As nascent markets turn into established and proven industries, there comes a critical moment when the time is right for consolidation and scale. For clean cookstoves, that moment seems to be quickly approaching, if not already here. Five years ago was clearly too soon. Five years ago, the UN Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was born, setting a goal of 100 million stoves by 2020. From...
The last time I presented at an event for investors, the first five people all asked me the same question, “Any exits yet?” The more years I spend focusing on revenue-based investing, the more that question is getting on my nerves. Perhaps some of that is on me, as the talks I give are generally titled “Investing without Exits” or “Alternative Exits” or...
Way back in 1991, Geoffrey Moore’s now seminal Crossing the Chasm taught the startup community how to jump over the chasm between the early adopters and early majority customers. It’s a great book that I wish I could recommend far more often. That is a wish rather than a commonplace occurrence as well before that chasm comes another, larger gap. The “pioneer gap“, also...
What is the story with the unicorns? Is there a tech investment bubble? What on earth is going in in the venture investing world? The short answer is that we’re at a crux of a paradigm. The paradigm wrapped around investing venture capital in startups. Few people I talk to know that venture capital, as practiced today, is a fairly new concept. People instead assume...
The U.S. State Department sends delegations to visit Fledge every month or two. We’ve had visitors from: Norway, Albania, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland; Oman, Dubai, Saudi Arabia and Jordon; Mexico, Brazil, and Columbia; Bangladesh and Pakistan, and more. The delegates that visit are typically either social entrepreneurs or working for (typically government sponsored) organizations...
