I often blame my training as an undergraduate mathematician for seeing the world differently than most others. Case in point, the inefficiencies of the everyday stop sign, and the lesson that fails to teach us about other areas of society. Specifically, picture a busy intersection with a 4-way stop sign. Or better yet, picture a traffic light on a busy street on a day when the power has gone...
There is no higher God in Silicon Valley than growth. No sacrifice too big for its craving altar. As long as you keep your curve exponential, all your sins will be forgotten at the exit. It’s through this exponential lens that eating the world becomes not just a motto for software at large, but a mission for every aspiring unicorn and their business model. “Going viral” suddenly takes on a...
As much as I advocate for doing good by doing business, there are some problems of the world that can’t be solved by for-profit companies, or at least not completely solved by for-profits, which instead need government aid and philanthropists. The 2017 letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation showcases five areas where the foundation has made incredible progress: vaccines...
The Bolshevik Revolution is a root cause of income inequality in the United States. That seems too crazy to be true, but history is more connected than the stories they teach in school. The story begins in 15 years before Lenin’s Russian Revolution, in 1902, when Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company. This was Ford’s third car company, the first two failed from a failure to ship a working car...
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...
