The Forest of All Knowledge

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 The Race to Win Staten Island and Someone Dead Ruined my Life… Again.

My own journeys include:

1. Understanding wealth inequality, which started with Capital in the Twenty-First Century and (mostly) ended three years later with all the book reports and blog posts in the Economics topic.

2. Two paragraphs in The Wealth of Nations mentioning the unique currency of the Pennsylvania colony, later printed by Benjamin Franklin after he moved down from Boston. Apparently I didn’t blog that story but it did start me collecting worthless currencies.

3. The question about Apple, Atari, and Commodore not improving the MOS 6502. That led to months down a rabbit hole in the forest and a lot of interesting answers posted to the Nostalgia category.

4. The latest surprise about Warren Buffett retiring in 1969. Two books half read trying to understand what happened, when, and why.

All this on top of my thirty+ year stroll through the forest understanding entrepreneurship, generally documenting my learnings as books or Advice blog posts. And my decade+ hike up mount investing, understanding the history of venture capital, the shortcomings of the VC business model, and alternatives like revenue-based investing and holding companies.

I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...

There are so many lessons in startups, startup investing, and technology adoption that come from looking back a few decades. For example, I’m out of the 1970s nostalgic computing rabbit hole, but that journey has subsequently led to reviewing the technological progress of the late 1900s and early 2000s. This week, that was the rise of the RISC-based CPU, which was then obviously going to...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...

I’ve never been able to explain why I have so hard of a time believing consultants. What is it about their role that make their conclusions so often so wrong? None other than Steve Jobs explains… in less than two minutes. “I don’t think there is anything inherently evil in consulting” … but “You never really taste it.” – Steve Jobs Share...

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...