Why am I an impact investor and a teacher of social/mission-driven entrepreneurs rather than sticking with software startups like most everyone else? Simple. It’s what the world needs. I spent the first twenty years of my career as a software entrepreneur, building venture-scale software companies backed by some of the biggest name in California venture capital. Five startups, four of which...
I love a long-held, incorrect, now broken assumption, and I found a doozy on Twitter. As happens on social media, someone was ranting. This time about how yoga pants have no business being worn outside of doing yoga. @dieworkwear replied with a lovely history lesson in fashion that not only refuted the rant, but which explained how the modern business suit was once considered low class and how...
Seven years ago I wrote and delivered a talk about how we leave the big problems of the worlds for the philanthropists to solve, but they just don’t have enough money to do that. The 2020 update to that talk is below. Short story shorter… the total amount of money in philanthropy is less than $1 trillion, less than the value of just Microsoft alone, a tiny fraction of the total...
The standard Mercator projection maps of the world make the land at the top and bottom of the world look larger than they really are, which in turn makes land in the middle, like Africa, smaller in comparison. In reality, Africa is humongous:
Cisco and Sysco are pronounced the same. They are both public companies. Both American companies. But that is about all they have in common. Cisco is one of the tech giants, famous for powering the invisible parts of the internet, the backbone routers that send the chunks of your email, videos, and cat pictures between Google servers, Netflix servers, and Snapchat servers to your internet...
How long until the tech investors realize that winners rarely take it all? Winner takes all, Go big or go home, Move fast and break things, etc. doesn’t apply to 99.999% of startup opportunities. Memes like these harm more than they hurt. They don’t help fund great startups. They don’t help put capital to efficient use building financially sustainable companies. While tech...
The backstory of Warren Buffett’s career and the creation of Berkshire Hathaway is a lot more fascinating and interesting than I thought possible. Last we left this story, Buffett had retired in 1969 but was still not yet working full-time with Charlie Munger at his side by 1974. Roger Lowentein’s biography Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, isn’t told chronologically...
“Poverty First” on the Africa Eats blog explains why poverty needs to be addressed before other important impacts. The end of that post includes a link to Dollar Street, a great project on the Gapminder website, created by the late Hans Rosling of TED talk fame and Factfulness book. On Dollar Street you can see pictures and videos of families living on $1/day, $2/day, $3/day and...
Every year or so I find myself lost on a hike through the Forest of All Knowledge, and, so far, have enjoyed those journeys quite a bit more than one my the best YouTubers, CPG Grey. If you’ve never seen his videos, start with Rules for Rulers and Airport Codes and the State Flags. If you want to understand the Forest of All Knowledge and the wayfinding needed to reach the other side, watch...
After 12 years of crushing Lehman Brothers, the Massachusetts Trust, and the Dow Industrial Average, Warren Buffett retired from investing in May 1969, and he was still telling people he was retired in 1974. If you missed my first blog post about Buffett’s retirement, best to start with that one, which left off at the cliffhanger asking how he got from there to Berkshire Hathaway. Halfway...
