Data and Society is a think/do tank in New York City, initially funded by Microsoft and supported today by prominent organizations such as The Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The team and an impressive group of Fellows (some of them faculty on sabbatical from their universities) take on the [...]
Category: Communitarian economy
Credit is broken; And it needs a unicorn?
I easily tire of Silicon Valley fads. One is the (recent) ubiquitous use of the term unicorn to describe super-unique start-ups that become huge wins for investors. Also, my daughters trained me in a different view of unicorns. Still, a recent TechCrunch post that used the term caught my eye. The author is predicting a [...]
Juxtaposition
Two stories from very different contexts came across my news feed today. The first announced a major investment in a small business lending service. The other took a fresh look at the war on drugs and the origins of addiction. Let's begin with the piece I read first thing this morning. I have written earlier [...]
Real businesses . . .
I have been working on the plight of small businesses in the American credit industry for many years. As entrepreneurs who are often lumped in with companies that have 500 employees and more, it seemed a good idea to write first about the people are top of my mind. As I write about digital platforms, [...]
When good character has a (short-term) cost
I recently met a former colleague for coffee. Let's call him Andrew (not his real name). He was telling me about a family business he had joined in the past year. The company had grown over the years without taking investments but had a significant line of credit from a regional bank. What happened in [...]
Small business loans 2.0
There are just a few blogs and online news services I track every day. Today I am thinking about a post I read some time ago, an innovative financial services startup that addresses the following problem: Building a business around online advertising is hard enough without having to combat the cashflow issues created by lengthy [...]
Two sides of a coin
So to speak . . . I follow coverage about the role major banks are playing in supporting Internet-based payday lenders. Among my concerns are the insane interest rates and the ability of such lenders to automatically withdraw payback straight out of a bank account, sending the account into perpetual overdrafts. And then there's the [...]
What makes small businesses seethe?
Yesterday, Wall Street Journal carried a piece about the spin-off company from Dun & Bradstreet--Small Businesses Seethe at Credit Service Using Dun & Bradstreet Name. In addition to realizing I've never used that verb other than in past tense, it was a striking story and quite familiar. With Descant, I set out to "co-create" a [...]
descant labs 