A good question recently came up on Quora: What is the concept of currency? How am I simply able to buy things and services with just a piece of paper? You have an item or provide a service someone else wants. They give you a token in return. You have needs for other items and services. Those providers accept your token. Each token represents historic effort. The harder it was to produce or...
I’m on the other side of the microphone on the Impact Connect podcast, being interviewed about my unusual style of startup investing.
In this episode, you’ll get my unique perspective on questioning everything. Originally posted on investorconnect.org
The venture capitalists following the traditional model of California Capitalism have a thesis that there are billion dollar business opportunities, there are business models able to capture those opportunities, and teams which can create those businesses if sufficiently funded. Softbank’s Vision Fund takes that model to a new level. A Tokyo-Riyadh Capitalism model. But a model that seems...
I spent the first half of September in East Africa, visiting two of my fledglings in Tanzania, training 14 entrepreneurs in Nairobi, then headed off to Western Kenya and drove to and from Eastern Uganda to visit five more graduates of Fledge, my conscious company accelerator. To share a glimpse of what all that was like, below are a series of video tours of each of the companies: Plus three key...
Last month I promised a daily habit of creation. What I’ve learned since then is that you have have any two of: international travel, jet lag, and blogging. But that doesn’t mean a pause to the habit. In fact, the jet lag is from 35 hours of flying from Seattle to Nairobi, with a stop in Dar es Salaam. Below are two videos from my stop in Tanzania. And in a week or two I’ll post...
American banks fail when unregulated, and they fail when improperly regulated. That is the one sentence summary of Broken Bargain by Kathleen Day, the latest book in my series trying to understand how the financial system is failing. My key learnings from his book are highly unlikely what the author intended. She’s a bit too anti-bank for my taste. We’d seem to agree on 99% of what is...
This idea of corporations with a purpose beyond just shareholders continues to be discussed in the news. This week in The Economist published an op-ed “What Corporations are for” ($), repeating the Friedman Doctrine and dissing the 181 signers of at the Business Roundtable earlier this month. The key word in the Economist’s essay is their measure of success of American business...
This year I turned 50 and and with that half century milestone, I’ve been looking back quite a bit more than normal this year. Case in point, in my recent post on the $80 trillion world economy, I pointed out there that the U.S. economy is one quarter of the total, or $20 trillion. 50 years ago, back in 1969, the U.S. economy was only $1 trillion (World Bank, reported in non-inflationary...
Today I hosted a delegation of 8 Korean college students brought to Seattle for a week by Kickstart Investment, a Korean business incubator. Sounds exotic, but I host a handful of foreign delegations each year from all around the world, often hosted by the U.S. State Department. It’s a fun way to meet entrepreneurs and people who help entrepreneurs without the accompanying jet lag. We...
My daily creation habit includes quite a variety of creations: blog posts, podcasts, videos, books, and a semi-weekly newsletter for Fledge. A sample of the newsletter is below. Here in 2019, the key to building a brand is being seen online, and the key to being seen is publishing content. As often as you can. As widely disbursed as you can, to reach into all the various corners of the digital...
