“This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It’s an experiment because we’re prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That’s why we’re doing it during the summer– so even college students can participate… The deadline has now passed, and we’re sifting through 227 applications. We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we quickly saw that we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas.”

“My colleague and occasional co-conspirator Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic, spoke last night at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, a presentation intriguingly titled ‘Business and Sustainability: Risk, Fiduciary Responsibility, and the Laws of Nature.’ As would be expected of Gil, one of the true pioneers in this field, it was a cogent articulation of the state of the art, for both better and worse, of sustainability in the private sector.”

“People tend toward inflated self-assessments, which is one of many reasons to break down corporate fiefdoms and rotate jobs regularly, former Microsoft chief operating officer says.”