Venture capital and angel investing are realms filled with unspoken assumptions. One such assumption is that companies should burn through substantial capital before even considering profitability. This notion is misguided! Countless startups, often overlooked by these investors, are compelled to be profitable to survive. If these investors took a moment to recognize these startups, they would...
Over the last decade I’ve spent much of my time managing funds (plus one investment holding company) investing in young companies (a.k.a. startups, a.k.a. SMEs). This includes not only equity investments, and revenue-based investments, but also traditional loans. Most of the borrowers understand what a loan is, and how loans work. For those that understand the follow the expectations, debt...
As an entrepreneur and investor I’m constantly running through “what if” analyses. In my off time it seems I do something similar, but there I let creative others come up with new variation. What this looks like is Harry Potter fan fiction, where you already know the characters and story arcs, but where each time you start a new story, you get a different “what if”...
PowerPoint (and Google Slides) are ubiquitous in modern business, but techniques such as properly scaling images are not. This post is a quick guide on scaling images without distorting those images. For example, the image on the left is taken from a real pitch deck. From the shape of the man’s head it is clear this image has been resized, but in doing so the image has been distorted...
It turns out that its only in the USA where payroll is commonly paid more frequently than once per month. As a business owner, I understand the benefits of monthly payroll, as payroll takes time and effort to process, as well as cash in the bank. That said, most likely this is soon to be history, as online services like Gusto make paying payroll just a few clicks of effort, including all the...
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...
The biggest employer in your neighborhood is likely not one big factory or hospital, nor the government or military. It’s unlikely any one corporation at all. The biggest employer nearly everywhere are the multitude of small businesses that operate the plethora of services needed to make up the modern lifestyle.
Devin: What is your superpower?
Luni: I can see paradigms. Most people, they live inside paradigms, and they don’t notice.
“Most people in Africa are farmers, and they’re poor not because they’re uneducated or any less intelligent than anyone else,” says Africa Eats founder and CEO Luni Libes. “They’re poor because no one buys their outputs. No one is buying what they’re growing.”
China had its economic boom… and this year saw its population peak at 1.4 billion and shrinking. India is in the middle of its economic boom… passing up China’s population with another 1.4 billion population, but with that population growth slowing down. Africa is the other place on earth with 1.4 billion people. Not a single country, but 54 countries, but also an area far...
Creativity is play
Play is openness
Finally… he wrote a book
