Have you ever noticed that if something is older than your grandparents, it feels like it has been around forever? So much of modern infrastructure and modern conveniences fall into that pattern. Things we take so much for granted that no one bothers to question where they came from. Especially boring bits of infrastructure, like buses. The Tim Traveler has this answer, and hundreds more videos...
For institutions whose ages are measured in centuries, the day-to-day inner workings of the stock exchanges are amazingly undocumented. I’ve asked numerous traders and others in the capital markets, and they all tell me they learned those details “on the job” from their peers. Almost a year ago I found The Work of the Stock Exchange, which did document quite a bit of the...
Back in 2019 I posted What is Money?, and it included a link to Perry Merhling’s course on Coursera. I had originally found his lectures on YouTube, which were at some point taken down. Today I found them, edited into two 6-hour pieces:
I found these from today’s’ post on substack, The Hierarchy of Money. If you like my writing, subscribe to that feed.
If I had to boil down my lessons for entrepreneurs on how to deal with investors, it boils down to “put your self in their shoes.” What does the investor want from you in order to decide to invest? What does the investors want from you after making the investment? For debt investments, the lender gave you money. That loan came with money and a schedule for repayments. What does the lender want...
There are lessons to be learned about entrepreneurship in unlikely places, including on the baseball field. Or at least in books about how to put together a winning baseball team, like Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. The lesson is simple, your KPIs matter. The What if? asked in Moneyball was “What is the goal of a baseball team, and how can a team best achieve that goal?” The agreed upon goal is to win...
You have a decision to make. If you have seconds to decide, you go with your gut. If you have minutes, you might take that minute to weigh Plan A with Plan B. If you have weeks you might create a pro-con list to help decide between those two – or even three – options. If you have months, you might take the time to brainstorm for some out-of-the-box options. What most people overlook is that there...
A few months ago I was interviewed on a podcast where the key question was “What is your superpower?” Sounds innocuous and simple, but it was one of those moments to reflect on life and not just provide a truthful answer, but something interesting and thought provoking. My answer was “If only”. What if _____? I’ve been an entrepreneur for over thirty years, founding or co-founding 10 companies. I...
Back in the dot-com bubble, my second-ever startup filed the paperwork to go public, but the NASDAQ topped off before we were able to complete that process. It’s long been a life goal to be part of a company to finish that process. That goal was not only achieved today, but by Africa Eats, my eighth startup. I’m now CEO of a public company. 🙂 Africa Eats is an investment company...
George Doriot (dor-ee-oh) was the key to modern venture capital and most of the rest of the early history of the venture capital industry is not documented. This is part 3 of a series. The (Lost) History of Venture Capital Venture Capital Took Decades to be Significant Arthur Rock helped invent Venture Capital The connection is that Arthur Rock was a student of Doriot, as was Thomas Davis. After...
There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...
