One of my former MBA students is turning his business school project into a real company… one that changes the way we bury our loved ones.
February 21, 2018
Dead 2.0
21February
February 21, 2018
Powerful, building the Netflix culture of Freedom and Responsibility
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...
February 19, 2018
Organizing investors in groups, e.g. The Seattle Impact Investing Group
19February
Investing is hard. It’s yet-another topic that isn’t taught in school, and rarely taught by family either. Here in the 21st Century, where a lot of wealth in America is self-made, the newly minted wealthy need help learning how to invest. For startup investing, the biggest challenges for investors are finding investable companies (a.k.a. dealflow) and doing enough due diligence on...
February 15, 2018
The realities of startup life (in Ghana)
15February
All startups are difficult… and they don’t get easier when your startup is in a foreign country… selling a service that no one there has seen before. Few books due the startup journey justice. Bright Lights, No City is one of the rare exceptions, telling the story of Burro in Ghana, a company founded by Whit Alexander, creator of Cranium, as told through the eyes and talented...
February 7, 2018
Growing the tent for impact investing
07February
With all the buzz about impact investing (see BlackRock’s letter), it’s no surprise that Social Capital Markets’ new SOCAP 365 impact investing conference in Seattle was sold out. Investors, venture capitalists, family foundations and more joined to network, learn and make commitments in furthering the growth of the impact investing field. The day was filled with the realities of the impact...
February 7, 2018
How to reach out on LinkedIn (and elsewhere)?
Putting yourself in the other person’s shoes is sometimes hard, especially when you are a first-time entrepreneur and you are reaching out to an investor. Here are a few tips to help: 1- Wasting time. If your words make you sound like you’ll be a waste of time, most investors will not even both to reply to you. If your words are in fact wasting time, those words might not even be...
January 24, 2018
Impact Investing going Mainstream
24January
In his annual letter to CEOs sent Tuesday, Laurence Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, which manages nearly $6.3 trillion in investments, put CEOs on high alert that they would be expected to answer questions about their long-term strategy, how they plan to use savings from the tax reform law, what role they play in their communities and whether they are creating a diverse workforce that is...
January 2, 2018
Expecting success and failure
02January
Talk to enough entrepreneurs over enough years, and some patterns get repeated over and over and over again. One of the most prominent is the expectation of success. Not just the expectation of overall success, but the expectation that the current plan is going to work as planned. It’s not. I grown seven startups of my own, helped 73 others through Fledge, have been following startup...
December 19, 2017
A No-Lose Lottery
19December
The staff at the Freakonomics podcast does an amazing job of uncovering interesting business ideas. Two weeks ago the episode was “A No-Lose Lottery“. The idea is incredibly simple, but feels enough like a lottery that it is illegal in most countries. It goes like this: Create a savings account, where the savers are guaranteed to not lose their savings (if not earn a small interest...
December 12, 2017
Hockey sticks are really S-curves
12December
I love uncovering hidden assumptions. One in particular gets written about every day in one form or another. The high-speed growth of a handful of startups, of Bitcoin, and other “overnight successes“. Learn a bit of history, and you’ll discover that the steep adoption curve of any success is really just the middle of the story. The beginning of the story is the (often long)...
