Where is your horizon? How far away from home does your daily life take you? How far into the past and future do you think about? I live on an island, and know quite a few people whose daily lives never even reach the beach. On the other end of the spectrum (to mix metaphors), few days go by when I’m not talking on Zoom to someone from Africa, if not also calls in the morning from Europe...
There are two reasons for the incredible amount of money focused on tech companies. First, because of the 10 largest companies on the S&P 500, five are tech companies. Tech has made many investors a lot of money since Apple went public in 1980 and Microsoft in 1986. Second, the core technology powering all that software has sped up by a factor of 30,000 since Apple launched the Apple ][ in...
I was asked last week by the Seattle Angel Conference to explain why investing overseas is not as big a challenge nor as big a risk as most Angels think. TL;DR: it’s very similar to investing locally but with much larger market opportunities and far far far fewer investors and thus far more realistic terms. This is one of the topics often covered by The Angel Accelerator, itself inspired by...
I came across this old BBC footage of Arthur C. Clarke in 1964 predicting life in the coming decades, all the way out to the year 2,000. It is difficult enough to predict what will happen in the future, and far far far more difficult to predict when those predictions will be reality, if ever. What I find more remarkable is Clarke’s accurate prediction of a fully-connected world, with people...
Ten years ago I published my first book, The Next Step. This was inspired by a few life changes, including being asked to teach entrepreneurship to MBA candidates at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Washington, and the imminent launch of Fledge, which at the time was one small business accelerator. This first book covered the process from...