Category: Startups

I feel like a broken record. Lately, I’ve been sitting down with founder friends of mine and having a discussion about how their business is going. Inevitably, I get a sense that even those with a lot of tactical successes or growth seem to be missing a larger purpose. Inevitably, we end up in a discussion about “the big picture.”…

Psychologist Kelly Flanagan wrote a paragraph I loved so much, I thought about framing it: The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all—themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way…

One of my least favorite qualities in many of the “successful” individuals I meet (those who’ve achieved wealth, notoriety or a combination) is their insistence that they’ve “made their own luck.” That’s why I loved Michael Lewis’ commencement speech from Princeton this year: This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is…

There’s a common refrain that entrepreneurs are, by nature, optimists. I certainly fit in that classification. I’m optimistic about people, about companies, about technology, about the progress we’ve made as a species in the past 200 years vs. the prior 20,000 and the past 20 years vs. the prior 200. Reading Foreign Policy’s analysis of the global middle class gave…

I truly enjoyed Sheryl Sandberg’s commencement speech given at Barnard College last week. It was not only inspiring but featured a call to action that I love and support – that women can and should reach for higher heights in their careers, and that there are specific tactics they can employ to get there. However, one part of the speech…