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An Plain English Explanation of the Economy

April 4, 2008 Leave a Comment

Yesterday while driving back and forth across the bay area, I listed briefly to an interview with Law professor Michael Greenberger, professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the director of the University’s Center for Health and Homeland Security, on NPR’s Fresh Air. This interview is one of the best descriptions of the current economic situation in the United States that I have heard to date. Greenberger’s explanation of where we are and how we got here (as well as what else we could expect) is simple enough for the layman to understand. Granted, you still need to pay attention and think through all the connections while trying not to get confused with all the complicated financial terms, but you should be able to do that without needing to reference any text books.

Every person in the United States should listen to this interview. I think the general population would be shocked to learn that (according to Greenberger) this whole mess happened because of a rider added to an omnibus appropriate bill that was passed by Congress in December 2000. And that this rider wasn’t really understood by the authors of the bill, it was written by lawyers from investment banks on wall street. The effect of this rider was to de-regulate certain financial markets at both the federal and state levels. The end result of this bill is the current situation…sub-prime mortgage crises, credit crisis, recession, and a tax payer bail out of some of the same investment banks that created the entire mess. What happened to the motherly wisdom of teaching your children a lesson: “you made the mess, you clean it up”?

And the real kicker…wait till you hear who the person is that was responsible for that original bill and was talked into adding the rider…and what he’s doing now…

Zen, Presentations, and VCs

March 28, 2008 1 Comment

One of my personal pet peeves is bad presentation skill. Considering the technology industry is so focused on information and knowledge, it’s amazing how bad we are at communicating it. I see this almost on a daily basis in Sales. It’s either an over loaded presentation on technology from marketing, a badly organized presentation from Sales people, or — worst of all — a presentation that is just a printed record of what the presenter said. Blah!

So I was giddy with excitement (honestly, just ask my wife…she was there) when I came across a wonderful book by Garr Reynolds called presentation zen. I have relying on this book lately as I develop a couple of presentations, specifically funding presentations where it is most important to be able to tell a story about what your working on and why it’s the most important thing since sliced bread (at least to your potential customers). That is one of the key points that presentation zen makes: your presentation should be telling a story, and it shouldn’t be a novel…think more picture story book. (for a great example, see Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on How creativity is being strangled by the law.)

The best part of presentation zen is that it can be used as a quick reference guide as your working on a presentation. It helps to reinforce the lessons you know. Such as start planning your presentation without your computer. You need to know your story line and flow, and having the computer in front of you when you do this only distracts you into things that don’t matter (like large bullet lists). I forgot this lesson when I started working on my latest presentation and the book, along with some peers with whom I reviewed an early draft, reminded me of my errors.

If you do presentations, do your audience (and yourself) a favor and buy a copy of this book!

I would also check out a Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, he brings up a great set of points on creating a presentation as well as a wonderful template to start with if your building a funding presentation (and he happens to have written the forward to presentation zen). A huge thanks goes out to Val for pointing me to this posting!

Since I’m on the topic of funding, if you interested in the world venture capital, I recently came across an interesting opinion piece on the Software VC Outlook for 2008.

More Than a Quote a Business Philosophy

March 28, 2008 Leave a Comment

“I’m happy about the fact that I’ve retired more people than I’ve fired.”

That quote is from a friend of mine and wins my Business Philosophy of the Year award. In a period of time when you hear stories in the news about how the rich keep getting richer, you see wall street firms imploding under their own house of cards that they built, and you hear stories from friend after friend of how mis-managed the companies that they work for are that hearing someone who is building a business make a statement like that is down right impressive. (Even more so when you know them well enough that it comes from the person’s heart and they mean it.)

I guess it’s the fact that true sentiment like that is so hard to find when you work in the get rich quick world of high technology and vulture capitalists that I felt it was worth sharing…