Someone Gave Frank Gaffney Too Many Stamps
Tracy Rizzo was alarmed. A number of days ago, an envelope, with a Chicago postmark and a hand-written address to her private investigations firm, came in the mail.
The letter inside said, “The Al-Qaeda organization has planted 160 nuclear bombs throughout the U.S. in schools, stadiums, churches, stores, financial institutions and government buildings.” It also said, “This is a suicide mission for us.”
The writer, who claims to be Osama Bin Laden, tells the reader the nukes are remotely controlled.
Tennis Playing Flying Robots
Future now:
On John Nash
His mind would accelerate like a run away freight train picking up ideas and concepts and dropping off others. I must admit I am far more fond of people that have uncontrollable passion than a disciplined, polished and calculated delivery. It was John at his best, unconventional and irrepressible. You knew that you were in the presence of a mind of an amazing and wild genius who sees the world in a far different way.
Social Entrepreneurship’s Funding Problem
Social entrepreneurship is exciting. It’s the application of business discipline to a real world problem in order to create value that others can use to benefit yet others. (‘Development’ is the legacy version of this approach.) Unfortunately, the funding pipeline is still in its early stages.
Social ventures suffer from limited access to the same capital pool that nonprofits do. This results in a dependence on altruism to get and stay going.
Given the limited access to capital, there’s a bias in the ‘industry’ towards niche initiatives – a water pump in a village, another soup kitchen, etc. While these can provide steady returns, they can’t expand the capital pool in a meaningful way. It’s fundamentally limited.
Niche will only get you so far. You need to be able to make the big, global, industry shattering plays – which is very hard given the funding ladder is broken.
For example, in tech, raising an angel round of $250-$500k can be done with relative ease (assuming you have a quality idea, prototype, network, etc. You can build anything with that kind of money. (Google started with $100k in the bank.) Then, once you’ve got the core workflow in place, worry about scalability with someone else’s $25M investment.
In social entrepreneurship, however, it’s not hard to find grants for between $0-$50k. This is stuff like pencils for teachers. And you can find foundations wanting to zoom successful ventures at the $1M+ range. But, I’d argue there’s a giant hole between $50k and $1M.
That sucks, because opportunity for millions of people slips through that void, every year.
A Tax For Nonprofits?
Been thinking quite a bit about the sustainability of the nonprofit sector.
For example, effort called The Two Thirds Effect is a nonstarter. It is essentially a voluntary 60% tax on profit. This is a very limited group of companies (none of them BIG).