Emerson was an American essayist and poet who led the 19th century transcendentalist movement. In this adapted essay called "Self-Reliance", he champions self-reliance and individualism as a virtue, and contrasts it with other concepts such as dependence or conformity. He emphasizes to follow your own voice. Because the original can be difficult to read, I have created an adapted version that is hopefully easier to access.
Listen to it now.
Brian Smith, Serial Entrepreneur Turned Executive Coach
Since he quit his investment banking job, Brian Smith has built and sold a multimillion dollar portfolio of businesses. He has built, bought, and sold businesses in the retail, service, and commercial real estate sectors. Now Brian coaches and studies entrepreneurs, helping them to make transformations at both the personal and organizational levels. Brian’s clients include founders and executives at all levels: from seed-round to post-exit.
Listen to it now.
Listen to it now.
Bryan Johnson, Entrepreneur Extraordinaire
Bryan Johnson made a decision at age 21 and never looked back. He told his family and friends that he would start a company and retire by age 30. In 2013, he sold his company Braintree, an online and mobile payments provider, to eBay for $800 million in cash. One year later, he dedicated $100 million of his own capital to invest in entrepreneurs working toward quantum-leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life. That marked the beginning of the OS Fund. Since then, Johnson has been meeting with and investing in visionary scientists and entrepreneurs working on some of humanity’s greatest opportunities and challenges. Johnson is also an adventurer. He has climbed some of the highest peaks in the world, raced in the African desert, explored an active volcano and built a snow cave in the Arctic. He is a pilot, the father of three and a children’s book author. At a small café in Nolita in the heart of New York, the entrepreneur and investor talks about his entrepreneurial journey and his goal of rewriting the operating systems of life.
Listen to it now.
Listen to it now.
Nick Hanauer and How To Think Independently
Nick Hanauer is co-founder and partner in Seattle-based venture capital firm, Second Avenue Partners. He has managed, founded and financed over thirty companies, creating aggregate market value of tens of billions of dollars. For example, he co-founded aQuantive, which sold to Microsoft for $6.4 billion, and was the first non-family investor in Amazon. He also serves as a Director for The Democracy Alliance and as a board advisor to the policy journal Democracy. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington, is married with two children and lives in Seattle, Washington. At O’Reilly’s Next:Economy conference in San Francisco, the venture capitalist talks about the value of studying philosophy, his investment strategy and how to think independently.
Link to it now.
Link to it now.
Peter Diamandis and Exponential Thinking
At the Exponential Finance conference hosted by Singularity University in New York, I had the opportunity to talk with Peter Diamandis, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Singularity University. Diamandis counsels the world’s top enterprises on how to utilize exponential technologies and incentivized innovation to dramatically accelerate their business objectives. Diamandis is also the Chairman and CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and launching large incentive prizes to drive radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. He attended MIT where he received his degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering, as well as Harvard Medical School where he received his M.D.
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Listen to it now.
Bob McDonald and Value-Based Leadership
Bob McDonald is eighth Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Prior to joining VA, he was Chairman, President, and CEO of The Procter&Gamble Company (P&G) He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in the top 2 percent of the Class of 1975. He is personally committed to values-based leadership and to improving the lives of others. When he visited Harvard Business School, I had a chance to talk to him. In this interview, he shared his lessons of West Point and CEO of Procter & Gamble and how his expertise from the private sector carries over to the public sector, to lead the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. We started with a simple question.
Listen to it now.
Listen to it now.
Eric Ries and The Lean Startup
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and was named as one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek Ries serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. He was also an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. While an undergraduate at Yale, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career eventually leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. In this interview, the entrepreneur and startup mentor talks about his mission, how he deals with obstacles and why startups fail.
Listen to it now.
Listen to it now.
Chris Camillo and Social Arbitrage Investing
A pioneer in applying social data analysis to investing and also the co-founder of Ticker Tags, which is a crowdsourced association taxonomy that connects trending social content to investable companies. I first heard about Camillo on CNBC where he talked about how he turned 20K into 2M. By now he has grown this figure to $8 million and besides investing in public markets, he also invests in startups as an angel investor. His latest venture was created to evolve financial news monitoring to include social-monitored tags that serve to parse the world’s data streams without bias.
Listen to it now.
Listen to it now.
The Food Revolutionary, Josh Tetrick
Tetrick started Hampton Creek, a San Francisco food startup that is going to make it easier for millions of people to eat better. Bill Gates selected his company as one of three companies that will shape the future of food. He has led a United Nations business initiative in Kenya and worked for former President Bill Clinton. As a Fulbright Scholar he taught school children in Nigeria and South Africa. He is also a graduate of Cornell and the University of Michigan Law School. He is an entrepreneur that not only thinks big but also has the stamina and power to transform his vision into reality, and plus he is a cool guy.
Listen to it now.
Listen to it now.
Doug Carmichael (Part 2) and How to Understand The World
The second part of the interview of Doug Carmichael, a strategy consultant at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We talk about his advice to younger people, news media consumption, what he did to understand the world, his regular get togethers in Palo Alto, his experience as a psychoanalyst and his daily ritual.
Carmichael started physics at Caltech, got a PhD from Berkeley in human development, a post doc of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies and lived in Mexico City while studying at Eric Fromm’s Institute for psychoanalysis. He consulted the White House and ran the network for Al Gore’s Reinventing government. For the last ten years has focused on the broad social science issues relevant to rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. Started the Stanford Strategy Studio and is most interested in the relationship between the humanities and economics.
Listen to it now.
Carmichael started physics at Caltech, got a PhD from Berkeley in human development, a post doc of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies and lived in Mexico City while studying at Eric Fromm’s Institute for psychoanalysis. He consulted the White House and ran the network for Al Gore’s Reinventing government. For the last ten years has focused on the broad social science issues relevant to rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. Started the Stanford Strategy Studio and is most interested in the relationship between the humanities and economics.
Listen to it now.
Doug Carmichael and How to Understand The World
This pilot episode features Doug Carmichael, a strategy consultant at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. We talk about how to understand the world, where he grew up, how he developed his interests, his influences, what you should study to understand the world, the importance of history and physics, the origin of capitalism.
Carmichael started physics at Caltech, got a PhD from Berkeley in human development, a post doc of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies and lived in Mexico City while studying at Eric Fromm’s Institute for psychoanalysis. He consulted the White House and ran the network for Al Gore’s Reinventing government. For the last ten years has focused on the broad social science issues relevant to rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. Started the Stanford Strategy Studio and is most interested in the relationship between the humanities and economics.
I also wanted to give thanks to Matthias Gohlke, who was kind enough to produce our intro and outro jingles for the podcast.
Listen to it now.
Carmichael started physics at Caltech, got a PhD from Berkeley in human development, a post doc of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies and lived in Mexico City while studying at Eric Fromm’s Institute for psychoanalysis. He consulted the White House and ran the network for Al Gore’s Reinventing government. For the last ten years has focused on the broad social science issues relevant to rethinking humanity’s relationship to nature. Started the Stanford Strategy Studio and is most interested in the relationship between the humanities and economics.
I also wanted to give thanks to Matthias Gohlke, who was kind enough to produce our intro and outro jingles for the podcast.
Listen to it now.
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