Continuing my dive into Capitalism, I headed to the beginning, to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known simply as Adam Smith’s masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. This is one of those books you hear about so often you think already know, but which you really only know of until you crack it open and dig into the details. And wow, are there ever details...
Income inequality is in the news, along with the populist Brexit, Trump, and La Pen movements that have sprung from the consequences of that issue. Before those votes, I wondered if there were any real-world consequences from income inequality, or whether it just made good sky-is-falling news stories. One book that greatly helped me understand what is truly going on is Thomas Piketty’s...
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...
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...
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...
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...
