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...
Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny looks than nods. At an event today, people seriously talked about potentially moving to New Zealand and to finally doing the leg work to get EU citizenship through an ancestral immigrant. Despite the mid 2010’s...
For the first time in 45 tries, we have an incoming President who not only has no history in politics, but despite the endless campaign, an incoming President who has not shared detailed plans, leaving us all to wonder what comes next. This has freaked out both the left and the right. The leftmost are out in the streets denying the result, with a few moderate voices calling out to give him a...
Last week began the first session of Fledge Peru. To kick it off I spent the week in Lima, getting the team up to speed on the day to day operations of the program, meeting the teams, and learning about the local startup ecosystem. It’s always refreshing to relearn the lesson that business is business, whether in Seattle or Lima, or Oaxaca, Santiago, or Nairobi. People have problems. Startups...
Every SOCAP leaves me wondering what its like outside the West Coast, and specifically outside of San Francisco and Seattle, which seem to be leading the way into the world of impact investing and conscious companies.
How does your city compare?
You can tell when an industry is nascent, growing, or established by looking at how many different conferences and events there are in September and October, the size of those events, and the overlap of attendees. Impact investing have moved from nascent to growing, and seems to be growing rather fast. Yesterday was my fifth industry event of the month: 1. SOCAP is the biggest annual gathering...
Last month, sitting in a monthly gathering of impact investors, in the midst of a discussion on why so few investments get made, a fellow member made a comment that I can’t get out of my head, “It’s not about dealflow, it’s about investorflow.” The way startups usually get funded is not how entrepreneurs think. It’s not a meritocracy. It’s not like an...
