Chris Maresca

Never mind the apocalyptic drop in funding for VCs, what would have really killed off the industry would have been financial regulations.   According to the Wall Street Journal, looks like these have been stopped by Barney Frank. As a rule, VCs carry no debt, don’t use derivatives and don’t trade in the public markets. Since [...]

Kevin Kelly, a small business owner in Union City, CA, writing in Newsweek, outlines how healthcare plans are just not doing it for him.  One interesting datapoint is the way SMBs are defined by congress vs the Small Business Administration: most legislation defines small business as companies with less than 50 employees. This stands in [...]

Well, everyone is buzzing about it and mostly not in a good way.  This post by port1080 @  TnT provides a good series of comments from usually supportive websites: If there’s any question that this decision was bizarre, it should be dispelled by the fact that even most of the left (from the center-left to [...]

Naked Capitalism has a good post about banks missing TARP dividend payments.  It’s pretty stunning that some are missing payments on relatively small sums: Of the 34 miscreants, two are pretty large, namely AIG and CIT, But the next on the list is First Bancorp, which received a mere $400 million from the TARP. Probably [...]

There are quite a few short videos online with lessons learned by business leaders, often through painful experience. I”ll be showing some of the more interesting ones here. Wim Elfrink on Cisco’s Globalization Strategy. The metrics around growth and opportunity are particularly interesting. These kinds of global competitiveness measures are not often discussed in the [...]

I’ve recently looked back at Cisco’s globalization strategy, something they put into place about a year ago.   It’s similar to a strategy I outlined for a client about 18 months ago, so I was curious how Cisco has done. Very generically, the premise behind the strategy is that Western countries, and the US in particular, [...]

There are quite a few short videos online with lessons learned by business leaders, often through painful experience. I”ll be showing some of the more interesting ones here. The first is Heather Dawson, an executive coach, on how to find time to focus, something we’ve all struggled with.

I don’t know how many people remember the ‘World at War‘ series produced in early 1970′s, but if you do, I think someone, in 20 years, will produce a similar series about the last dozen years.   Except, it will start in January 2009 and go backwards. If you step back and look at what has [...]