For the first twenty years of my career, I (co)founded a series venture-scale software companies, growing each from an idea to a company earning millions in revenue, collectively serving tens of millions of customers.
I now use the knowledge gained from those twenty years to help new entrepreneurs. My goal is to have them increase their odds of success by not repeating the common mistakes that I and my peers once made. I do this in many ways:
The Next Step series of books guides entrepreneurs step-by-step through the process of getting from idea to operational startup, breaking the paradigm of startup investing, and explaining years of lessons teaching entrepreneurship.
The Next Step: podcast shares the lessons from the books plus other advice, anecdotes, and interviews, all in bite-sized audio pieces.
Fledge is a global network of conscious company accelerators, providing intense guidance, mentorship, investment, and support for a small set of entrepreneurs.
Africa Eats is an investment holding company focused on lowering hunger and poverty in Africa through for-profit solutions. The first spin-off of Fledge, it builds upon the work of a few dozen Fledge alumni who are building the food/ag supply chain across Africa.
Answering questions from entrepreneurs on Quora.
Plus in these various efforts, I do my best to uncover hidden assumptions, break investment paradigms, and seek solutions to income/wealth inequality.
And despite writing checks to entrepreneurs, I still consider myself first and foremost an entrepreneur, and as such every so often I simply have to create something new, such as:
The philanthropic investing service at Realize Impact, a 501c3 public charity that I co-founded, which lets any philanthropist turn a donation into an impact investment.
I hope something from this long list is of help to you.
For institutions whose ages are measured in centuries, the day-to-day inner workings of the stock exchanges are amazingly undocumented. I’ve asked numerous traders and others in the capital markets, and they all tell me they learned those details “on the job” from their peers. Almost a year ago I found The Work of the Stock Exchange, which did document quite a bit of the...
Back in 2019 I posted What is Money?, and it included a link to Perry Merhling’s course on Coursera. I had originally found his lectures on YouTube, which were at some point taken down. Today I found them, edited into two 6-hour pieces:
I found these from today’s’ post on substack, The Hierarchy of Money. If you like my writing, subscribe to that feed.
If I had to boil down my lessons for entrepreneurs on how to deal with investors, it boils down to “put your self in their shoes.” What does the investor want from you in order to decide to invest? What does the investors want from you after making the investment? For debt investments, the lender gave you money. That loan came with money and a schedule for repayments. What does the lender want...
There are lessons to be learned about entrepreneurship in unlikely places, including on the baseball field. Or at least in books about how to put together a winning baseball team, like Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. The lesson is simple, your KPIs matter. The What if? asked in Moneyball was “What is the goal of a baseball team, and how can a team best achieve that goal?” The agreed upon goal is to win...
