In his annual letter to CEOs sent Tuesday, Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, which manages nearly $6.3 trillion in investments, put CEOs on high alert that they would be expected to answer questions about their long-term strategy, how they plan to use savings from the tax reform law, what role they play in their communities and whether they are creating a diverse workforce that is...
Talk to enough entrepreneurs over enough years, and some patterns get repeated over and over and over again. One of the most prominent is the expectation of success. Not just the expectation of overall success, but the expectation that the current plan is going to work as planned. It’s not. I grown seven startups of my own, helped 73 others through Fledge, have been following startup...
The staff at the Freakonomics podcast does an amazing job of uncovering interesting business ideas. Two weeks ago the episode was “A No-Lose Lottery“. The idea is incredibly simple, but feels enough like a lottery that it is illegal in most countries. It goes like this: Create a savings account, where the savers are guaranteed to not lose their savings (if not earn a small interest...
I love uncovering hidden assumptions. One in particular gets written about every day in one form or another. The high-speed growth of a handful of startups, of Bitcoin, and other “overnight successes“. Learn a bit of history, and you’ll discover that the steep adoption curve of any success is really just the middle of the story. The beginning of the story is the (often long)...
