For the first twenty years of my career, I (co)founded a series “venture-scale” software companies, growing each from and idea and a few co-founders to a company earning millions in revenue, collectively serving tens of millions of customers. All but the first of these startups are still in operations and a few acquired by Global 1000 companies.
I now use the knowledge gained from those twenty years to help the next set of 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.
Teaching entrepreneurship at Presidio Graduate School, the first business school in the world to teach how to do good through business.
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 now 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. Most recently that is investorflow.org, an online network gathering together all the world’s impact investors.
Hope something from this long list is of help to you.
Working with hundreds of startups, various patterns eventually become obvious. One common pattern is wrapped around the common refrain of mentors to entrepreneurs, “focus“. The actual pattern is a bit more complex. It goes like this: 1. You have an idea. It may feel fully formed, but it’s half-baked. You know enough about the problem and just enough about the customers to...
Earlier this year I had a most amazing experience, traveling to India to meet the President of the Tibetan government in Exile, the Speaker of the House, the Chief Justice of their Supreme Court and his holiness, the 14th Dalia Lama. One of the take aways from this trip was the Tibetan attitude about the present and the future, first shared by Lobsang Sangay, the current President. It goes like...
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World continues my research into wealth inequality and the real-world workings of capitalism. This book is the story primarily of four men: Norman, Strong, Moreau, and Schadt, the heads of the central banks of the UK, U.S., France, and Germany in the 1910’s through 1940’s. These are the men who restructured the financial world at the end of...
Last week was my sixth consecutive SOCAP in San Francisco. If you’ve never been, SOCAP is the largest impact investing event in the world. Over 3,000 attendees. Hundreds of speakers. Big and messy, but one place where you can meet 50 people in a week, all working toward the same goal of improving the planet. The impact above is the pile of cards I collected during the week. I stare at...
