A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Miki and I want to congratulate Jerry Nemorin, founder and CEO of Lendstreet, a fintech startup. As a board member I’ve been with Jerry from the start and know how hard he’s worked, as well as how much he cares.

He cares about his team, his company, and his investors, but most of all he cares about Lendstreet’s ability to help its customers to a better life.

Lendstreet restructures debt for consumers in financial distress. A badly kept secret is that healthcare expenses is the number one reason that people go bankrupt and families lose their homes. In fact, most middle and low income families live on a shoestring — the average family only has  a few hundred dollars in the bank to deal with emergencies.

As a consequence, a seemingly small thing like the car breaking down can put an entire family spiraling downward to homelessness. Lendstreet interrupts this cycle by using technology to restructure the debt and ensure that the family has the necessary liquidity to get through hard times. In addition, they educate people on financial best practices, including how to improve their credit score.

In essence, Lendstreet provides technology-based solutions and resources that reduce consumer debt, increase credit scores, and improve savings. Since its inception, Lendstreet has helped customers successfully reduce their debt by nearly 40 percent and improve their credit score by an average of 100 points.

Lendstreet was founded in 2013, and Jerry has spent the intervening years building its business to support some of the most vulnerable people in this country. Sure, he’s raised money, a difficult proposition for a business focused on helping the bottom 80% of the population, instead of the top 20%.

He has been relentlessly tenacious in his drive to bring the company and its products to market and in raising the necessary capital to be able to help an increasing number of people.

This week he reached an important milestone in his quest — he managed to get top institutional investors to participate in funding a solution to the tune of $120 million.

“Lower and middle-income Americans are struggling and relying on high interest credit cards for their day-to-day survival. These investments will enable us to scale our platform and reach more consumers who are struggling with too much debt. Prudential, CIM, Radicle Impact, and our other investors share our vision of finally giving mainstream Americans access to an equitable and transparent alternative for their mounting credit card debt.”–Jerry Nemorin

My hope is that by helping people get back on a solid financial footing, by reducing their debt and coaching them on spending wisely, they will be able to stabilize economically and generate upward mobility, as opposed to treading water or, much worse, drowning.

CONGRATULATIONS,  and !

(In 2013 Jerry covered The Innovation Summit for MAPping Company Success.)

Image credit: HikingArtist

I am in Chicago this week for a mini conference and learned a few things about the importance of attention to detail and preparation.

When my team and I arrived to set up our booth the first thing we learned is we had not paid attention to the details. We had not completed a step in our registration to have our badge scanner work. Initially I thought this would be an issue, but when I had valuable conversations with people on the floor I started asking them to write down their info in my notebook. The result was actual eye contact while speaking and getting a sense of the problem in their own words.  Crisis averted but a rookie mistake.

During the course of the conference it was clear that the person in charge of setting up the event is a rockstar. She worked long hours, was dedicated to her role and was literally running around to get things done the day of. The venue was amazing, the speakers fresh and the food was on time.

However, about mid way through the morning the unexpected happened. The power went out.

Power outages and tech events typically do not mix well. As the information became available we leaned that it was not just the venue, but a few city blocks that were without power.

I’m not sure this event was in any contingency plan, but adjustments were made right away. The guest speaker lost his slides, but was able to speak from memory without a microphone. The attendees were forced to look up from laptops without WiFi and have true conversations. And the windows were opened to allow fresh air with the AC out.

The power ended up being out for 2 plus hours and it was interesting to see how people adjusted. The end result though was a memorable experience that led to some positive reviews from attendees. They appreciated that we could not control the power, liked the venue and enjoyed the conversations. Perhaps we can repeat the process next year.

Image credit: Miriam Delirium

The last two posts reminded me of something KG sent (also used here).

It neatly sums up the state of our nation these days.

Actually, it probably sums up the state of every nation on Earth.

That said, it has nothing to do with politics or who is on which side.

You can find every kind of MAP, from far left to far right to none of the above, represented in each of the three categories mentioned.

The pigs go back to the dawn of humanity.

The wolves, too, although their tools today reach farther and are more predatory than ever before.

Sadly, the sheep are multiplying and becoming ever more sheeplike .

Image credit: Internet meme

Yesterday’s post cited a quote from a book, “Power is the ability to sustain illusion.”  At the time, I used it in a post that focused on the idea that powerful people often believed and acted as if the rules didn’t apply to them.

Of course, powerful people — glitterati, politirati, digirati, corporati, religirati — have acted on that premise for centuries; still do and always will.

But there is a difference, actually two differences, between then and now.

The first is the new technology that is blurring and even erasing the separation between truth and lies, reality and fantasy.

The second is far more worrying.

It’s not just people’s willingness to turn a blind eye and rationalize what’s happening, AKA, business as usual.

Rather, it’s their willingness to actively embrace it — often with their eyes wide open.

Not as active protagonists, but as passive ones.

It’s not that they are bad people, but as Edmund Burke said, The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Image credit: Angie Trenz

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.

I wrote this 9 years ago, long before Facebook, Uber, Zenefits, Google, and a myriad of other companies that started on the light side of ‘but me’ and, over time, migrated to the dark side.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few days ago I read Fourth Down, Death, an old mystery by Michael T. Hinkemeyer, and I’ve been thinking about how true was the statement, “Power is the ability to sustain illusion.”

We see the illusions fail all the time in the news these days—think Enron, WorldCom, options backdating.

What will it take for the corporate elite to realize that the illusion is fragile and that it takes very little to crack the power that sustains it?

Put another way, when will they stop operating on a “but me” basis? ” As in, “the rules apply to everybody, but me.”

However, “but me” is also

• the mindset that yields the greatest inventions, as when two brothers thought, “everybody thinks that man can’t fly, but us,” and fosters innovation at any level;
• what lets each of us continue functioning in our crazy world, knowing that the bad and scary stuff we hear about in the news can happen to anybody, but me.

Think of “but me” as having both a light side and a dark side—then choose the side on which you want to play.

Please join me tomorrow for an updated look at the quote that started me thinking way back in 2007.

Image credit: Yaniv Ben-Arie

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Did you read Ryan’s Journal yesterday? One of the things he talks about it the importance of starting with ‘why’, instead of just rushing in.

I get it, ‘because I’ve always been a ‘why’ person.

Founders would do well to ask ‘why’ more often, as in “Why are we building/doing this?”

The importance of that particular ‘why’ is data-driven, which is important, since the tech world especially believes that everything important is data driven.

I can cite dozens of sources, but I’ll use data from CB Insights, since it’s a startup and it’s product is data.

Tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather than those that serve a market need was cited as the No. 1 reason for failure, noted in 42% of cases. Or, as Treehouse Logic said, “We had great technology, great data on shopping behavior, great reputation as a thought leader, great expertise, great advisors, etc, but what we didn’t have was technology or business model that solved a pain point in a scalable way.”

A lot of people don’t like asking ‘why’, because, more than most, it is an uncomfortable question.

It usually requires introspection and frequently doesn’t return the desired answer.

Founders don’t like the why question for the same reasons, especially when it interferes with their beloved vision, let alone their worldview.

There are two ways of internalizing that data.

The obvious: Not asking ‘why’ increases my chance of failing by 42%.

The less obvious: Asking ‘why’ increases my chances of succeeding 42%.

If you subscribe to the less obvious approach, or want to, the simplest was to implement it is to embrace the Lean Startup methodology

Doing so may mean abandoning your initial vision, or, at the least, tweaking it, which could bruise your ego, but the payoff is huge.

And the bruising should be easier to handle knowing that you got a 42% boost on the road to success.

Image credit: HikingArtist

I wrote a piece last week on the idea of embracing the rush of our lives and how it’s a human condition. While to some degree I do think it’s a sign of our times and not altogether negative, I do see the impact it has made.

In school I read about the effects of coffee on the industrial revolution. The idea was that the widespread use of the stimulant allowed shift workers to operate all hours of the day and night.

Of course, we, in the modern day, have benefited on the backs of their labor; however, we have also learned from the negative aspects of that society. At least in this country, we no longer employ children, we have tougher safety laws, and regulation.

Back to my point of embracing rushing, I was wrong to take it on from a single standpoint. Through this past week I have searched out resources to learn more about the effects of our gadget driven world and what it has gotten us.

I titled this post “Start with why” and it’s a rip off from a great book of the same name by Simon Sinek.

That book focuses on sales and challenges sales people to start by asking why someone would want to buy their product/service and then shape a solution around that.

However, he also speaks about the current state of our society and it’s character.

If we could sum up the modern First World in one word it would be addiction and not just to drugs.

Many in my generation are addicted to our phones, our streaming services and our reliance on same day delivery. We can order anything, watch any show and contact any person in the world. In an odd twist of fate I can get live tweets from our current president and tweet him back.

As a current digital addict I tend to look at others and see it as normal.

When I am at the park I tend to not use my phone and see that others are. As a result I figure I must be balanced.

However, first thing in the morning I check my phone and look at my notifications. If you were to follow me on a social network you would see that I don’t post a ton. In reality I tend to not think I have much to say that is important for the world to know and I limit my posts for food recommendations while in new cities.

However, I check all the networks multiple times a day. I get updated on the latest coffee from the person I had 10th grade English with and also get to see the latest from our President.

It’s an odd time to be alive.

Why do we do this?

One reason is dopamine. It is the same drug that opiates release and it’s triggered naturally when we see activities or people responding to our posts. That’s why we look to see the comments, the likes and the re-shares.

It’s also why we tend to get worse over time with our usage. We need more and more dopamine to feel good.

I wrote all of this to say one thing.

Maybe we shouldn’t always embrace the rushing and start with the why.

Why are we doing this; who do we care about; why are we not happy.

Image credit: Ksayer1

Why in the world do so many people choose to run at 60% efficiency?

“Not me,” I hear you saying.

Yes, you.

It’s the price you pay for enabling ‘notifications’ on your phone.

Your phone sitting there, constantly lighting up throughout the day creates this pattern in the brain scientists call “switch cost.”

It essentially means when there is an interruption, such as a notification, we switch our attention away from the task, then have to return afterwards — which is costly in terms of brain power, as well as time.

There are a finite number of hours in the day and we plan in an effort to spend them wisely, so it makes sense that we should plan how to spend our daily allotment of brain power/energy just as wisely.

Considering the toll, notifications doesn’t seem to fall in the wise column.

“We think it interrupts our efficiency with our brains, by about 40%,” Scott Bea, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic told CBS. “Our nose is always getting off the grindstone, then we have to reorient ourselves.”

Beyond reducing effectiveness, notifications near constant interruptions directly effects our brains.

According to a study, presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America last November, the interruptions from alerts to your smartphone could be altering your brain chemistry. (…) Constantly waiting for the next notification can put you on edge, meaning when it comes, your body releases cortisol, causing you heart rate to jump.

Even if you scoff at the addictive and brain-altering effects of notifications, do you really want to stake your career progression/success on functioning at 60% efficiency?

After all, it is your choice.

Check out some of the other posts/links about the myth of multitasking and its negative effects.

Image credit: Erik Pitti

There’s an old saying that stuff comes in threes.

A couple of months ago I wrote Privacy Dies as Facebook Lies.

Today I read a new article regarding Facebook’s data-sharing policies with so-called “service providers,” AKA, hardware partners.

Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung (…) to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books. (…)

Some device partners can retrieve Facebook users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data. Tests by The Times showed that the partners requested and received data in the same way other third parties did.

Facebook’s view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user’s Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties. (…)

Last Friday KG sent me this image.

Considering the three together made me wonder.

Is Facebook a wolf or a pig?

Or both.

Image credit: Internet meme

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.

I came across these two posts several weeks apart. The ideas they presented seemed to logically follow each other. This is strange only because the first one shown was written in 2013 and the following post in 2009.

Regarding the actual content, it’s still valid, only more so.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Three Categories of People

People have longed for an all-knowing leader who they can mindlessly follow and abdicate their decision-making, since time began.

Some seek this all-knowing leader in religion; others look to politics, while still others believe that business is a better source.

Their time would be better spent accepting the reality that no such thing exists anywhere in any walk of life.

Then there are the people who aspire to be that all-knowing leader.

To that end they amass thousands of friends and followers, network their way well beyond what’s needed to be a LinkedIn Lion and work ceaselessly to raise their Klout score.

Finally, there are those who know without doubt that all-knowing leaders are in the same category as the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Clause.

Which are you?

Follow Yourself; Partner With Others

I have a great idea to make the world a better place.

• Everybody who aspires to the cult of all-knowing leader stops.
• Everybody who longs for an all-knowing leader embraces the reality that no such thing exists.

Replacing these, everybody would

• learn leadership skills;
• apply them constantly to themselves; and
• occasionally in the outside world as circumstances dictated;
• take responsibility for their own actions and decisions; and
• partner with others as equals, whether one was in front or behind at any given time.

Not that I think there’s a chance in hell that this will happen, but it’s a nice thought on a beautiful summer Friday.

Image credit: Warning Sign Generator