New Coffee Ventures: Being a co-founder of Keurig has the added advantage of providing me with a seemingly endless supply of coffee and appliance related business plans. Entrepreneurs like to send me their plans and I like to read them. From tortilla makers, to...
Planning Failure Files Problem: It’s 1902 and the city of Hanoi is plagued by rats. Proposed Solution: Eliminate the pesky rodents by encouraging entrepreneurialism. Pay a bounty to citizens for each rat they kill. Sounds pretty straightforward. What could...
The casual reader will look at articles describing Nestle’s recent investment in Freshly and get no further than the intended message: “The $240 billion global conglomerate has invested in an emerging, US meal-kit delivery startup!” It’s all...
“Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Yes, that is the actual quote from astronaut James Lovell on Apollo 13. The past tense is striking, not simply because it differs from the Hollywood rewrite but because it suggests a problem that had already been...
Einstein, the gold standard of references. Quote him early and often; one size fits all applications. Better yet, quote him while quoting celebrity CEOs. In 2017 (as we see below) Albert’s words-of-wisdom paired with those of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, popular...
Those who read my blog posts have probably surmised that I am a curmudgeon, one easily irritated by many Top 10, Top 5, or similar listings. The startup world, as found on the internet, is awash with these enticing shortcuts. They are the Cliffs Notes of the 21st...
