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 the first spin-off of Fledge, taking a few dozen graduates, all run by native-Africans, all focused on lessening poverty and hunger across the continent, wrapping them in a holding company to provide more even support than than the accelerator.
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. One is investorflow.org, an online network gathering together all the world’s impact investors.
Another is the philanthropic investing service at Realize Impact, a 501c3 public charity that I helped create. This new service lets any philanthropist turn a donation into an impact investment.
Hope something from this long list is of help to you.
The Future of Heart-Powered Entrepreneurship interviewed me about my work at Fledge, Africa Eats, and The Angel Accelerator. Takeaways from this podcast include: Luni works with mission driven for profit entrepreneurs to help them launch and grow their companies.He recently created an accelerator for investors to help them invest in conscious companiesWhen people think about improving the...
My biggest learning from nine years of impact investing is the complexity of the space. I spent the first twenty years of my life as a software entrepreneur, i.e. a techie, and in comparison with venture capital for tech startups, impact is an order of magnitude more complicated. Ultimately the complexity boils down to two issues. 1 – Geography It used to be that 90% of tech investing was...
For years I’ve been talking about California Capitalism, how the traditional model of venture capital doesn’t work outside of the Bay Area, New York City, and Boston, and rather than just rant I’ve been explaining and implementing alternative investment models including revenue-based finance and holding companies. The latest issue of American Affairs magazine includes a deep...
In 2011 I left my life as a tech entrepreneur and began my work as a teacher, mentor, and impact investor. That change meant building a new network of contacts, and I started that effort with just a few dozen curated connections from the first twenty years of my career. Ten years later, I’ve been keeping a CRM database of (almost) everyone I’ve met and today the 19,001st person was...
