Warren Buffett took early retirement at 26 from his teaching job and invested his retirement fund of $174,000 in his own investment business. A billionaire by age 46, (current net worth $83B) his insightful Letters to Shareholders carried unforgettable wisdoms and have become an annual must read for the investing and business community since 1977.
Will you disrupt or be be disrupted? This is an often repeated refrain. After Clayton Christensen published his series of books starting with ‘The Innovators dilemma’ the story of simplified solutions upending complex expensive ones are common lore. Who has not discussed the long march of simple over complex – PC over mainframes, Korean over Japanese over American cars, E-Trade over Schwab over Merrill Lynch. Skype and other VOIP services over phone co’s. Square over Visa and Mastercard, Smartphone camera’s over Digital cameras over Kodak and Nikon.
Apparently in a lot of places. FastCompany recently released their top 50 innovative companies list. These companies were chosen from a list of 410 nominated across 41 categories and countries. The list includes the obvious suspects like Square, Twitch, Shopify, Alibaba, Grab (Singapore, 1bn revenue, Ride hailing + Food delivery+ Finance) and, well, Apple!
44.6% of calls to mobile phones will be scam calls in 2019 up 400% from 2017
A First Orion report calls out the alarming growth in scam calls – 3.7% in Q2 2017 to a whopping 44.6% projected for Q2 2019. 42.1% of all calls will be Scam or nuisance, that is nearly half of all calls. 9 of 10 calls will use area code spoofing.
About a month ago I wrote about remote work and quoted Jason Fried. He has been open about his ideas of how we need to look at work differently and sharing his learnings at 37 Signals – now Basecamp, for over two decades.
According to a recent CBInsights report startups outside US raised more equity dollars than US based startups 2nd year in a row. China – between Beijing and Shanghai – is catching up in terms of number of deals and funds raised. Silicon valley is still way ahead (as a singular location) with over 200 exits above $100mn where Tel Aviv is better performing than London,Boston, NY and LA (it is also a favorite of international investors).
How do you stop the data monopoly of The Four (Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook)? It is important to ensure that we co-own and have total access to the co created data that has given The Four a near monopoly of the currency of our times – our data.
