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...
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...
Twice in the last year I felt obliged to post about politics, given few others speaking up. This time it is right fundamental human right for the people to choose their own government. What is utterly amazing to me is that we live in a world where the voting booth can choose not only the members of government, but the borders of the country itself. For millennia, borders were only moved by guns...
From The Wealth of Nations to The Divide, I’ve spent months with my nose in a book looking for answers to income and wealth inequality. Meanwhile, down on a trip to Lima in Peru, simply walking around answered one key question that keeps going unanswered by the writers, “Where does inequality lead us to?“ When that question comes up in my circle of friends, the conversation...
It has been four months since Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and my quest to find answers to inequality. In that time I came across The Divide, by Jason Hickel, which claimed in the subtitle “A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and it’s Solutions” to provide not just problems but also solutions. That jumped it to the top of my growing stack of books. The first two thirds of the...
Five years ago, while still working on the business plan that was to become Fledge, I helped run a weekend event for “social entrepreneurs” called #SocEnt Weekend. From that came the following video with Brian Howe, co-founder of what was to become Impact Hub Seattle. Reminiscing is often fun. More so when we can look back five years to see what we thought might happen in ten years...
(This is in response to Jeff Bezos’ call for feedback/ideas on his philanthropy) Jeff, If you want to immediately help a few homeless in Seattle, do that. But what about the other 10,000 homeless in Seattle and the other tens of thousands of homeless in other American cities? And what about the billion others who live a life with even less food, less shelter, and less chance of a...
It’s good to be out of debt… even when that means finishing David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I had started on this book before diving into the rabbit hole of The Wealth of Nations, Communist Manifesto, Capitalist Manifesto, Divine Right of Capital, Et al, revisiting Debt’s 400 pages on occasion to clean my mental palate between other books. Debt is another...
After finishing The Divine Right of Capital, I searched my house high and low for my copy of Owning our Future, Marjorie Kelly’s other book on Capitalism, which I remembered was good enough to merit ordering a second copy after the search came up empty. Whereas The Divine Right of Capital is 95% problem, Owning our Future is a travelogue of solutions. Kelly takes us with her traveling to...
