UNCONVENTIONAL THINKING BLOG

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of talking extensively with a young Italian opera star, introduced to me by a dear friend — a former MSCO team member — who now lives abroad.

When I was a boy, my parents introduced me to organized religion. It didn’t go well. From the start, it became clear that I wasn’t big on anything “organized.”

Through the years however, I searched for the great value religion brings: something grander and greater than yourself to believe in. I always believed in God, but never in the flawed men and women who stood at the lectern and pretended to be His messenger.

In one way, it’s like the birth of Christ. It set up a line in history that separates all that came before and after it.

That would be the emergence, the rise, of Google.

America is the oldest enduring republic in the world. And the finest. By a mile and a half.

Its greatness has been driven by many, sung and unsung, rich and poor, black and white, men and women. But by none more so than by its soldiers of war and its army of entrepreneurs.

Attend a class at any business school in the world and you will hear professors waxing poetic about concepts for new businesses. Ideas that can’t miss. The next Google, Facebook or Microsoft.

But what these blackboard entrepreneurs miss is that their recipes for success must be validated by a filter most of them discount or detest: the risk taking capitalists who reach into their bank accounts and back the shots in the dark with the money they need to make it to market.