Business – Steve Larsen

Going off to college is scary. When my oldest granddaughter went from two decades of daily contact with parents, family and friends, 1500 miles away to a new state where she’d be totally on her own, I worried. Making College Friendships I wanted to encourage her to not feel lonely, and to make new friends…

The Politics Industry Most know I rarely write or post about politics. While I have some political beliefs, I find little value in discussing them. It is unlikely to influence those on the other side of the political fence and it could hurt my relationships. But a recent book has brought me out of this…

March 15, 2024 Stratton Oakmont versus Prodigy is a lawsuit that happened when I worked there and had major impacts on the online lives of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy users then, but these issues haven’t gone away. A single message board post ignited a legal firestorm. The implication of the lawsuit and subsequent legislation dramatically…

The final twenty years of my career was directly involved in disrupting large companies stuck with stale “we are too big to fail” thinking. Running into a person near my age, as I did at lunch last week, espousing today’s version of “It’ll never fly, Orville Syndrome,” irritated me. Don’t people read history and pay…

This year I read 61 books, about ten more than average, roughly equally split between fiction and non-fiction. As I get older, the number has begun to creep up. I’ve always been a reader. A speed-reading class in high school gave me techniques for increasing speed and comprehension, and I still occasionally use some of…

I’ve just finished Frank J. O’Connell’s book, Jump First, Think Fast, and found it more fun, interesting, and inspiring than I had thought possible. I’ve known Frank and his wife Barb for more than twenty-five years. There was never a doubt Frank’s life and career would make a great story. However, Frank’s collaboration with writer…

For the past ten years my interest in diminishing the impact of psychics and pseudoscience has grown. I wrote a newsletter about scary psychics earlier this year. Few groups stand up for reason and truth – there should be more. The good ones, like the one mentioned below, needs and deserves our support. The Center…

Because I subscribe to a variety of websites and have a good-sized group of Facebook friends linked more by shared love of family, motorcycles and cars than political affiliation, I run across my fair share of questionable news reports. Whether they are conspiracy theories or just scary threats to which one should pay attention, a…

After nine of them, I know a good bit about starting companies. After investing in at least twenty, I spot founders with a high success likelihood pretty quickly. An author I admire, Taylor Stevens, recently penned a newsletter nailing one of those elusive success factors brilliantly. For her, it is all about success in writing…

Recent explorations into ethical questions have led me down a variety of rabbit holes, eventually to the whole psychic phenomenon and people claiming to be mediums and able to predict the future. One fascinating character is Mark Edward. I watched a 90-minute presentation where he explained how he and others in the “business” of psychic…

Newsletter

Thank you!