Conscious Capitalism

In June of 2010, something really extraordinary happened in the world of Philanthropy. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet began recruiting for what is known as “The Giving Pledge.” As many of you know, the giving pledge is a promise made by the wealthiest individuals in the world, mostly billionaires, to give away the majority of […]

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Continual Partial Attention

We live in a connected world, and it is a wonderful world. Twenty years ago it would have been hard to fathom that every bit of information we need could be found by clicking an app on a mobile phone. This access to information is, of course, unlimited: trivia, a definition, personal background information, and […]

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Set the Context For Your Investors

I recently recorded a Podcast for Gavin McCully’s The Pitch Deck – Episode #53. Gavin offers a number of other great episodes.  Enjoy   Ep #53: Jeffrey Finkle, Angel Investor/Coach, ARC Angel Fund – Set the Context For Your Investors Joining me today on The Pitch Deckpodcast, our guest brings an amazing new perspective, which I don’t believe […]

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5 THINGS YOU CAN DO TODAY TO SAVE MONEY ON DILIGENCE LATER

A company whose board I serve recently decided to accept an offer to be acquired. About one third of the way through the due diligence period, I checked in with legal counsel to see where the legal bill stood and found out that we were already at $200k…..whaaaaat? This was close to the overall budget […]

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Pinpointing Problems Worth Solving (Part Three of Three)

In part two of this series I wrote about how I believe that founding CEOs who are deep domain experts are the best at getting to product-market fit in a capital efficient way. I profiled ServiceChannel’s CEO’s 30+ year history solving problems in the contractor and facility management space. In this post I will profile […]

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Pinpointing Problems Worth Solving (Part Two of Three)

In my last post, I wrote about how many startups fail because they try solving problems no one really has or cares enough about to spend money to solve. I mentioned that while poor execution is responsible for many startup failures, you can’t execute your way out of a bad idea. In the venture capital […]

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Pinpointing Problems Worth Solving (Part One of Three)

Finding a good problem to solve with a startup can be like finding a needle in a haystack. “Haystack. End of Summer” Claude Monet One of my favorite blog posts is Paul Graham’s How to get startup ideas. Paul is one of my top-five bloggers, along with Marc Suster, Ben Horowitz, Nir Eyal, and of course […]

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The Undervalued Witness to History

During my 20 years as an operating executive, when I would interview a job candidate I would often think: “Is he/she a ‘maker of history’ or a ‘witness to history?’” Candidates would tell great stories where they play the hero: “I created a cross-function marketing allocation process around quarterly initiatives, which included members of each […]

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