Dave’s Blog for OC & The World

Classic Writings By Legendary Entrepreneurs
The essays by over 50 famous entrepreneurs takes you into their minds as they create companies that are now the bedrock of the American economy. A few paragraphs from the editor introduce each story and gives you some historical context and some personal information about the writer. In addition to entrepreneurs there are writings from a Venture Capitalist (Arthur Rock who funded Intel), an Investment Banker (Henry Kravis who argues that LBOs restore America’s competitive edge), to a potato chip king (Herman Lay). There is solid representation from technology entrepreneurs (Wang, Olsen, McNealy, Watson, Perot, Jobs, Dell, Case). Truly an inspirational group of people.

Tags: entrepreneur

Came across an article the other day on CNBC about “The Girl Effect” (Peter Buffett Teams With Nike for $100M Investment in the “Girl Effect”) and it seemed oddly familiar.

What is “The Girl Effect”?

The Nike Foundation describes it in a news release (pdf) as “the powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society.”

“In impoverished communities, lack of resources drives girls out of school and into early marriage, childbirth, and HIV infection at rates dramatically higher than boys. The results are irreversible for girls, and devastating to communities caught in intergenerational cycles of poverty. Yet when girls gain a different path - supported, educated and empowered - everyone benefits.”

The reason it was familiar to me was that years ago Mom worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Arab World to collect data on this very phenomenon.

Statistics for a long time have shown that the best investment a country can make (in terms of improving its social indicators) is increasing girls’ enrollments.

But the word “empowerment” has negative connotations when translated in some of these regions; for these “empowerment” programs to be effective you need to understand the local cultures to get the support of the population.

Tags: development, international

Robert Hagstrom gives a good description of Buffett’s style of focus investing; basically investing in 10-15 companies you understand very well and can monitor closely rather than investing in more companies that you can’t understand as well or monitor as closely.
Hagstrom then goes on to argue that Buffett’s value investing principles can be applied to “new economy” companies, aka technology companies. As his example, he points to AOL as a company with enduring value, with few other examples. Looking at how AOL has fared since the publication of the book in 2001, it has definitely not been a shining example of enduring value: per the wiki, AOL’s subscriber base has declined from 30 million to 10 million, and total stock value declined from $226 billion to $20 billion.