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.
APRIL 2020 – As I write this, we are a few days from the projected peak day of death from the pandemic here in the United States. With that “light at the end the tunnel” economists are starting to predict what comes next for the economy. McKinstry this week published a prediction. TL;DR: U.S. GDP drops by 8%-13% in 2020. Personally I don’t understand how 15%+ unemployment...
The flood of ignorance coming from government leaders, the media, and social media is maddening. The world has suffered from and survived global pandemics before. The last one like 2020’s was just 102 years ago, in 1918. That pandemic’s infection rate was “flattened” in some cities, with social distancing and lockdowns just as we’re doing now. So while it seems that...
You may have seen this map of social distancing, with the commentary on how certain parts of the U.S. are not “getting with the program” about staying at home. Reuters Most of the commentary on why is about politics, despite the other fundamental, underlying issue of income inequality. Reuters When the same data is sorted by income, unsurprisingly the people with the lower incomes are...
As the Tibetans say, “Tomorrow will be worse.” March 3rd there were less than 100 known cases of Covid-19 outside of China, and the only lockdown was a few tens of millions of people in Hubei Province. April 3rd, over a million known cases, over 55,000 dead, and over 4 billion people locked down. We knew a pandemic was eventually coming, but the speed of this particular pandemic has...
