Coburn Ventures Podcast

Elliot Noss, CEO of internet company Tucows for just about 25 years, starts us off with a simple but reverberating statement: “the fundamental compact between employer and employee has changed”. There are so many related mutations of work, as he calls them, to consider. A few up shots that don’t do this conversation justice: Changes that will stick have cultural principles that were already underl...

Picture a pie chart of your work week: what percent is your job, your vocation, or total waste? Let’s use this model to uncover possible changes in process and decision making.

As more of our work life is digitized, we do know now, or we will know the how, when, why and where of work... where we work best, with whom and for what purpose. But there is so much to understand and experience before we can know what that means for industries across many sectors. Let’s dig in with Greg Parsons.

Growth and value are simply boxes we put around two giant categories. It’s helpful for marketing purposes, and for investment process. So what gives? Well, we have been in a period of disequilibrium for over 25 years, and that disequilibrium has skewed massively to growth. Let’s dig in on what this means for process.

The “study of the mind” is now mainstream, but why is this important, and how far ahead are corporations and advertisers?

This student mindedness conversation will help us take a step back, exploring an attitude or approach that can be highly personalized. But what is it? What does it look like in active practice? Pip and Brynne discuss what it is snd why it comes up so often so that you can identify what elements might be helpful to your process.

We continue with biologist Maria Souza on complex systems. In Part 1 we discussed resilience as a key property of complex systems. Now we examine the role of internal feedback loops in resilience and how to identify the lynchpins that could help change your system.

Biologist Maria Souza introduces us to the core properties of complex systems: how to identify a resilient system, and how understanding the property of resiliency — which is neither good nor bad in and of itself — can help us identify effective cultures.

An introduction into Stewart Brand’s pace layering model, from his work The Clock of the Long Now. Movement in this model leads to vast destruction or creation of market cap. We talk through how we identify where companies sit in the model, and when and why there might be movement.

Social psychologist Matt Wallaert offers his thinking on why identity is the most powerful force for behavior change, and how to be aware of it and use it to make better decisions.

Continuing on the topic of decision making, we walk through the data chain and how to use it to identify where you are in the process and to then make the conversion from one node to the next.

JC Herz guides us through risk avoidance vs. risk acceptance, resilience and fragility, and why your first step must be to identify and write down the answer to this question: what is your source of maximal regret?

We know investors are particularly prone to some common decision making biases. We start the discussion today on some of the tactics and tools to bring awareness of these biases to the forefront in order to ameliorate the problems they can stir up.

Data scientist and business leader JP Rangaswami expands on the impact of starting from a point of view of stewardship vs. monetization; how he expects the quality of investment metrics associated with ESG to improve, and the conditions required to act with real stewardship in business governance.

Continuing our series of tools to assess change, we apply Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief to managements ability to assess reality and lead through periods of massive change.

A deeper dive with Corey, Pip and Brynne into Coreys piece Living in the Bardo.

Part 3 in a series intended to help you study possibilities for the future with fewer investment biases, more context, and easy to use tools.

“Omni” means all, but we have used the term omnichannel to describe retailers who compliment brick and mortar with e-commerce and mobile. In this mini-cast, we start an examination of how omnichannel is accelerating and what forms it is taking on with regard to how we work.

Adversity comes every day. What can we do to mentally prepare for it and handle it in the moment it arrives? Dr. Morris Pickens is back to explain his “locker room” process that he uses with his clients, some of the best professional golfers on the tour.

Part 2 of a series intended to help you study possibilities for the future with fewer investment biases, more context, and easy to use tools.

Part 1 of a series intended to help you study possibilities for the future with fewer investment biases, more context, and easy to use tools.

What does it mean to “trust your gut”?We explore this question with investor and former CEO Rudy Karsan. Rudy gives examples of how he has learned to identify the many facets of gut decision-making, but also expands on the practices he uses to continue to refine his ability to trust it.

What is considered a healthy building or community in a world that was already increasingly remote? Glenn Lowenstein discusses a changing calculus in how buildings are valued, which long-held customs and rules may be fractured , and whether defining communities and buildings by productivity is missing the whole picture.

Giving ourselves clean time to think is a surprisingly counter-cultural activity. In this conversation, Mo describes why it’s so important, and Mo, Pip and I discuss a variety of modalities to support this practice.

In this mini-cast, we discuss one quick insight with cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken.