Religious Entrepreneurship in Nevil Shute’s Round the Bend
September 8, 2021 § Leave a comment
I am currently podcasting a book club with my father on Nevil Shute‘s novel Round the Bend. The framing question we are using for our discussions is “What is this book about?” There are a number of different themes that have come up (e.g., technology, love, and racism), but my current hypothesis is that the book is primarily about “Religious Entrepreneurship”, a sort of cousin to the Spiritual Entrepreneurship I studied with Hatchery LA.
Here (four chapters in) is how and why I think the author wrote this book. This is all purely hypothetical on my part; I have not done any actual research on his methods. However, this reflects the kind of process that I could see myself going through, based on comments the author made about the context in which the protagonist built his business.
« Read the rest of this entry »Become Like a Billionaire
December 10, 2020 § Leave a comment
- Obsess over a Wildly Important Problem that has not been properly characterized
- Identify a novel point of technological leverage for solving that problem
- Discover a market hurting enough to pay for even a crappy solution to that problem
- Iterate and improve on all the above until you die, fully solve the problem, or hand it over to someone who can do better.
Solutions to Three of the World’s Hardest Problems
December 17, 2018 § Leave a comment
The Problems
(Drawn from the list identified by Social Capital on December 15, 2018)
- Disrupting Programming
- Can we enable people who don’t know programming to build applications?
- Is there a way to structure, pipe, and manage data better?
- Disrupting Education
- Can we educate humans in interesting ways so that they learn to think in multi-disciplinary ways?
- Can we educate people in small, continuous ways so they keep learning throughout their lives?
- Disrupting Urban Transport
- Can we build new transportation methods that enable us to take someone form point A->B faster?
- Is there a way to build better, cleaner cities?
The Solutions
Three Steps to Startup Success (in 15 syllables)
August 17, 2018 § Leave a comment
Sunday School 2.0: Shark Tank for Spiritual Growth
July 29, 2018 § Leave a comment
The purpose of Sunday School 2.0 is to create an adaptive architecture of participation where everyone can experience what it feels like to be children of God, including:
Whole-I-Ness: A New Job to Be Done for Christianity
June 17, 2018 § 2 Comments
In many ways, Western Christianity is now a solution in search of a problem. We are a victim of our own success, having effectively worked ourselves out of a job by eliminating the “pain points” of Judaism, paganism and animism while diffusing most of our benefits into the culture. Like a technology-centric startup, we now find ourselves in the awkward situation of trying to define (or worse, create) problems that need our solution.
The alternative is to go back to the customer discovery phase. Who is our customer? What are their most important jobs to be done? What is the “impossible” thing that, if it could be done, would change everything for them?
What is it that the world most needs? Especially from us?
What is a Technical Co-Founder?
April 8, 2017 § Leave a comment
Most successful startups require both a technical “hacker” and a relational “hustler” to bring them to life. One common pattern is that a “hustler” has access to ideas and potential funding and looks for a “technical co-founder” to join him or her, through a process often compared to finding a spouse.
Best Live Chat Widget for Startups: Jan 2016
January 20, 2016 § Leave a comment
Live chat support software is a great way to ensure visitors to your SaaS site are successful – or at least tell you what went wrong. An in-page widget with a friendly human being on the other side is much more approachable than a link to anonymous forum!
Unfortunately, few startups are able to guarantee 24×7 coverage, which means you need a easy-to-use tool with a good fallback user experience for when nobody is available to chat. Here is what appear to be the best options as of January 2016.
How to Fund Growth
July 2, 2015 § Leave a comment
Most organizations’ financial structures are designed for predictability rather than explosive growth.
To change that, we must:
Invest Constructively in Passion
Specifically:
1. Align Incentives
- Learn what people deeply want.
- Articulate how they can pursue that by contributing to the organization’s mission
2. Unleash Talent
- Learn where people are the happiest and most productive.
- Build support systems that allow them to maximize flow.
3. Virtualize Infrastructure
- Learn which essential tasks nobody is able to do efficiently and awesomely.
- Sell those to a business that sees the opportunity.
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