If you were starting a project or business, common sense would tell you that you could produce 5x as much output if there were five people working on your goals than if there were just one person. If you are running a counseling program, ten counselors should be able to do 10x the work as a single counselor, right? If you are starting a candle company, twenty employees should be able to produce 4x the work as five employees, right? If you are a mom cleaning out a garage, you should get … [Read more...]
Here Is One of My Secrets to Making Money (Or, How I Once Bribed Women to Code for Me with Diamonds, Rubies, and Chanel)
July 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The Secret: Strike Deals Where Everyone Has Limited Downside and Harness the Super Power of Incentive Some of you have been writing to me privately and asking about the early days when we started out and were trying to build our companies. I thought it would be useful to share some of the things we did during that time that worked out well ... and maybe I'll even talk about those things that didn't work out so favorably. I hope you find it useful in your own endeavors. When Aaron and I … [Read more...]
The Joy of Cash Dividends
March 12, 2010 By 2 Comments
Over the years, I've written a lot about dividends on the Investing for Beginners site at About.com. In fact, over the past few years it has been one of my absolute favorite topics to cover because through the Great Recession of 2007-2009, those who owned a collection of high quality dividends stocks were better able to ignore market fluctuations and avoid selling their ownership to pay their household bills. It isn't an infrequent thing I'll hear people opine, "yeah, but who has money … [Read more...]
How to Make $10,000,000 After Taxes in a Few Years
August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I’m sitting in my investing office, looking over the river behind the property, figuring out what I’m going to do for the day. I’ve got a cup of coffee in my Seattle’s Best mug from Border’s and am listening to Roosterspur Bridge by Tori Amos. The ideal would be to plow into a giant pile of stock reports but that isn’t going to be possible for a few days because the operating businesses need my attention. We have so many opportunities over the next twelve months to explode in … [Read more...]
I'm a private investor who loves architecture, furniture, clothes, history, philosophy, books, cooking, and music as much as I do finance. 
