Who invented double entry accounting? The ubiquitous system of general ledgers, income statements, balance sheets, and cashflow statements found throughout businesses and quite a lot of households? This is yet-another of those concept so taken for granted that they seem to have been around “forever”, but thanks to Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance by...
Despite the fact that stock markets have been operating for over 400 years, how exactly they work at the level of individual participate and individual role is rarely documented. Here in the 21st Century most of the accounts are how to make money as an investor, two or three steps away from the actual transactions taking place within the exchange. Which is why it was so fascinating to find and...
If you want to understand the history of Berkshire Hathaway there are two good books to choose from. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, which I summarized six months ago, or The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, summarized below. The main difference between the two tellings is that Lowenstein focuses more on the Buffett Partnership and then Berkshire Hathaway as a...
Nine of every ten startups fail. For the the last decade I’ve been sharing my 30+ years of experience to help lower that horrible statistic. And it is working. Eight of our ten of the companies at Africa Eats are still running, the oldest now over 10 years old and many soon to reach that milestone? How? Business planning. By not stopping with a Plan A, as Plan A rarely succeeds. By not only...
Do you remember my journey down the 8-bit computing rabbit hole? Well… if you are going to do something for fun like designing an upgraded 1976 CPU and writing a 1979 personal computer operating system, you might as well go all the way and write the accompanying book too, in the matching late-1970s style. I read a lot of fan fiction in my free time, but I don’t recall ever seeing much...
After finishing Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, I’m confident that Warren would be quite pleased that I managed to pick up a used copy for just 75ยข at my local library. Warren may be one of the 10 richest people on the planet, but Warren Buffett loves a bargain. Like most owners in Berkshire Hathaway, before reading this book I knew a little about Buffett...
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”...
Creativity is play
Play is openness
Finally… he wrote a book
I wrote a whole book walking entrepreneurs through the process of creating a simple, compelling pitch deck, and I’ve posted a slide-by-slide guide to the standard, 12-15 slide pitch. But there are other frameworks, and here is Sequoia Capitals, as posted by Alex Banks on Twitter. Slide-by-slide Slide 1 This is your first impression. Pick a great name. Spend a little money on a great logo...
Ten years ago I published my first book, The Next Step. This was inspired by a few life changes, including being asked to teach entrepreneurship to MBA candidates at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Washington, and the imminent launch of Fledge, which at the time was one small business accelerator. This first book covered the process from...
