A much better manifesto of Capitalism is Marjorie Kelly’s The Divine Right of Capital (amazon.com). In it, Kelly explains in greater detail the divide between capital and labor, some of its origins, and dives deep into the assumptions latent within the current system which she hopes to see uncovered and overturned. Kelly repeatedly returns to the metaphor of feudalism, with the noble Board...
Speaking of manifestos… in 1958, 110 years after Marx, Louis Kelso wrote The Capitalist Manifesto as an alternative solution to the rift between capital and labor. This is one of those books with a handful of interesting ideas, wrapped in 265 pages of repetitive rhetoric, closer in style to a long academic paper than a New York Times nonfiction bestseller. None the less those few ideas...
Jumping forward to 1848, 72 years from The Wealth of Nations, Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States experienced an economic revolution in the Industrial Revolution. Steam power, coal, gaslight, railroads, etc. With that change came the industrialization of work, with far more powerful capitalists and unpowerful laborers. From that change came Karl Marx’s Manifesto of the...
Continuing my dive into Capitalism, I headed to the beginning, to An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, better known simply as Adam Smith’s masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. This is one of those books you hear about so often you think already know, but which you really only know of until you crack it open and dig into the details. And wow, are there ever details...
Income inequality is in the news, along with the populist Brexit, Trump, and La Pen movements that have sprung from the consequences of that issue. Before those votes, I wondered if there were any real-world consequences from income inequality, or whether it just made good sky-is-falling news stories. One book that greatly helped me understand what is truly going on is Thomas Piketty’s...
[This post is targeted to the hundreds of colleges and universities who teach Entrepreneurship, along with the thousands of entrepreneurship training programs] Seventeen years ago, when I first taught Software Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington, 90% of the curriculum was guest speakers. Good stories, but not enough structure for the students. Five years ago, when I was asked to...
How do you measure, compare and aggregate the impact of organizations that aim to do good in the world? Measure, whether in a nonprofit project or for-profit social enterprise? Compare, using a universal measure to easily compare a rooftop of solar panels vs. an acre of re-planted forest vs. 500 vaccines vs. jobs vs. food vs. happiness? Aggregate, as in taking the sum of any or all impacts...
When I set out to write The Next Step: Guiding you from idea to startup, I imagined someday I’d go back to provide more details on each of the topics covered within that book. Many diversions later, I’ve finally started fulfilling that vision. Today, The Next Step: A guide to startup sales and marketing is now available, here on this site, as well as on paper and Kindle via Amazon...
After a decade and a half starting and building startups, I woke up one morning with the desire to help other entrepreneurs. I thought it might be possible for them not to repeat all the mistakes I’ve made myself, and seen my friends make. I thought they might like to have a serial entrepreneur to call upon for advice. This epiphany came to me before the latest wave of entrepreneurial...
