America’s educational system is broken

I was fortunate to attend Wednesday the CED’s Postsecondary Education Summit on Business Leadership for 21st Century Education Policies, as well as their annual fundraising dinner.  The CED is a leader in leveraging the business community to promote rational economic policies; I was very impressed by the people they have on their team. After opening remarks...

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Online Dating is the Future of Your Business

I gave a talk today as part of TEDx Silicon Valley on “Online Dating is the Future of Your Business”. Here’s the video and an expanded version of the slide deck. In the talk I discuss how some of the successful online dating startups are models for new businesses, many of which in various ways...

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CRM Systems and Private Equity Deal Sourcing

Preqin and LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions just released a report on “CRM Systems and Private Equity Deal Sourcing”, based on a survey of 63 private equity funds. They report that 84% of respondents claim to source over 20% of their opportunities through proprietary deal flow. Based on our research, I think that these respondents are taking...

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Disruptive Companies in Asset Management

We recently hosted an idea dinner on “Disruptive Companies in the Asset Management Industry”. The most attractive industries to disrupt are highly profitable ones, and asset management is traditionally a highly profitable industry. IMHO, the most successful disrupters in this area to date have been Vanguard (who popularized index funds) and the ETF industry. We...

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FinTech Innovation Lab Launch Event – June 2, 2011

The new FinTech Innovation Lab, an annual program run by the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture, had their launch event on Thursday night. It attracted a very high quality crowd of senior executives from major investment banks and members of the innovation community — two groups that don’t normally mingle. One peculiar note:...

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Conference Notes on Sourcing Deal Flow & Developing New Business for Private Equity

I enjoyed participating in last week’s Capital Roundtable Private Equity Masterclass on “Best Practices for Sourcing Quality Deal Flow & Developing New Business” (May 26th, 2011). Our star intern Adam Kalamchi took detailed notes, below. High Road Capital Partners Deal Sourcing Keynote View more presentations Chairman’s Keynote: How to Win -The Five S’s of Successful...

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