The Future: The Most Important Entrepreneurial Challenge of Our Time

The US Presidential election just concluded.

The rage of the white working class that is today poor and disenfranchised has propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

Majority of the college educated did not vote for Trump.

Large numbers, in fact, did not vote at all, finding Hillary Clinton equally uninspiring.

In my previous column, The Future: An Age of Idiocracy, I pointed out that more and more, the uninformed and the ignorant will be deciding on the future heads of states in the Western democracies. [This is already the case, by the way, in countries like India, where bulk of the voting population is uneducated, uninformed, and incapable of making rational choices.]
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The Future: An Age of Idiocracy

America has elected Donald Trump as President.

We have entered the age of idiocracy.

There will be more populist candidates both from the left and the right.
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Answers to Some Frequently Asked Questions About Accelerators

As I’ve written about extensively, there is a very real knowledge gap on both sides of the early stage start-up game. First-time entrepreneurs lack the seasoning to steer through turbulent waters. Inexperienced friends and family (and, increasingly, crowdsourced investors) lack the ability to gauge the viability of a business, or to mentor naïve entrepreneurs. I’ve come to believe that this knowledge gap is best filled by savvy accelerators. However, there are over 7,500 business accelerators/incubators around the world, and most of them fail.

Here are several 30-second videos answering the most common questions I’m asked about accelerators that can help you navigate and make informed decisions.

Why Join a Non-equity Based Accelerator?  

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Your Thoughts on Ageism in Tech?

What Do You Truly Enjoy About Your Job?

What Do You Use or Do Today That is Ripe for Reinvention? How Would You Change It?

From $100k to $1 Million: 10 Videos to Watch

You’ve got customers. You’ve got some level of validation. You’ve got, perhaps, a reasonable degree of product market fit. If you have managed to get past $100k in revenue, that tells me that you have some sense of who your customers are, why they are buying what you have to offer, and how to sell to this customer base.

Entrepreneurs whose revenue falls between $100k and $1 Million experience a very specific set of challenges while following the light at the end of the tunnel. For such entrepreneurs, I have recorded a series of 30 seconds videos addressing their unique concerns. >>>

Some Small-scale Startup Ideas for Indian Entrepreneurs

To help inspire Indian entrepreneurs to spot opportunities for startup businesses, I’ve shared several startup ideas with the lens of developing small, bootstrapped businesses this year. Some of these ideas take a second, smaller-scale look at projects that I wrote about back in 2009 in Vision India 2020 and were originally designed to scale to very large numbers, to become billion dollar enterprises. These ideas are specifically written for Indian entrepreneurs, but could also be adapted to other markets as well.

• High Quality Eldercare In India – Back in 2009, one of the projects I had developed was called Care. The premise of the project was that the number of millionaires are increasing in India by leaps and bounds. At the same time, many of these families have need for in-home caregivers to take care of their ill, mentally-ill, or elderly family-members. Care would provide trained in-home caregivers in domains such as Alzheimer’s. And Care would source its staff from among women in disadvantaged situations – battered, abused, abandoned women who needed safe, secure family situations to be part of. I took another look at this project and found the idea to be quite amenable on a smaller scale.

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