Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
It’s interesting that so many of the entrepreneurs whose ideas could actually change the world are either still in school (not college) or at the other end of the spectrum. It also seems that most of the 20s/30s/40s crowd are primarily interested in changing their financial status and burnishing their brand. Oops! Seems like I’m getting cynical in my golden years.
I frequently see comments on blogs and social sites along the lines of “I know I could be an entrepreneur if I just had a good idea” or “I want to be an entrepreneur and change the world.”
Sadly, it seems that most are looking for ideas to make them the next Groupon or Foursquare and while that might make them rich, it will hardly change the world.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it won’t change much or get you into the history books.
You change the world by tackling real-world problems, often with hard science.
But you don’t need to be a scientist; self-taught Gary Cola invented the world’s lightest, strongest steel that takes less than ten seconds to make.
In fact, you don’t have to be an adult. Take a look at the winners of the first Google Science Fair and you will be blown away; none are 18 yet and none of their ideas involved the Internet.
Here’s an idea; if you want to change the world look for problems with global impact. Blake Mycoskie is changing the world with shoes and glasses, while Anthony Capone, CEO of Nimbus Water Systems, is changing it with inexpensive, solar-powered, portable water purification systems.
Then there are toilets.
Yes, toilets.
That handy gadget that we take for granted (unless it isn’t working) and that many parts of the world only dream about.
“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet.” –Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global development program
And the Gates Foundation is putting its money where its mouth is.
Look around; think about changing the world by reinventing or innovating something that addresses a basic need.
You may not end up as rich as Mark Cuban, but I guarantee that it’s the sexiest, most exciting, rewarding, feel-good thing you’ll ever do.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
How time and tech fly. I wrote this in 2017 and there’s been a lot of change since then. In short, while hypocrisy has skyrocketed, with the advent of Uber, Lyft, We, and others profitability has fallen way behind. Greed, however, is alive and kicking butt — think We’s Adam Neumann.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Tuesday I cited a post by Scott Belsky on Medium talking about how employees are often conned (my word) by founders, especially unicorns, when it comes to the wealth that is supposed to flow from their ISO.
As pithy as the post was, some of the comments were even pithier. I especially like this one from colorfulfool (21st comment)
If profitability were proportional to hypocrisy, there would be no failed startups in the Valley.
Not just true, but succinctly and elegantly stated.
Founders love to talk about the importance of transparency, trust and authenticity.
However, their stock plans and pitfalls thereof exhibit such a high degree of opaqueness and caveat emptor that they kick a hole the size of Texas in the fabric of the founders’ authenticity.
Another prevalent piece of hypocrisy is “change the world.”
Do you really believe that another dating app or being able to evaluate a new restaurant or another way to buy your groceries will change the world?
While they may impact one’s personal world, they certainly don’t have the impact of something like Mine Kafon.
What is proportional to the Valley’s hypocrisy is its sheer greed.
Actually, when I stop to think about it, the greed probably exceeds even the hypocrisy.
Whether you’re talking invention or innovation, it’s important to remember that it’s often the simplicity of a solution, as opposed to complexity, that makes it truly elegant. Along with simplicity, practicality is important, as seen in the MYCOmmunity Toilet, and focusing on plain old common sense can create a viable business by addressing American bias against ugly produce.
Here are a few that actually have world-changing potential.
Following up on yesterday’s idea to re-freeze the Artic is best described as ‘back to the future’.
A California-based company called SkyCool Systems is in the early stages of manufacturing a coolingsystem that’s more energy efficient than anything humans have used for a century.It’s doing it using radiative cooling, a concept that was used in the Middle East and India hundreds of years ago.
Inventions like this are potential game-changers as the world stares down a growing climate crisis, spurred by emissions pumped into the atmosphere by human activity. Globally, about 12% of non-carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to refrigeration and air conditioners, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
There is a lot of the talk about “food disruption,” mostly focused on new ways to grow food, plant-based protein, etc. But ending food waste would go a long way to feeding the world’s population.
Europe is way ahead of us when it come to reducing food waste.
Nearly 2 million tonnes of food is wasted by the food industry every year in the U.K. alone. Of that waste, 250,000 tonnes is still edible, equating to roughly 650 million meals. When you consider the 8.4 million people in the U.K. struggling to afford to eat, there’s obviously a problem.
And that’s where the Danish-born Too Good To Go app comes in. The app, which is available in 11 countries in Europe, is simple: it connects users to stores, such as supermarkets, restaurants and bakeries, that have unsold, surplus food.
R3’s software assesses criminal records, as well as credit histories, employment experience and information self-reported by individuals, and produces a numeric indicator for each individual predicting future trends. Scores run from 300 to 850, to mimic the standard framework for conventional credit histories. The higher the number, the less risky the person.
Gina Périer and Alexander Egebjerg have designed an industrial-standard female toilet for festivals and outdoor events that allows people to pee sitting down quickly and safely.
Named Lapee, the pink plastic structure has three urinals arranged in a spiral, with curving back rests that provide privacy while allowing the user to remain aware of their surroundings.
All of these, even Lapee, have the potential to create major change in our world.
Ask any entrepreneur about their idea and at some point most will claim it will “change the world” in some way — such as making it easier to hook up.
But some truly want to change the world֫ — or at least help save it.
And not all are young, nor are they techies.
One of the most impressive I’ve heard about recently is Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an Indonesian designer, and his two colleagues, Denny Lesmana Budi and Fiera Alifa.
Kotahatuhaha’s team set out to create a prototype for the “re-iceberg-isation” of parts of the Arctic by freezing seawater into hexagonal blocks of ice that nest together to form new ice floes.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
I love the story of startup Be My Eyes, because it highlights an entrepreneur who really is changing the world and illustrates the good that comes from a lack of funds.
I read the story in the Lean Startup blog and thought it worth sharing.
“Be My Eyes is just a simple app that basically makes a video call between two persons (…) we have volunteers who sign up and say ‘Yes, I am available to help a blind person see something.’”
The volunteer presence adds an extra layer of independence to the visually impaired person’s life, rather than worrying that they are interrupting or imposing on someone.
All the volunteers do it look at their screen and tell the caller what they see, such as the ingredients in a recipe.
Be My Eyes boasts a global network of volunteers speaking a variety of languages and is always recruiting more.
The great thing is the volunteers can respond from wherever they are and the calls only take a few minutes. If they can’t take the call, no problem, since the system calls multiple people for each request.
Be My Eyes has a number of programs to encourage company involvement, including a way to provide product support to vision impaired/blind customers. This is a great opportunity for startups that want to give back, but have neither time or money to donate.
As to the advantage of minimal funding, it kept them from the typical tech error of over-engineering and forced them to keep the app very simple. Good move.
They had an overly long list of features they wanted to put into the app in the beginning, but which lack of funds prevented. (…) Be My Eyes hasn’t had many requests for all the “brilliant ideas” they had in the beginning. “So maybe it was a really good thing we didn’t overload the app.”
Be it as an individual or involving your family, friends or company be someone’s eyes, you’ll be amazed at the difference doing so will make in your life, as well as theirs.
Yesterday’s Oldie talked about one of the biggest lies perpetrated on an already vulnerable Millennial audience — relentless striving 24/7.
It’s a great article — equal parts enlightening and alarming.
Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape.
According to Erin Griffith (@eringriffith), writing in the New York Times, the biggest drivers perpetuating the scam do so to line their own pocket.
“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp.
In 2016 Marissa Mayer, of Yahoo infamy, claimed a person could work 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”
Many companies extoll the approach and incorporate it into their culture, but WeWork has gone further and built its business around it and is a good example of how this philosophy in action looks more like a cult than a culture.
It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.
But it took Gary Vaynerchuk, the patron saint of hustling and founder of One37pm to “glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.”
It’s a lifestyle that has made a fetish of convenience, not for the sake of a better, more well-rounded life, but as a way to free up more time to work.
Finally, without doubt, it can be stated that hustle is a culture with no redeeming features. It sucks humanity from its followers, then uses up and destroys the most devout.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Generation Y is the more accurate name, but you probably know them as Millennials. I, along with the rest of media, have been writing about them for more than ten years — too often disparagingly — and far too simplistically.
They didn’t deserve it.
So this week we’ll take another look at that much maligned generation.
Ryan Healy starts his post by saying, “There’s no doubt that Generation Y will fundamentally change corporate America.”
It’s an interesting post, filled with the brashness, dreams and optimism I’ve come to expect as each new generation enters adulthood—whether I read about or lived through them.
Still more interesting are the comments, whether they agree or not.
I can’t help siding with Carlos who says, “Every generation thinks that their generation is unique. The truly gifted on each generation is and will affect change, but this notion that today’s 20-somethings are any more intelligent or capable than those from 10-40 years ago is naive,” although I would change his 40 years to 4000.
Each generation, going back to Year One BC, sets out to change its world and in doing so lays the groundwork for the next generation to change it and the process repeats itself throughout all history.
Some of the changes are good and some not; some seek to address errors previously made, while some target good changes gone bad as a result of social or technical progress.
Changes can be revolutionary or evolutionary; they fuel both society’s progression — and its regression.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
The mantra of startups is “change the world.”
That slogan seems to be the one thing that startups have in common; they all claim their product/service will do it.
No matter how silly, invasive, unnecessary, or just plain creepy.
One of the creepiest (say the comments) is MobiLimb.
MobiLimb is a robotic finger attachment that plugs in through a smartphone’s Micro USB port, moves using five servo motors, and is powered by an Arduino microcontroller. It can tap the user’s hand in response to phone notifications, be used as a joystick controller, or, with the addition of a little fuzzy sheath accessory, it can turn into a cat tail.
Creativity should be celebrated and innovation can be a wonderful thing — when it isn’t just plain stupid.
In 2011, the Gates Foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to bring sustainable sanitation and hygiene solutions to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who do not have such access. The challenge, which is ongoing, is a global call to researchers around the world to develop innovative and financially profitable systems to manage human waste. The systems must operate off-grid, cost less than $.05 per day, and function in poor, urban settings.
Even corporate giants got into the effort.
Kohler—a leading U.S. manufacturer of toilets (…) received a Gates grant in 2014, describes these toilets as “stand-alone units that take in wastewater, then disinfect and purify it to be reused for toilet flushing.”
But water is also a scarce commodity, even when it’s reused.
Now, from a group of students at the University of British Columbia, comes the MYCOmmunity Toilet.
The MYCOmmunity Toilet consists of a mycelium tank that is small enough to sit inside each individual dwelling. (…) when it’s full, the toilet is buried in the ground or left somewhere out of the way for another 30 days to allow the composting process–aided by the mushroom spores–to finish. Each toilet includes local seeds, which can be planted on top of the toilet, allowing plants or crops to grow from the human waste.
Although it was designed specifically with refugee camps in mind, it would seem to have far greater potential.
The MYCOmmunity Toilet qualifies as an invention — with the potential to truly change the world.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
