A Modern Marvel: The Funnel
Let me tell you why this $1.19 funnel that I purchased from AutoZone should astonish you. Behind it lies not only a secret about consumer product pricing but also an amazing but true fact about manufacturing. First, the secret: a consumer product is typically priced at two to five times what it costs to make. […]
Landlords Pay No Taxes?
I’ve been writing a bit about technology startups lately. Let me flip back to the other end of the business spectrum — landlording — to share an interesting conversation I overheard recently: Landlord One: How many landlords pay taxes on their rental income? It’s like no one. Everyone runs at a loss. Landlord Two: Oh, […]
An Entrepreneur Neither Loved nor Savvy
After leaving my corporate job last fall, I joined up with elance.com, a site designed to help freelancers find work. I submitted 29 bids and got selected once, the one time I offered to work for less than minimum wage. The economics are tough: elance is a global marketplace, so I was bidding with my […]
Why I Wouldn’t Bet the Farm
How many times have you heard an entrepreneurial success story where the founder took huge risks and won big? It usually goes like this: they took out a home equity loan, maxed out their credit cards, and pitched violently forward into the ditch of debt only to be saved at the last minute by a […]
What the Market Thinks about North Korea
Is South Korea going to be attacked? Well, we can get a sense for market opinion by analogy with World War II. Back in 2004, Financial History Review published an article correlating market events with World War II events. In particular, they looked at the prices of Nazi German bonds and Belgian bonds. Below is […]
Sam Walton on How to Treat Employees
I’d like to share a surprising quote from the book Made in America, a sort of conversational biography of the founder and manager of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton, who said: The larger truth that I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes — like the discounter’s principle of the less you charge, […]
How to Tackle Someone in an Elevator
I’ve been going to meetings for the Boston Entrepreneur’s Network for a while now. I like the group a lot and have found the meetings to be very well moderated and timed. (This is a big deal for me; it means I know the guest speakers have had a chance to say what they wanted to […]
A Month in the Life of a Landlord
In Massachusetts, residential rentals are highly regulated. To do it by the book, you need to have a non-discriminatory tenant finding procedure, an apartment that meets requirements for the sanitary code, no lead-based hazards, and a rental agreement that could stop bullets. You also need to have a nice place, an attractive ad, a responsive […]
The Surprising Math Behind Startup Dilution
This recently blew my mind, so I thought I’d share some simple math with you. Imagine an investor wants to invest in your startup. He says it’s worth $1 million and he wants to invest $500,000. He’s going to take half your company, right? Wrong. He’s going to take one third. At least, that’s the […]
Banned from the USA
So this young businessman named Nick remixes a Disney movie with their permission, and US Border Protection decides that the US wants none of that. So they deport him, and they put his name into the computer so that he won’t be able to get back in for ten years. I’ll let you hear the […]
