Aviary.vc takes flight, expanding Fledge, and re-branding Kick

My 2016 is shaping up to be quite exciting:

Aviary.vc – To keep up with the growth of impact-oriented entrepreneurs, Aviary is a new venture capital seed fund, focused on mission-driven for-profit conscious companies, i.e. companies that do good by doing business. If you are an accredited impact investor (or wondering how to do that), we’re building a community of co-investors. Contact us for details.
aviary.vc

Fledge – The conscious company accelerator is four years old next month, with 52 graduates from 16 countries, acclaimed as one of the top three program in North America. With that success, it is time to replicate Fledge outside of Seattle. We’re looking for partners interested in bringing Fledge to their home cities. People who can raise funding to replicate the investment model, and who can guide entrepreneurs through their long journey from idea to successful startup. Or ideally a team of people Contact us you are interested in creating a Fledge for your city.
fledge.co

Kick – The pre-accelerator program is being re-branded, expanded, and spun off to the Spring Activator in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Over the last two years, Kick grew from just Seattle to 30 cities worldwide. As part of Spring’s growing program of entrepreneurship training, we expect to see that list grow to over 100 cities in the next two years. Contact Spring if you’d like to help your local entrepreneurs.
kickincubator.com | spring.is

With this news, impactful entrepreneurs everywhere on the planet will have a series of stepping stones from ideation and business planning workshops through full-scale accelerators in multiple cities and seed funding upon completion. Exciting times!

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...

There are so many lessons in startups, startup investing, and technology adoption that come from looking back a few decades. For example, I’m out of the 1970s nostalgic computing rabbit hole, but that journey has subsequently led to reviewing the technological progress of the late 1900s and early 2000s. This week, that was the rise of the RISC-based CPU, which was then obviously going to...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...

I’ve never been able to explain why I have so hard of a time believing consultants. What is it about their role that make their conclusions so often so wrong? None other than Steve Jobs explains… in less than two minutes. “I don’t think there is anything inherently evil in consulting” … but “You never really taste it.” – Steve Jobs Share...

The standard structure for private equity funds (and venture capital funds) is “2&20”, as in a 2% management fee (±1%) and 20% (±10%) of the profits, a.k.a. “carried interest“. Why 20% of the profits? Henry Kravis of KKR explains below, starting at 6:00. TL;DR: Necessity, as he and his partners had no capital to put at risk. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens...