People have different style preferences. So much of what makes advice good is the right style. . So I randomly came up with this system last night (applicable to any advice that is given or received in any kind of relationship, not specifically formal advisor/advisee relationships) to be good at advice Different levels of advice Level 0 — words of encouragement and acknowledgement: You don’t actually give advice.

Guidance to shut down all non-essential services; business owners have right to defy Employees have right to work from home; protected from retaliation Retail, restaurant, other in-person workers have right to leave of absence; can collect PUA (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance — $600 per week allocated for those unemployed due to…

This is the part 2 following 33 Books I’ve Read and Reread in the Past 3 Years from March 2018 (2 years ago). I love to read and here are a few select picks from the past couple years. …

Building Products That Help People be Their Aspirational Selves Without Going Bankrupt It’s hard to succeed with a product that only makes money if people behave as their aspirational selves. Your churn is too high. Examples: Gym memberships Goal setting apps Meditation apps If you want to make money on these you have to get paid upfront or on a lock-in subscription…

I remember sitting in on a meeting with an angel investor who decided to pass on the deal and asking why. Investor: “She wasn’t likable enough.” Me: “Oh yea, what did she do?” Investor: “You heard the way she was talking to me.” Me: “Yea… she was quite direct I…

I went back and forth for a long time whether people are black and white or many shades of grey; whether morality is relative or absolute. To make sense of a worldview based on a framework of moral relativism I had to do all sorts of mental gymnastics and the…

I love to read. There’s richness and complexity in the concepts you absorb through reading that you can’t get from listening to talks or having someone explain something to you. My reading list skews towards the philosophical, historical, sciences, startups and venture capital. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but excluding…

When you think of Silicon Valley what do you think of? Maybe you think of Elon Musk going to space or Peter Thiel searching for immortality. Maybe you think of scrappy entrepreneurs using breakthrough technologies to change the world. In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs benefit from networks that provide insider information…

Successful venture capital in fragmented, emerging markets differs from the developed world. Since WOMENA’s launch a year and a half ago I have seen over eight hundred pitch decks, listened to over a hundred live pitches, conducted due diligence on about thirty startups, and finally overseen investment in four startups…