soon after serendipitously discovering the wonderful online class, Economics of Money and Banking by Professor Perry Merhling (@PMerhling). After two or three years buried under other books on my nightstand, prodded a bit by a discussion group popping up on Reddit talking about the class, I finally finished...
I just spent two of the last three weeks of my life attending big, global, virtual conferences. Quite the 2020 experience, made more so by the 11 hour timeshift for one of these plus a one-day conference a month ago. All this has me pondering what is lost in moving conferences online, and more importantly, can be gained from these early experiments. As the pandemic ends, I expect we’ll see...
My last post critiqued the pros and cons of 2020 virtual conferences. This post focused on how these conferences could be so much better. Sweating the Details Online conferences are software products as much as events. For software, every click needs to be thought through and optimized, as does every button, every bit of text, and every bit of whitespace, as well as the layout of all the user...
