Our mission at True is to make the world a better place for entrepreneurs & to help them make their dreams come true. Investment is only a part of the process. For us, this means all entrepreneurs, not just those we fund. For Team True, if you are willing to chase your dreams, we want to help you.

There is no better way to do that than by answering your questions. Today, we are launching Ask True, a platform that allows you to ask questions and get feedback from venture investors and other entrepreneurs. We are using the Q&A platform developed by one of our portfolio companies, Sponge.

Hope you can stop by and simply Ask True.

Weiser and his team felt that the one-size-fits-all desktop model of personal computing had some real limitations. They understood that people move from place to place throughout their day, they devote varying levels of attention to tasks in different contexts, and they prefer to organize their work spatially and to think in three dimensions. The team also saw the trend toward cheaper, smaller processors and realized that it would become economically feasible for each person to have a collection of small specialized computers, each providing a particular service rather than a single big general-purpose computer. These new devices would have new user interfaces (UIs) tailored to the context of their use.

Weiser’s vision was prescient. Twenty years later, we rely on the internet, mobile apps, and a constellation of other technological tools every day. Our devices offer novel sensor-supported UIs (e.g., touch, gesture, location). Many of us are getting used to having a lot of our computer-mediated behavior smeared across a host of devices – laptops, smartphones, TV’s, tablets – in a host of locations – work, home, out and about.

Novel UIs are being developed both in research labs and in the commercial realm, and lots of new devices and related services have been popping up over the past few years, such as the Wii, Microsoft’s Kinect/Natal, Google Voice Search, set-top boxes of various sorts (TiVo, Roku, Slingbox), the Fitbit, GlowCaps, and EasyBloom to name a few. At Sifteo, we are also working to make a contribution with Siftables: interactive, smart tiles for play and learning.

These new interactions are becoming key parts of our everyday lives. Whether it’s tapping out a tweet on a phone, watching a video on a laptop, or drawing up a CAD model on a dual monitor desktop rig, it is through these digital tools – and the use, misuse and mastery of their UIs – that we do our media consumption (reading) and our media production (writing).

But with all these new devices – enabled by cost reductions in sensors, cheaper processing, and the development of the web – we users are having to learn new UI metaphors quickly and often.

This raises a question: How are we going to be able to continue to “read” and “write” fluently if our tools keep changing?

Historically, becoming “literate” has been a once-per-lifetime process of learning to read and interpret the written word. It is expensive and time-consuming on an individual and societal level; we spend a long time in school learning to be literate. But today technology is creating multiple diverging literacies, each with unique requirements for accessing, interpreting and creating media forms. From files and the computer desktop to web content and the browser to MP3s and iPods to tweets and twitter clients to locations and social apps, literacy in the 21st century is no longer a skill to be acquired once; our ability to access and interpret media must be kept up-to-date.

There are a variety of possible outcomes of this explosion in UI systems; we see three broad scenarios.

We might see a Darwinian process, eventually producing a small number of shared media forms, access tools and interfaces. In this scenario, becoming literate will still take time, but will only have to happen once. Or we might see humans becoming increasingly competent in a variety of UIs, but not truly mastering any – especially if that means we get really good at consuming (reading) but not-so-good at producing (writing) content using our new UIs and media forms. Or we may see the development of UIs that are both expressive and easy to learn, cutting out the need for users to invest lots of time mastering each new device. It may turn out that literacy and fluency are simply easier to acquire with these new UIs, than, say, learning to read and write the printed word.

Scholars have been thinking for a long time about the interactions between technology and literacy, and it is riveting to see these interactions playing out with next-gen devices. It seems like each new big-budget action movie now requires a scene that speculates on the future of UI, and consumers are now actually getting access to devices and interfaces that approach these Hollywood visions. Inventor/entrepreneurs like us are now able to produce these new devices as a start-up, as the global supply chain and IT advances obviate the need to work within the confines of large companies or the research world in order to explore this territory.

We’ll see which technologies truly develop into media consumption and/or creation devices, which ones achieve success in niche contexts, and which become historical footnotes. We’ll see if the ways we read and write converge or just keep changing. We’ll see what new UI changes mean for how we communicate with our machines and with each other.

What does all this mean for startups building new devices or web services? How can we make our products become among the lasting tools or media forms?

The “safe” approach is to express them in well-known interaction languages, leveraging users’ experiences with other products. Real innovations may be difficult to shoehorn into existing UI models, however.

A different approach is to be the problem – go ahead and fragment literacy further with totally new UIs that uniquely enable your amazing new capability – flaunt usability if it gets in the way of expressivity. Most technology paradigm shifts start in this mode; only the early adopters “get it” in the beginning, taking the time to learn the new language. Texting (SMS) worked this way: at first only adolescents texted and now even soccer moms are doing it.

The risk for a startup is that bigger wins may be achieved by companies that arrive later and translate the new capability into a language that users already know (compare the experience of texting on an iPhone vs on your first mobile phone: the iPhone uses a familiar GUI and QWERTY keyboard language). We’d suggest a hybrid approach: scaffold users to literacy through a combination of familiar metaphors where possible, universal design (iterate, iterate, and iterate again to make it simple) and just-in-time teaching for the UI elements that must be truly novel.

This is an exciting moment in history for UI with a lot of new possibilities. It will be a quite a ride witnessing – and contributing to – the legibility of future interactions.

This post was written by David Merrill & Jeevan Kalanithi, the creators of Siftables, the next-gen tabletop game system that fuses cutting edge technology with classic gameplay, and co-Founders of Sifteo, funded by True Ventures.

*Full Disclosure: Fitbit and Oblong are supported by True Ventures and Foundry Group, respectively, each of whom support us at Sifteo. *

One of the recurring activities I’ve mentioned in my blog posts this summer is my attempts to take up cooking. As the summer progressed, I gradually got more into it and tried fancier dishes moving from simple pasta and tomato sauce to stir fries, homemade Chinese food, and…more elaborate pastas. I’ve really started enjoying the whole process, not just consuming the end result, which got me thinking about how my culinary experiments relate to my professional experience with TEC this summer.

In many ways, learning to cook is like starting your own business. You start off by observing what’s going on around you and saying to yourself, “Hey, I think I can do that,” or “I bet I can do that better.” You begin gathering the resources you need to make your idea a reality. For cooking, it’s going to the store to find the right ingredients. For startups, it’s learning about your industry, finding the necessary skills, and obtaining funding. In a way, VCs are like a supermarket for entrepreneurs because they can offer numerous resources like funding, advice, and networking. It’s usually wise to shop around for the best deal, but unfortunately, there are no reward card specials.

Once the pieces are in place, it’s time to start executing. At first, it’s hard to know if what you’re doing is right. Is this chicken fully cooked? Does my website draw in new customers? You can read books or seek out advice from others, but ultimately it’s about trial and error. There’s no right or wrong way to do things, it’s all about finding your niche and style. Things may not work out perfectly the first time, but you can learn from your mistakes. You can’t be afraid to fail. You just have to get your product out there and iterate. If you stick with it and adapt, you will slowly get better and build your culinary repertoire and revenue streams.

Picking up cooking or starting your own business is easier than ever. With globalization and improvements in technology, costs are lower than ever. You can get cheap utensils and ingredients if you go with generic brands. You can also get cheap computing power and software using cloud computing services. You can’t always do everything on your own, so sometimes it makes sense to outsource tasks. For example you might buy a sauce from the store or hire a developer for a project. You’re never alone either. Millions of recipes can be found online for free while sites like Odesk are good places to find cheap outsourced help. You should be careful though, as Tony Hsieh advised, not to outsource or cut corners on your core competency. This could be the quality of beef in your stir fry or Zappos’ warehouses.

There is a sizable psychological barrier to entry into both cooking and entrepreneurship. If you’ve never done it before, it can be intimidating because you don’t know where to start. It’s tempting to take the safe route and eat out or work at a stable job. Once you dive in though, it can be very rewarding. Even though your dishes may not be restaurant grade and you may be taking a pay-cut at your startup, there’s something innately rewarding about creating something with your own hands and being able to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Plus you can have more fun goofing around in your kitchen or your startup office.

I’m sure it takes a certain type of personality to enjoy cooking or entrepreneurship. However, for that select group of people, it’s very exciting and a lot of fun when done right. Fortunately, I think I fall into both categories.

Come back next week for my final post! In the meantime, here’s some photos of dishes I’ve made this summer. Comments welcome!

Culinary Experiments

Note: This was originally written by Summer TEC Intern Steve Liu on the True Ventures TEC Program Blog. It was reprinted here with his permission.

Well, the problem with doing this is that you’re eating what your measure. And if you aren’t sure what that means, think of it this way…

If you are running an ecommerce site and you are measuring page views, one of your goals is going to be to increase the amount of pages each visitor sees. The problem with this goal is that a page view doesn’t necessarily correlate with the number of products that are purchased on your site.

So if you measure unimportant metrics, you’ll end up focusing your time on things that aren’t improving your business.

Think about what you measure

Just for a second, think about the metrics you should be measuring and tracking. If you are stuck, here is some food for thought…

Blog

• Pageviews – a common way blogs make money is through advertising. And one way to increase how much ad dollars you are getting each month is to increase the amount of page views your blog receives. This is because advertising is usually based on a CPM basis. So a couple of metrics you should be measuring are page views and pages per visit.

• RSS button clicks – in addition to measuring pageviews, another thing you can consider measuring is the placement of your RSS subscription buttons on your blog. The more clicks your RSS buttons get, the more subscribers you’ll get, thus your overall traffic should go up over time, which means more ad revenue. Through Google Analytics you can track the clicks you are receiving on your RSS buttons and you can analyze that data to maximize the placement of your buttons.

• Engagement – if your readers don’t care about your blog, they won’t come back. Because your overall goal should be to increase your traffic, you’ll want to make sure you are writing content that people actually like reading. A few ways to measure this is to analyze how many times people comment on your posts, link back through track backs, and tweet about your content.

Ecommerce

• Conversion rate – if you have an ecommerce site, your main goal is to get more sales from your website. So a metric that would be worth tracking is your conversion rate, because if you can improve it, you’ll increase your revenue.

• Cart abandonment – if people add items to their cart and never check out, you won’t make money. One way to figure out what is causing people to not check out is to create a funnel of your check out process. This way you can see if most people are leaving when they are asked to put in their credit card, or even just register. Because you may end up finding out that requiring people to register before they purchase is what’s causing your buyers to not purchase from you… so you would then want to remove that process from your check out funnel.

• Competition – through service providers like Comscore, Hitwise, and Compete, you can get a rough understanding of where your competitors are getting the majority of their traffic. In the ecommerce world, chances are that your competition is buying traffic from specific sources to increase their revenue. This is a good way for you to learn about new marketing channels that are worth testing out.

Social games

• Time on site – one way social games make money is by convincing people to buy virtual goods. So one important metric for a social gaming company is to measure the time people spend in the game because the more time people spend playing your games, the more likely they are to pay for virtual goods. Another related metric is the percentage of people who come back to the game after they first play it. The more people come back, the more they play the game and the more opportunities you have to get them to buy virtual goods.

• Viral loop – the more people playing your social game, the more money you’ll make. One thing to track is the virality of your game. By tweaking it, you can drastically affect how many new people play your game on a daily basis.

Software as a service

• Lifetime value – as a SaaS based business you make money when your customers keep on paying you every month/year. So the longer a customer keeps on paying you, the more money you’ll make in the long run. And if you want to keep customers for a very long time, you should consider measuring sign in rates because if someone signs into your software on a daily basis they are less likely to cancel their subscription.

• Attrition rate – if your goal is to increase your revenue, one way to do it is to get new customers. Another way to do it is to keep your existing customers happy so they keep on paying you. By measuring your attrition rate you can see how many customers you are losing each month and then you can survey them to find out why they are abandoning your product. You can then use this data to improve your product so that users are more satisfied with it.

• Up sells – with SaaS based businesses one way you can make money is by up selling your current customers. By tracking the call to actions inside your application you can find out what actions causing users to upgrade and which ones don’t. In addition to that you can also track the type of users that are upgrading because you may notice a trend in which users who login in at least once a day are more likely to upgrade, so you goal would be to get more users to login more frequently. You can do this by utilizing email for reminders and notifications.

Things change over time

Even if you are measuring the right metrics at this point in time, it doesn’t mean you’ll be measuring the right ones in the future. Your business will change over time, so you’ll have to adapt with it.

For example, if you are releasing a new product to the market, revenue is an important metric to measure, but in the short run product/market fit maybe a better metric. If users aren’t satisfied with your product then than it is going to be hard to create a real business… because why would people pay for something they don’t like?

So in the short run you should be measuring product market fit so you can get to a point where people consider your product a “must have”. Once this is achieved you could focus more of your efforts on growth and increasing your revenue.

Conclusion

The metrics I mentioned above, maybe a good fit or a bad fit for your business. But before you decide on which metrics you are going to measure, make sure that they directly impact your business. Because the last thing you want to do is work on improving metrics that won’t be help your bottom line.

If you are measuring the wrong metrics don’t worry because it isn’t too late to change what you’re tracking. They key is to think beyond basic metrics such as page views, unique visitors and search engine traffic.

This post was written by Hiten Shah & Neil Patel of KISSmetrics, a new generation analytics company funded by True Ventures.

Huge congrats to Luke, Teyo, and the rest of the PuppetLabs team for raising their recent round of funding!  We are excited to welcome Kleiner Perkins to the deal along with the addition of Kevin Compton from Radar Partners to the Board.  Both Kevin and KPCB bring a wealth of experience in building great companies.

The company has made tremendous progress since True first led the A round last year.  Puppet is used by thousands of organizations across several major verticals while becoming a critical component of the next generation data center. With Puppet, automation and reusability are finally become a reality inside data centers where system administration has traditionally been a roadblock.

We look forward to partnering with PuppetLabs on the next phase of their journey!

The official press release is listed here.

First of all, I’ve pretty much wrapped up a several-weeks-long project to create Assistly’s entire product video offering — that’s storyboarding, scripting, audio recording, audio editing, video recording, video editing, and making title scenes and final cuts — for 6 videos. Software-wise, this involved a combination of GarageBand, Camtasia for both PC and Mac, and a bit of dark magic. Sustenance-wise, this involved a combination of Nonni’s biscottis and a 72-pack of hot chocolate the Assistly team generously supplied me on one of their Costco runs.

Formula for making product videos.

My new project has me hopping out of bed in the morning because I can’t wait to go to work. I’m working with CEO Alex Bard on redesigning the Assistly website in preparation for the product’s upcoming public launch. This means that Alex and I spend a lot of time geeking out about colors, textures, gorgeous typography, and clean design in general — and then go and build sketches and mockups based on this aesthetic.

This week, I thought I’d give you a taste of what this daily immersion is like by sharing some of the designs that have been inspiring our work:

GOOD Magazine:

Frank Chimero:

Squared Eye:

(Speaking of typography, I can’t say enough about TypeKit. I talked about CEO Jeff Veen in last week’s post on iterative design, but did I mention that TypeKit enables you to put designer fonts on your website — not as an image or as Flash, but as honest-to-goodness text? It’s highlightable, but more importantly, it’s indexable and searchable, which means that TypeKit is literally improving the content of the web.)

I’m very excited about the direction Assistly is taking. Everything’s under wraps right now, but here’s hoping that by next week’s post, I’ll be able to share some screenshots and footage of my projects with you.

Note: This was originally written by Summer TEC Intern Katherine Maslyn on the True Ventures TEC Program Blog. It was reprinted here with her permission.

-> Entrepreneurship is not about the glory, most of the time it’s about doing the dirty work that others wouldn’t.

-> Entrepreneurship means if you are a builder you have to learn to sell and if you are salesmen you have to learn to build. And most importantly…

-> Entrepreneurship means you have to always be hustling and working harder than your competitors.

I remember once reading an interview of Murk Hurd, the CEO of HP. When asked, “why do you wake up so early?” He answered: “I wake up at 4am every morning because I can’t sleep knowing that my competitors in China are awake and working.“ I thought he was crazy, but now I know that a healthy dose of insanity is important for an entrepreneur.

Anyways, I can talk about entrepreneurship all day. I also wanted to share an important lesson I learned at this week’s Thursday meeting. Apparently there is a mathematical formula for success. Here is the argument: A startup’s ability to succeed is strongly correlated to the number of iterations it can go through. This means being able to release a product, then iterate on feedback, and release again as frequently as possible. It is so important to iterate quickly that “if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first release, you have already failed.” This means success is maximized when cash, the numerator is as large as possible and the denominator burn rate and the time it takes to iterate are as small as possible. (To keep burn-rate low, I prescribe ramen) Therefore, Success is a simple math function that can easily be maximized with a couple of derivatives. I wish I had discovered this relationship earlier

Note: This was originally written by Summer TEC Intern Hanyin Cheng on the True Ventures TEC Program Blog. It was reprinted here with his permission.

Stinson also gives us time to reflect and ruminate on the past year. Each year we ask ourselves whether or not we are living up to “the promise” we made when starting True. The promise was something we talked about at our original Stinson offsite. The time was 2006 and we had just closed Fund I at $165 million. We had the opportunity to create a new kind of venture firm that really did stand first for Founders and the entrepreneur. We really did have an opportunity to re-align (true) the venture industry to shift more power and value to the people creating value (the entrepreneur). We really did have the chance to change the relationship between investor and entrepreneur through better practices and communication, and appropriate structuring to create true alignment. And we really did have a chance to create a new kind of partnership in our firm.

We promised each other that we’d make this happen, and it wasn’t just b/c we are nice people. We are, nice people, (☺), but all we hold a core belief that tremendous value and innovation existed in the talents of the early stage entrepreneur, and we saw it as our job to unlock it. We saw the chance to create a much bigger pie.

So each year we check our progress.

We also do a deep dive product review. No, not of our portfolio companies, but literally a review of our own products. True is a startup just like any other. We have a customer (the Founding entrepreneur) and we build a product (a deal, or in our case three types of deals: Super Seed, Seed, Real). We think long and hard about product, and we’re all dedicated to making ours the best ones in the marketplace. We frequently talk to our customers about how our deals are working for them, and when we see problems in how a product is working, we’re quick to improve it.

We’ve done a lot of product development at and after Stinson. Two quick examples: our “$10K both sides legal docs” that make it easy and inexpensive to get a seed round done with the appropriate structure. There’s been a lot of great attention on this area in the past 6 months, but we’ve been doing this for 4 years at True.

Example 2 is last year’s launch of our $250K “Super-Seed” deal. We noticed tremendously talented Founders who just wanted a tiny bit of money to either engage in early customer development or testing. Raising even $500K or $1mm made little sense to these customers, so we launched the Super Seed. Our process is lightning fast, but our criteria no different. This product “flew off the shelves,” because it hit a sweet spot for many entrepreneurs, and a year ago there weren’t many options in this category. A year later there are many, many options in the $250K category thanks to the proliferation of the super-angels. This is an incredibly good thing, because it offers Founders more choice.

I’m not sure what we’ll conclude next week at Stinson relative to our product set. We have a few ideas for some adjustments to make our deals more competitive. We haven’t noticed a ton of “bugs” in the existing set, but we’re interested in staying ahead of the market, so we’ll be engaged in a deep dive.

If you know of ways we can build better deals for Founders, please comment here, tweet or email us. We’d love your help improving.

More to come from Stinson, and please do let us know any thoughts or suggestions on stuff you’d like us to tackle as a group.

Computer science is looking at a problem and tackling it. Your approach may change over time; you may run into unexpected problems; you never know all the problems you will encounter. However in anything you want to succeed, you have to learn to overcome those challenges to create your executable poetry. You may have to learn a new language, you may have to spend days debugging, or you may have to rebuild it from scratch. But, if you truly believe you can do it, you will do it.

Business, in my opinion, is looking for a market opportunity that you believe in and tackling it. You may have an idea how that market works or how your venture will play out but that may change. You have no guarantee that it will actually be successful or be as rewarding as you want, but if you even want to find out you have to try. You have to put yourself out there and go pitch to VCs; you have to hire new people; you have to fire old people; you have to a million things. But at the end of the day, if you want to have a business that is successful in rewarding, you have to be willing to do everything you can and believe is right to bring it to success.

The two processes I described above are exact mirrors of themselves. Computer science is a lot about looking at a problem and finding a solution regardless of what you currently know at the time. I believe business is the same. Both are growing opportunities and to be successful at either you have to seize those opportunities.

VodPod offers me the ability to explore all of these opportunities. Maybe I should try to look into that new piece of Ruby code we pushed out today; maybe I should be learning how the API works; maybe I should understand how and when we push out features; maybe I should understand how the design of a login screen effects sign-up conversion. I’ve stepped into all these areas over the last week; some of them were more comfortable areas than others but all rewarding. I’ve learned about countless knew things taking this approach: try everything.

The VodPod iPhone application is done. It should be submitted on Tuesday and then it’s all up to Apple to review and (hopefully) accept. I’ll leave you with a teaser screenshot.

This week at TEC played into theme of the week, it’s seizing opportunities to learn if you haven’t caught on yet, with Phil Black teaching us about term sheets. To be honest, before the talk I doubt I understood anything that was meaningful on the sheet, but after I felt like I could at least get the basic concept and if I was getting screwed in a deal. The other two speakers were also awesome. Tim Young of SocialCast had a great speech about his path towards entrepreneurship and SocialCast’s growth. I appreciated his advice on life and the fun, interesting idea of reading books based on height. Jared Kim of WeGame was also extremely interesting and relevant; he is a young entrepreneur that I felt I could relate with and also learn an immense from. The talks just seem to be holding up their quality, and I continue to enjoy them.

As you might of heard, I am Ali Shah and I go to a university in New York named New York University. I enjoy things like Belle & Sebastian, Discovery, uncharted islands, charted islands, Gmail, Jerry Seinfeld and the small things.

I’d also like to note that TEC has forced me to get a haircut somewhere different than my normal barbershop for the first time in ten years. I haven’t decided if that’s a good thing, but I would like to take this time to apologize to my barber. I’m sorry, Pablo.

Note: This was originally written by Summer TEC Intern Ali Shah on the True Ventures TEC Program Blog.  It was reprinted here with his permission.

The craziest part about returning from a vacation is seeing how much everything has changed in your absence. The craziest part about returning from Africa is that everything seems like a vacation.

I’ve spent the last two weeks making my way from Arusha, Tanzania to Entebbe, Uganda. The trip had been planned since my sister began living and working in Tanzania two years ago, and our idea was to divide our time between projects, research, and adventure. But as any entrepreneur could have predicted, the initial idea evolved many times along the way.

At Pumpkinhead (release coming soon!) ideas evolve through testing, or reactions to product demos, or just redefining the service. But with limited resources, sometimes ideas evolve out of necessity. This is certainly the case when trekking Africa. Making our way to a hospital in Rubiya, my group of adventurers instead found ourselves push-starting a bus on a dirt road with potholes bigger than the Great Pit of Carkoon.

The trip itself was incredible. From touring the world’s top development projects, to sampling ten variations on fried corn dough in the same street, to learning from subsistence farmers about the geopolitics of patented crops, to watching unfamiliar stars over Lake Victoria, experiences were burned into my brain that I will have a hard time forgetting. Another burn that will be difficult to forget is the lobster-red sunburn I received above the cloudline in Arusha National Park.

Meru from twenty miles away and three miles below.

After summiting Mt. Meru, a peak we dubbed the K2 of Africa, we set off to investigate the Mbola Millienium Village. The UN project is an effort to prove that the eight Millennium Development Goals can be met efficiently and sustainable across the African continent. The focus on enterprise was remarkable. Self-funding operations dominated the project literature, and many relied on bringing financing to the lowest level. Development has finally shifted from a charity-aid paradigm that treats people as victims to a market-based approach that empowers them as entrepreneurs.

Jumping straight from the world of Bay Area startups to East Africa street vendors forces you to make comparisons. Even through the smoke of a crowded bus stand, the similarities are vivid. For one thing, the vendors work hours every bit as demanding as the most overworked coders in San Francisco. Their efforts to differentiate themselves and engage customers are just as creative as any marketing guru.

Intrepid bus stand vendors in Bukoba created wearable display boards.

They even employ targeted pricing schemes for different market segments: prices for a mzungu (traveller, or less euphemistically, whitey) range two to twenty times higher than prices for a local. And their opportunistic pricing strategies led me to the expensive discovery that they bargain as hard as any acquisition-minded VC.

Beyond the world of street vendors, there are truly impressive business achievements happening every day. Shipping firms that adapt to routes changing by the day. Wireless telecoms inventing entirely new billing models that consider customers’ needs and infrastructure limitations. Marketing battles more aggressive than any American holiday shopping season. Every day, innovators in Mwanza have the same quality brainwaves that make people rich in this town.

Mbola's new dispensary. Problem? No medics to staff it.

Without the surrounding support of a powerful economy, though, their efforts generally yield just enough to scrape by. People with all the ingenuity, drive and work ethic of a great entrepreneur are spending their lives trapped in poverty simply because they were born in the wrong place. Why?

If I knew, I’d be out making a solution. But as I return to the world of tech innovation (and hot showers) I’ll be keeping two things in mind.

The first: innovators grow everywhere, and whoever can connect them will have an advantage in the next round of globalization.