Back before I founded Fledge, before even breaking ground on the business plan, I spent my days networking. 15-20 meetings per week. Nearly all at coffee shops at one end of Seattle or another. You learn a lot of that intensity of networking. One skill I learned is how to track hundreds of introductions and conversations. Each and every one of the people I met back then were logged in a...
Its been years since I posted anything on crowdfunding. The JOBS Act is finally up and running. Regulation A+ and Regulation CF fundraising is happening. Is it working? Blogger Scott Purcell has some statistics from 2016, taken from the SEC. I don’t know Scott and don’t know of FundAmerica, but the numbers are from the SEC, and thus should be trustworthy. In short, the answer is...
[This post is targeted to the hundreds of colleges and universities who teach Entrepreneurship, along with the thousands of entrepreneurship training programs] Seventeen years ago, when I first taught Software Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington, 90% of the curriculum was guest speakers. Good stories, but not enough structure for the students. Five years ago, when I was asked to...
At the end of the 10 weeks at Fledge, we ask each company to create a 30/60/90 day plan. After 10 intense weeks on strategic thinking, marketing plans, sales plans, iterations on financial models, and weeks crafting stories for investors and others, it’s time to drop down into tactics and figure out how to execute. That is the easy part. The hard part is then making that plan come true. If...
As an entrepreneur building out two startups while also raising a family, I don’t have a lot of free time for hobbies. To relax, I like to visit Quora, mostly reading other people’s answers but at times answering some as well. Today I came across this question and thought this audience might appreciate all the answers. Mine is below: Most everything is hard, but since you asked for...
The modern world wasn’t planned. It wasn’t designed. It came to be from billions of little decisions plus a few thousand big decisions, most of which were solving short-term problems, few of which ever questioning the core assumptions of society and economics. From this we have a world today where business is about making money, and where the press and elite will tell you that the sole purpose of...
I love an inspiring grand vision. As the applications roll in for Fledge, quite a few are big, audacious, grand plans. The problem is that startups don’t have the resources to make those visions a reality, at least not within a year or two or three. The bigger problem is that most first-time entrepreneurs don’t know this. They are too often deluded, thinking that everyone on earth will see their...
I love the 21st Century. The productivity afforded to us by technology here in the 2010’s is utterly amazing to my old-enough-to-remember-the-20th Century mind. Case in point, I sit here in the late afternoon of a rather quiet workday in mid-December, with 100 email arrived and read since yesterday, and 45 email sent. I often hear laments about the flood of email (and spam) in our lives...
Remember when YouTube was a site to post snippets of videos of your baby, puppy, or kitten? Perhaps its still used for that… but for me, it is a near-daily source of snippets of lifelong learning. I subscribe to well over 100 different channels, spanning a dozen different topic areas. A few of these are spectacularly good at telling an compelling story which conveys an interesting...
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over {$17 trillion} dollars a year, but...
