If you took all the maize (corn) farms in the world and put them together, they’d not fit on the British Islands. Neither would rice or wheat. This fun YouTube video shows just how much space each crop takes up:
Today I hosted a delegation of 8 Korean college students brought to Seattle for a week by Kickstart Investment, a Korean business incubator. Sounds exotic, but I host a handful of foreign delegations each year from all around the world, often hosted by the U.S. State Department. It’s a fun way to meet entrepreneurs and people who help entrepreneurs without the accompanying jet lag. We...
Entrepreneurs worry about their product, marketing, sales process, recruiting, finances, and operations, but often don’t think twice about designing their corporate culture. Forget about culture, and successful startups soon turn into The Office and Dilbert. There isn’t yet a The Next Step book on how to design a corporate culture, but I do teach the topic in both my MBA...
Underlying everything is the organizational culture… The culture at Fledge is unique within a business incubator. The Fledge culture is an extension of the culture found within Pinchot University. Pinchot is a unique, groundbreaking institution, founded in 2002 as the first business school (in their words) to teach “sustainable” business (and in Fledge’s vocabulary) to teach “how to do good by...
The last site visit for Investors Circle in Nairobi was SunCulture, seller of solar-powered pumps and drop-irrigation systems for small farms across Kenya. Speaking of culture, one learning on this trip about East Africa was the blended nature of the populace. Not only are there dozens of tribes within Kenya alone, but added to that are the 100+ year old history of Europeans and Indians living in...
A startup is a clean slate. If you take the time and effort, the corporate culture can be anything you envision. If you don’t bother, then at scale it will be just another place to work, yet another “Office”, yet another “Dilbert”, a soul-sucking job you take to get some “Moon Shoes”. This lecture looks at three innovative corporate cultures: Netflix...
Hypothetically, if you could invest in any of the following three companies, which would you choose: ABCorp, which is raising $10 million, and with that promises they’ll have a new version of their product in the market, a bigger sales staff, plenty of marketing, 5x growth to $2 million of revenues, a loss of $1 million, and be ready for the next round of $45 million in fundraising. GHInc...
At the 10th Sankalp Africa Summit in Nairobi, Kenya a panel of investors, adaptation & resilience businesses, and intermediary institutions curated by GIZ and DFC spoke at “The Secret to adaptation investment”. Panel Participants Eric Onchoga (Irrihub) | Martin Kiilu (Growth Africa) | Rebecca Mincy (Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund) | Luni Libes (Africa Eats) | Peter Fry (Kua...
A few weeks ago I asked the internet why there are no copycats of Berkshire Hathaway, despite Warren Buffett telling the world exactly how he and Charlie do what they do. This week, Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders was published, and now that Africa Eats is copying parts of Berkshire Hathaway’s model, I found it more fascinating than usual to both learn as well as compare and...
The big shift I’ve seen in 2020, 2021, and 2022 is that the default mode of business (in impact investing) is meetings on Zoom vs. meetings in-person. The new normal for my workday is spending a few hours talking to people around the world via Zoom, with 99% of those meetings set by Calendly.com. All those people have the option of a phone call, and maybe once per month someone choose a...
