Many months ago, someone suggested I read “Am I Being too Subtle?“, Sam Zell’s memoir. It’s a good read. Clearly written by Sam itself, as Sam is a go-getting entrepreneur, a true self-made billionaire, but one that didn’t simply have one success, but a whole series of successes in a multitude of industries. The biggest teaching moments of the book come at the end...
I spend a lot of my day in Gmail “talking” to hundreds of people at a time. The web interface to Gmal is efficient and sufficient, but today I discovered a fixable flaw… MUTED. I noticed that in a little box next to the title of one important email. It looked this this: Googling, it turns out you can find all your muted email by searching for “is:mute”. I had two...
Back in 1992, at age 22, I started my first company. Before cellphones. Before the Web. Before broadband. Before everyone had an email address. Before the Lean Startup. But what I (and others) took for granted was a system of Angel investors and venture capitalists. I didn’t think twice back then where that system came from. I didn’t consider whether the same system funded Edison...
I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 30 years. I’ve founded or co-founded a lot of companies in that time. I’ve taught and mentors hundreds of entrepreneurs in the last decade. I’m a lifelong learner and am constantly finding and reading more advice to make entrepreneurs’ lives easier, including my own. There is no shortage of startup advice. The trouble is, a lot of...
The New York Times shared an enlightening graph last Sunday. A graph of deaths per year per 1,000 people living in New York City. Here we are in the midst of a horrific global pandemic. Over 13 million known infections and more than half a million known deaths, and counting. This disease is far from the worst of history. As of today, the death rate in New York City is 19 per 10,000 or 1.9 per...
COVID-19 is the ninth pandemic since 1900, the thirteenth since 1800, and the seventeenth since the Black Death decimated Europe. Pandemics happen! A visualization of past and present pandemics, from VisualCapitalist.com
Here in the midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic and attached economic crisis, it seemed a good time to read Ben Bernanke’s memoir of the Panic of 2007-2008. Like most of the economics history books I’ve read and posted about, the stories are interesting but the writing quite dry. Too many words devoted to unnecessary details. But ideas that are well worth remembering and learning from...
“How in the world [is Africa] going to deal with this? We didn’t plan for disease. They are putting dead bodies in the streets” – Melinda Gates When Melinda Gates, co-creator of the world’s largest foundation, largest non-government philanthropist for healthcare and hunger doesn’t know of a solution, there is no solution coming. I’ve been writing about...
Two months after predicting a hunger crisis in Africa, and there is a hunger crisis in Africa. The news on this has been sparse, but its starting to trickle out. Today the story was posted on Foreign Affairs. The novel coronavirus has overwhelmed public health systems and jolted economies around the world. Now it is poised to spark a global hunger crisis as well. After decades of progress in the...
Both McKinsey and the International Monetary Fund published papers in the last week talking about the current and coming food security issues in Africa. McKinsey McKinsey’s paper is Safeguarding Africa’s food systems through and beyond the crisis. TL;DR: Africa is a net importer of food and requires $6 billion worth of imported inputs to grow the food it grows. So far, the breakdowns in the...
