Social Media Week Is Back

Image by That Other Paper via FlickrI was just looking at the Social Media Week site for the first time after spotting a mass email from Toby Daniels. I got lost on first try.

I remember having a lot of fun last year during Social Media Week.

Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever

Not Going Into Any Accelerator Program

Image via WikipediaThere is no accelerator program anywhere that will help me tackle the last mile in microfinance, the most important mile in my line of work. I have a FinTech startup, but it does not revolve around coding, it revolves around the last mile of microfinance.

Also, I can't think of one iconic tech company that came out of some accelerator program. You could argue accelerator programs are a new phenomenon, they have not had the time to spit out iconic companies yet, but accelerator programs are more for purely web tech companies. Mine is not one.

My Third World Advantage

Image via CrunchBaseThere are five broad categories in tech: web tech, clean tech, bio tech, nano tech, fin tech. Each of those five categories are broad. Each has sub categories, and sub sub categories.

There is no next Google in web tech, there is no next Facebook in web tech. Google is the next Google. Facebook is the next Facebook. But the Googles and Facebooks of clean tech, bio tech and nano tech are still out there. They are still small. If you can locate them and put some money into them, you are going to end up uber rich. But it is not easy to locate them, not easy at all. Even the Google of today was not easy to locate when it was small. Yahoo could have had the Google search engine for a few tens of millions, but they passed up on the offer.

Who Hired You?

Image via WikipediaSam Walton is an inspiration of mine. I find Walmart, Dell and the dollar pizza places fascinating. I admire those who can keep the costs down.

Sam Walton had plastic chairs at his Arkansas headquarters. And this was after Walmart had gone public, and Sam Walton was a billionaire already. His logic was obvious. If we buy expensive chairs, the costs get passed on to the customers. It made perfect sense to buy plastic chairs. When he traveled for business, he made a point to stay in cheap motels.

I read his autobiography a long time ago. It is a slim book, a great read.

We Are Not Trying To Solve All The World's Problems

People talked of me as a future Prime Minister of Nepal when I was at high school. They were perhaps not off the mark, because a guy who was junior to me politically before I came to America - I was too young to be running for office legally, but I was Vice General Secretary to a political party with two MPs - has been a cabinet minister in Nepal for years now. I have sharp political instincts, as sharp as anyone on the planet. Like Marlon Brando says, I could have been somebody.



My point being, what I have is not a political organization. We are not in the good governance business. Good governance is basic to poverty elimination. But if a people have an illegitimate, shady, corrupt, oppressive government, it is their responsibility to rise up and throw that government out. My company is not in the political revolution business, although I don't see how I can stay away from Iran myself personally.

A FinTech StartUp With An Edge

Image via WikipediaWhat I have is a FinTech startup. It is a tech startup. But it is not a tech startup that is trying to come up with the next big thing in tech. That we will leave to the companies that are first and foremost web tech companies.

But we a-r-e going to stay on a constant lookout for developments in tech to see what new developments we can put to the use of microfinance. So we are going to keep our antenna up. But then that is not true only of web tech. We are also interested in the developments in clean tech, bio tech, nano tech. If there will be developments in those sectors that we can possibly put to the service of our microfinance efforts, we will go in with both hands.

Mock Pitching Brad

Tomorrow, Friday, at noon I will be mock pitching my friend Brad Hargreaves at General Assembly: five slides, five minutes. I am going to conclude by yelling, "Brad, show me the moneeeeeey!" Or maybe I will not yell, he is a friend, but I w-i-l-l deliver the line.



Why did I pick Brad? Well, he is a friend. He is an amazing blogger. He "gets" tech. He is an entrepreneur at heart, although he has worn a few different hats along the way. When I first met him he was an Entrepreneur In Residence at a VC firm.

The Best Way To Deal With Venture Capitalists

Image via WikipediaVCs are money people. And many entrepreneurs fall for that stereotype. VCs are not rich people - well, many are - but my point is VCs are not big money people who are itching to get rid of the money that is, oh, such a burden on them. VCs are entrepreneurs themselves. They go raise money. They raise money promising to grow that money. The good ones do. The best ones grow the money like money were raining from trees. If you put that first 100K into a company like Google, you see a growth that is better than any winning lottery ticket ever.

There are many, many VCs out there. There are many, many, many would be tech entrepreneurs out there. As an entrepreneur you should not need money. You should be able to generate revenues and profits.

Top VC Bloggers: The Numbers Don't Look Right

TechCrunch has an interesting post: The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers Of 2010.

It's good to see Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Chris Dixon, Charlie O'Donnell, and Albert Wenger on the list. These are people I have met in person or, in Brad Feld's case, interacted online. Of all the people on the list, I personally know Fred Wilson best, either in terms of how often I visit their blog and leave comments at their blog, or in terms of how many times I have met in person.

Kiva And My Outfit: Three Major Departure Points

Image via CrunchBaseI am a huge fan of Kiva. They went from raising $5 million five years ago to raising over $100 million last year and are projected to raise close to a billion dollars in five years. But that would still be a drop in the ocean. Global poverty is no small challenge.

There are more than 10,000 MFIs - microfinance institutions - in the world today. But global poverty is as big as ever. It looks like a virgin terrain to me. There is so much work to do.

Going For Profit

Yunus is the father of non profit microfinance. When the white people in the Arctic Zone of Scandinavia awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, he made a little over a million dollars.