Lack Of Skin In The Game Is The Root Of Our Problems

You can trace nearly all of the problems in the world back to one cause: lack of skin in the game. From the financial crisis, to our broken government, to most wars, corruption, pollution and famine, you’ll find a lack of skin in the game…

Travelogue Bolivia: Salar de Uyuni, Potosí, Sucre

Seeing Things From Other Peoples’ Perspectives

Note: I wrote this post in a spiral notebook in 2012, on my 27th birthday, when I was on a beach in Isla Baru, Colombia that had no potable water, no electricity and only hammocks to sleep in. I found it today going through old notebooks and…

A Small Win Against the Bureaucracy

In 2010, during my first six months in Chile, I worked out of the Startup Chile office in downtown Santiago in the in the Ministry of the Economy. From day one, we had all sorts of problems with the internet. The government wasn’t used to 50 entrepreneurs burning up…

The Politics of Fear

Fear is the easiest, simplest, most visceral way to get people to do something. Scare them half to death and they’ll be much more likely to do what you want.

It’s one of the easiest to take advantage of people.

Magma at Six Months: Five investments, Four in the Pipeline, Culture Starting to Change

I haven’t written anything new on Staying out of the Cubicle lately, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy! In the first six months since we launched Magma Partners, we’ve…