In his annual letter to CEOs sent Tuesday, Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, which manages nearly $6.3 trillion in investments, put CEOs on high alert that they would be expected to answer questions about their long-term strategy, how they plan to use savings from the tax reform law, what role they play in their communities and whether they are creating a diverse workforce that is...
Talk to enough entrepreneurs over enough years, and some patterns get repeated over and over and over again. One of the most prominent is the expectation of success. Not just the expectation of overall success, but the expectation that the current plan is going to work as planned. It’s not. I grown seven startups of my own, helped 73 others through Fledge, have been following startup...
The staff at the Freakonomics podcast does an amazing job of uncovering interesting business ideas. Two weeks ago the episode was “A No-Lose Lottery“. The idea is incredibly simple, but feels enough like a lottery that it is illegal in most countries. It goes like this: Create a savings account, where the savers are guaranteed to not lose their savings (if not earn a small interest...
I love uncovering hidden assumptions. One in particular gets written about every day in one form or another. The high-speed growth of a handful of startups, of Bitcoin, and other “overnight successes“. Learn a bit of history, and you’ll discover that the steep adoption curve of any success is really just the middle of the story. The beginning of the story is the (often long)...
Last month I pointed out that tech seems to be peaking, but social good feels like its in its infancy. The “peaking” story has cropped up a few more times: Freakonomics recent podcast asks, “Are We Running Out of Ideas?” This podcast, like the book it is named after, always does a good job analyzing the root causes rather than just skimming over the surface. That root...
Here we are in 2017 and only now are we uncovering who the Angel investors really are. The Angel Capital Association (ACA), Wharton School of Business, and Rev1 Ventures sponsored research to let us all know. The results are not surprising. 78% male 88% white Average age: 48 Standard check: $25,000 Most live in CA or in and around NYC The men don’t care about gender (and thus don’t...
“First they will laugh at you; then they will threaten you; and then they will follow you” – Ghandi Back to my readings on economics and inequality, I found Fusion Economics sitting on my nightstand, shot right through it, and suggest you pick up a copy too. Laurence J Brahm is a real life Forrest Gump, but brilliant is as brilliant does. Gump, as in his life seems to take him...
For the first twenty years of my career I was a techie. And it was an amazing two decades to be in tech, spanning the dot com bubble, the ubiquity of the personal computer, the Web, a mobile phone in every pocket, smartphones, tablets, social media, and the cloud. Six years outside of tech, it is interesting to watch how that market seems to be reaching a zenith. My computer is almost six years...
When the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business starts talking about the world being in a vicious cycle of inequality, you know we’re well into the end game. From this blog post: Earlier this year, a Stigler Center paper by Luigi Zingales [Faculty Director of the Stigler Center] argued that market concentration can lead to a vicious circle, in which companies use market...
Ray Dalio posted a great analysis of the American economy, splitting it into two parts, the top 40% and bottom 60%. To understand what’s going on in “the economy,” it is a serious mistake to look at average statistics. This is because the wealth and income skews are so great that average statistics no longer reflect the conditions of the average man. For example, as shown in the chart below, the...
