culture

"The Entrepreneur's Essentials", my free ebook, is in progress

I’ve been writing a lot lately, just not here on Lucky7. I finally decided to compile and refresh some of my best posts over the years into a free ebook named “The Entrepreneur’s Essentials”. In this article, the Austin Business Journal interviewed me about doing so. It is really fun to reflect on what I wrote years ago and have been applying to data.world for the past three years. If you would like to check it out, head on over to Medium. Here are the four lessons I’ve written so far:

  1. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #1: How to leverage advisors and investors as your extended team

  2. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #2: What’s in a name?

  3. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #3: The five critical ingredients to build a big company

  4. The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #4: Seven lessons learned on the journey from founder to CEO

Two incredible years at data.world

On July 11 we celebrated our second year anniversary of data.world being live.  We had a great time at SPiN in the first ever OWL Cup (the ping-pong championship) during the same week as the World Cup in the finals.  It was a real upset, and you should ask us about it (as well as why OWL is all in caps) the next time you see us in person.  We don't have to spill the beans on everything publicly!

But we did make a decision about how public to be in the release of our first ever Public Benefit Corporation Report.  As a Certified B Corporation®, we are required by Delaware corporate law to report how we are fulfilling our public benefit purpose to our private shareholders every two years.  Given our love for the data.world community, which is now the largest collaborative data community in the world, we decided to make our PBC Report public for all to read.  You can read it here, and it really has been an incredible two years.  I won't repeat the report here, as we all collectively put a lot of time into writing it, but I will say how proud it makes us to be a B Corporation.  A lot of people don't understand B Corporations, thinking that they are social businesses that don't focus on financial performance or making money for their shareholders.  That couldn't be farther from the truth - our business plan includes us becoming a top-tier financial performer and we are doing our best to generate a large shareholder return.  We are fortunate to have raised $33.3 million from such a prestigious and helpful group, and we are very serious about performing well for all shareholders, including ourselves.