Last month I pointed out that tech seems to be peaking, but social good feels like its in its infancy. The “peaking” story has cropped up a few more times: Freakonomics recent podcast asks, “Are We Running Out of Ideas?” This podcast, like the book it is named after, always does a good job analyzing the root causes rather than just skimming over the surface. That root...
Here we are in 2017 and only now are we uncovering who the Angel investors really are. The Angel Capital Association (ACA), Wharton School of Business, and Rev1 Ventures sponsored research to let us all know. The results are not surprising. 78% male 88% white Average age: 48 Standard check: $25,000 Most live in CA or in and around NYC The men don’t care about gender (and thus don’t...
“First they will laugh at you; then they will threaten you; and then they will follow you” – Ghandi Back to my readings on economics and inequality, I found Fusion Economics sitting on my nightstand, shot right through it, and suggest you pick up a copy too. Laurence J Brahm is a real life Forrest Gump, but brilliant is as brilliant does. Gump, as in his life seems to take him...
For the first twenty years of my career I was a techie. And it was an amazing two decades to be in tech, spanning the dot com bubble, the ubiquity of the personal computer, the Web, a mobile phone in every pocket, smartphones, tablets, social media, and the cloud. Six years outside of tech, it is interesting to watch how that market seems to be reaching a zenith. My computer is almost six years...
When the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business starts talking about the world being in a vicious cycle of inequality, you know we’re well into the end game. From this blog post: Earlier this year, a Stigler Center paper by Luigi Zingales [Faculty Director of the Stigler Center] argued that market concentration can lead to a vicious circle, in which companies use market...
Ray Dalio posted a great analysis of the American economy, splitting it into two parts, the top 40% and bottom 60%. To understand what’s going on in “the economy,” it is a serious mistake to look at average statistics. This is because the wealth and income skews are so great that average statistics no longer reflect the conditions of the average man. For example, as shown in the chart below, the...
From the Visual Capitalist, an infographic that helps you visualize all the world’s money… I cut off the bottom of the original graphic, which is derivatives, as (a) that market is humongous, but (b) the net total of the trillions in derivatives is $0, as every buyer has a matching writer, and thus that is a zero-sum market, unlike stocks or housing or gold. Hopefully the Visual...
I met Joel Solomon five years ago. Someone pointed me to him as knowledgeable and experienced. I knew of his work Renewal Funds, and a few years ago visited his Hollyhock on Cortes Island in British Columbia, Canada to attend his Social Venture Institute. (Disclosure: sometime in all that he agreed to invest a tiny amount into Fledge, one of my contributions to the field of social good.)...
Two weeks ago Morgan Simon announced her new book, Real Impact. I was going to toss it on the end of my queue, not expecting it to be part of my quest for answers to inequality, but was proven wrong. First and foremost, the book is the best primer I’ve read on impact investing. The first half walks through why we need to align capital with social and environmental solutions and the second...
Twice in the last year I felt obliged to post about politics, given few others speaking up. This time it is right fundamental human right for the people to choose their own government. What is utterly amazing to me is that we live in a world where the voting booth can choose not only the members of government, but the borders of the country itself. For millennia, borders were only moved by guns...
