7 billion people, 80% are farmers… I’VE WORKED WITH DOZENS of entrepreneurs born and raised in dozens of different countries. One similarity between all of them is that they were all taught how to write a proper essay in school. The same three-part structure that my children were taught in their American schools. Essays, essays, and more essays, with very little instruction in how to write...
It’s good to be out of debt… even when that means finishing David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I had started on this book before diving into the rabbit hole of The Wealth of Nations, Communist Manifesto, Capitalist Manifesto, Divine Right of Capital, Et al, revisiting Debt’s 400 pages on occasion to clean my mental palate between other books. Debt is another...
Great advice from an entrepreneur who has built an amazing interrelated set of companies: [hr] “Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?” That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic...
The power of peers is greatly underestimated… Fledge is based around cooperation and support between fledglings, not competition. That is part of the Fledge culture, and is seen repeatedly on a daily basis for all ten weeks of the program. The result of this culture is an additional source of advice, beyond the Managing Director and mentors. Given 7 teams per cohort, this is not an insignificant...
If nothing else, educate… The entrepreneurial education at Fledge is based on The Next Step series of books, written by Fledge’s founder and Seattle Managing Director, Luni Libes. These books were inspired by Luni’s efforts at teaching Entrepreneurship to the MBA candidates at the Pinchot University, as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Washington’s Center for Commercialization...
Education, advice, mentorship, promotion, and a network of support… The Fledge program is based on the best practices of TechStars, with improvement, plus a few adjustments to better suit conscious companies. The biggest differences lie around culture, education, support by the fellow participants, and the format of the on-stage presentations, and the structure of the stipend/investment. The...
Bouncing down an unpaved road in a far western Kenya (1 2 3 4 5 6), in the Rift Valley, I had a profound thought… There have been people living here for over four million years! That is an incredibly long history. An unfathomable depth of experience living off that land. In comparison, the Puget Sound region where I live wasn’t seen by human beings until about 6,000 years ago, when the last ice...
An ongoing discussion during the Investors Circle trip to Nairobi was about the tradeoffs between the companies founded by Africans and those founded by Americans, Europeans, and Indians. We met a few of both, and thus had a first-hand look to make (anecdotal) comparisons. Overall, the consensus was that natives like GreenChar and Totohealth had the advantage of deeply understanding their market...
The last time I presented at an event for investors, the first five people all asked me the same question, “Any exits yet?” The more years I spend focusing on revenue-based investing, the more that question is getting on my nerves. Perhaps some of that is on me, as the talks I give are generally titled “Investing without Exits” or “Alternative Exits” or...
What is the story with the unicorns? Is there a tech investment bubble? What on earth is going in in the venture investing world? The short answer is that we’re at a crux of a paradigm. The paradigm wrapped around investing venture capital in startups. Few people I talk to know that venture capital, as practiced today, is a fairly new concept. People instead assume...
