Category: Entrepreneurship
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The Future of LA Tech: Manufacturing, not Media
The city of Los Angeles has long been the global capital of film. Hollywood’s storytelling power is unmatched, and its movies have influenced cultures far and wide. But LA has a deeply diversified economy beyond Hollywood and most recently the city has rapidly emerged as a hub for technology companies. This rapid rise has a…
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The Power of Float-Based Business Models
Markets have been core to commerce since the first day humans began transacting. In the last 10 years some of the biggest tech companies that have been created have been marketplaces intermediating new and old markets. Amazon has intermediated the market between buyers and SMB sellers of goods. Uber has intermediated the market between riders…
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The Rental Economy
This article was originally published in The Startup. One of the determining characteristics of any economy is who owns what assets. Different economic systems (capitalism, socialism, communism) differ primarily based on who owns and who rents capital assets. Ownership of assets shifts and evolves over time thanks to technological disruption, economies of scale and shifting…
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Death by a Thousand Cuts in SAAS
This article was originally published in The Startup. If you are a business today you are faced with a dizzying array of SAAS tools across all your core business functions: accounting, marketing, sales, payroll, recordkeeping — the list goes on. While every tool that is adopted brings benefits (time saved, better visibility etc) each tool also comes…
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Tokens Are Equity
2017 has been a good year for all things Blockchain. It’s a talking point in every major stakeholder in society — from governments to businesses and everyone in-between. While there are diverse applications for Blockchain, the application most people are familiar with are cryptocurrencies. In the past year numerous currencies have debuted through what has come to be known…
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Relevance, Not Volume
Funnel is a popular word in the world of tech. You can “funnelize” everything these days. Everyone has a sales funnel, a customer funnel, a talent funnel and so on. But I think we’ve failed to appreciate how the dynamics of funnels have changed dramatically in the past 10 years. Funnels have long existed but…
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How to Start a Startup at Northeastern
Ever since its founding in 1898, Northeastern has been an unorthodox, experimental university highlighted by its acclaimed and hugely popular cooperative education model. In the world of entrepreneurship, Northeastern has continued this flare for the unorthodox and the unique and has built a complex, rich and high-paced entrepreneurial ecosystem. Today, there are over 270 active…
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Micromoments in Conversational Commerce
This post was originally published in Chatbots Magazine. There are few industries as large, as exciting and as crucial to the economy as ecommerce. By 2020 ecommerce will be a $4 trillion dollar industry. While ecommerce is filled with giant companies, few have had the influence on ecommerce and customer acquisition that Google has. The Google…
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Abstraction & Substraction
Abstraction & Substraction The world is more complex, interconnected and interdependent than ever before. Information is flowing in all directions at an unprecedented scale and as individuals we are increasingly on the receiving end of more information, from more mediums and in more formats than ever before. This is a growing problem and it can…
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Economic Democracy in the Startup Age
With the collapse of communism and the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc in 1991 the triumph of liberal capitalism seemed complete. The liberalization of countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and of economies worldwide saw an explosion of trade coinciding with a period of profound economic growth from the late 1980s to mid-2000s. Capitalism seemed…
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The Doctrine of Three
We often remark quixotically that life is chaotic, random and uncertain. We talk of how one should appreciate every moment because one can never know when your last day will be. We observe how you shouldn’t expect to have a plan and follow it to the letter in life because, well, life happens. At some…
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Boston’s Startup Story
The Boston of the 50s, 60s and 70s was a powerhouse of American innovation and enterprise muscle. MIT was powering out a series of jumps forward in computer technology, and major tech companies like Digital Equipment, Wang, and Data General are all based in the Greater Boston area. But this innovative spark and muscle slowly…