Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
There’s a lot of agita around the supposed plague of wantrepreneurs–posers who are into being entrepreneurs because it’s trendy, rather than because they want to build real businesses. This Fortune piece is a good representative of the genre: http://bit.ly/1f5EX8n “Wannabe entrepreneurs with laptops hog up the physical and digital bandwidth of the Valley right now,” … Continue reading Why I Don’t Worry About Wantrepreneurs
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir recently published their book, “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.” I even wrote about them when I pointed out that busy professionals, like the working poor, face a scarcity–but of time, rather than money. http://bit.ly/1g1Pnod I wish I could say that I’ve already read their book, but alas, … Continue reading Escaping the Scarcity Trap
One of the reasons that VCs and angel investors often get swelled heads is the fact that people kiss our asses all day. It feels good to have smart, talented people speak glowingly of your wisdom and plead for your help. But the dark side of having money is the doubt it creates. If entrepreneurs … Continue reading The problem with having money
The myth of Silicon Valley is that it is a perfect meritocracy where things like wealth and class are irrelevant. The truth is that while Silicon Valley and the startup world are better than most other institutions, wealth and class still play a role. The vast majority of entrepreneurs are young, well-educated, well-off men, who … Continue reading Wealth, Class, and the Startup World
I am a product guy, dating back to my days as a design student at Stanford. I’ve been a fan of Clay Christensen ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and even interviewed him for the student newspaper when I was a Harvard Business School student. Which is why I’m shocked that I hadn’t heard of Clay’s … Continue reading What job are people hiring your product to do?
Atul Gawande is a wonderful writer who happens to be a doctor. His last book, “The Checklist Manifesto,” was a best-seller that focused on the power of simple checklists to change behaviors. Yet his latest article in the New Yorker, “How Do Good Ideas Spread?” focuses on the limits of the relatively simple checklist approach: … Continue reading Behavior Change comes from the Human Touch
Inc Magazine recently ran a great piece on “The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship.” http://bit.ly/15avBVM The piece, which includes some revealing stories from entrepreneurs who found themselves on the brink, touches on some of the psychological reasons why entrepreneurs are particularly vulnerable, such as their tendency to feel emotions more strongly and take more risks than … Continue reading The Overlooked Reason Entrepreneurs Are Vulnerable To Depression
The great Eric Barker recently reviewed the research on fear, and found that there are three secrets to fearlessness, as practiced by courageous types like firefighters and special forces operatives: http://bit.ly/1awzzJt 1. Training and Preparation “The Navy SEAL team that killed Bin Laden trained for weeks inside a full scale replica of the compound they … Continue reading Why Worry?
Here’s another great insight I took away from James Altucher’s book, “Choose Yourself”http://amzn.to/1b59su7 James points out that humans evolved the fight-or-flight reflex for a reason. Stress helped our ancestors survive. When stress hit, cortisol surges through our systems, increasing heart rate and blood pressure, making us ready to either strike out or run away. When … Continue reading 3 steps to make your fight-or-flight reflex work for you, not against you
I was fascinated by a recent PBS video that covered research being done at UC Berkeley on wealth, privilege, and human behavior. The upshot is that in controlled experiments, wealthy people tend to behave more selfishly and dishonestly than the poor:http://bit.ly/1azIjMa Of course, people might think, that’s how they got to be wealthy! But if … Continue reading Wealth and dishonesty are correlated, but the arrow of causality isn’t what you think