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.
There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...
The GDP per capita metric is helpful to gauge the level of economic development within a region, but misleading in that the metric gets skewed by extraction-based industries like mining and oil (which is why Botswana, Namibia, and Gabon) are higher than their neighboring countries). Visual Capitalist has published a map of the per-capital GDPs of most of the African nations (in most cases rounded...
I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...
