For the first twenty years of my career, I (co)founded a series venture-scale software companies, growing each from an idea and a starting team 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.
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.
Spending too many hours per day on Zoom? Finding Zoom calls far more draining than phone-based conference calls and face-to-face meetings? Yes and yes for me, and I’ve been experimenting to try and figure out how to overcome Zoom Fatigue. Over the summer (and before the unbreathable smokey air showed up), I took pleasure in any meeting that was by phone rather than Zoom, as that let me get...
If you’ve never seen Hans Rosling speak, scroll down, click play, and be amazed. Before Hans passed away, he wrote down his big learnings in Factfulness. This is one one those books everyone should be read. It’s a easy read, and insightful and hopeful, and at the same time, frightening. The key lesson is that almost no one really knows what is going on in the world. Population growh...
For years I’ve been so busy with global travel and family that I’ve not had time for any real hobby. Instead I’ve been vicariously enjoying other people practicing their hobbies via YouTube. Keith Appleton, Keith Rucker, Scott Manley, Cody’s Lab, TechMoan, and Curious Marc, plus the explainers of 3Blue1Brown, Alec Steele, CGP Grey, Clickspring, Half as Interesting, Half...
Many months ago, someone suggested I read “Am I Being too Subtle?“, Sam Zell’s memoir. It’s a good read. Clearly written by Sam itself, as Sam is a go-getting entrepreneur, a true self-made billionaire, but one that didn’t simply have one success, but a whole series of successes in a multitude of industries. The biggest teaching moments of the book come at the end...
