What my mentor said in week six of due diligence, and why I still repeat it. Six weeks into due diligence I had a list, and the list was bad. No product management to speak of. An org chart that made no sense when you followed it from the top down. Nobody inside the company could tell me what the...

I saw it in ten minutes. She had been inside it for three years. Three months ago I took a call from Megan, a former colleague and a good friend, and inside five minutes she told me she and her husband were thinking about selling the business or shutting it down. I had to ask her to say it again!...

I spent thirty years running toward a beach. Getting there is how I learned it was the wrong direction. I came to this country with no money and paid my own way through school. I took my first job as a software engineer in 1988, earned an MBA, and moved into consulting for two reasons I was very ...

Profit is an opinion. Cash is a fact. And the day debt enters your business, bought or built, the two numbers split. My son is 27, a licensed personal trainer who genuinely loves the work and is good at it. He studied sports management, minored in entrepreneurship, and has wanted to run his own f...

The strength of your runway was decided long before the day you look up and see how little of it is left. In December of 2020, a friend referred me into a startup in the Pacific Northwest doing genuinely exciting work in cloud security. Two ex-Microsoft product executives, Ivy League pedigrees, a...

Two years ago, I read Arthur Brooks's book “From Strength to Strength.” A friend had gifted it to me while I was considering launching a new online learning business. The last one I launched at 38, so doing it again at 56 was scary to say the least. The typical questions: What if I blow through a...