I have retained a few of my favourite posts from my old blog here for reference. I am currently publishing articles primarily on the Radical website.
Category: Archive
Farewell Alex
Every time I see a burrito — IRL or on TV — Alex comes to mind. And I hope he always will. His passion for burritos was eclipsed only by WordPress.
Alex has battled cancer for about three years — very bravely — and yesterday his family announced that he passed away peacefully, at home.
Some of you will disagree with me that burritos came second in his priority list after WordPress. “What about the cars?” you’ll say. Well, after spending an entire evening wandering around Portland in search of food he would be happy with I am personally convinced that, given the choice between a car and a burrito, he would have chosen the latter.
***
I first met Alex in Italy when I was working for Automattic and responsible for the Jetpack division while the big boss was out. That is to say, I was in Italy, he was in his Portland home, and we were talking on Zoom. However, one of my associations with Alex (apart from burritos), is irrevocably the golden light of the Italian sun on the Tuscan hills.
We were talking because I had just pitched Matt on having Alex join my team and this was our first face-to-face conversation. I was a little bit nervous — Alex has an amazing reputation inside Automattic having worked there for years and pretty much touched every part of the company.
It turned out to be one of the most memorable conversations at Automattic for me. At the time he’d been working in the VaultPress team and was struggling to be productive. He was delighted that I wanted him on board and I was surprised, and delighted in turn, that he considered my offer to join the growth team an exciting one.
He jumped into marketing work with an enthusiasm I’ve rarely seen from an engineer, keen to make an impact on Jetpack’s growth. And he did because within a few short weeks he had delivered on a few tricky projects for me.
***
Sadly this was short lived as just a few weeks later, perhaps a couple of months at most, he got sick with what turned out to be leukaemia.
His courage throughout the process was evident. Not just because he fought long and hard and transparently with his disease. But because, with a tenaciousness that I envy, he kept coming back to Slack to try and work, contribute, and be part of the team. In most cases these were short-lived spurts of work because he would tire easily or have to undergo another exhausting round of chemo which was debilitating.
Yet in spite of this very, very mitigating reason for not working, his work ethic was as strong as ever.
***
The last time I spoke to Alex face-to-face was about a year ago. I was in London for the Affiliate Summit in early February and at the time Alex was back at work.
Because of his West Coast timezone and my UK timezone (and eight hour time difference) it was often hard to find good times to sync up on a video call. He was not much of an early riser and I have a young daughter so our overlap times were not great.
So, whenever I was travelling, having no evening family commitments, I would try to make up with an extra long catch-up call.
That time, wandering around Islington in London scouring the place for a good spot to have a call, I chanced upon the perfect spot. A small cafe with large windows right opposite a burrito joint! Sitting back to the window the Mexican take-away was my backdrop for our call which Alex found hilarious.
***
That was the last time we spoke properly, apart from Facebook messaging, because a few short weeks later the team was re-organised and a few weeks after that I left Automattic.
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My thoughts and love go to Alex’s family and close friends. I know that he always felt hugely supported by everyone around him.
A Responsible “iGaming” Company…
A responsible “iGaming” company is one that chooses to not be in business.
What is permissible is not always honourable – Cicero
It is impossible to live in Malta if you’re involved in the software industry and not constantly run into the online betting or gaming companies – or people who work for them. A rough estimate based on LinkedIn puts almost half of my Maltese connections (those working in software) on the payroll at a gaming company. Of my ex-colleagues and students who’ve chosen an entrepreneurial path, a large number have started companies that service the gaming industry.
To say this is disappointing to me is an understatement.
Of all the industries Malta could have become associated with “iGaming” is possibly one of the worst. The clue is in the fact that it is an industry that requires a “responsible gaming foundation” to educate and protect users from the perils of gaming. A business whose core product or service means that its users run the risk of irresponsible spending, addiction, and bankruptcy is unethical. An industry that lends itself to money-laundering practices becomes complicit in cocaine trafficking and the associated widespread harm that “industry” in turn generates.
Of course its not illegal to run or work for a gaming company. Just like its not illegal to operate or work for a physical casino. Just like its not illegal to operate or work for a tobacco company or a strip club.
But every time I see a LinkedIn notification that so-and-so is now working for OnlineSimpleBet Group a part of me dies inside.
![[UniqGroup] Employees hung around most of the day but looked understandably worried.](https://richardmuscat.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/unigroup_jpg__690c397496_.png)
We have many talented developers, entrepreneurs, and designers and we could have just as easily made it possible for them to work in a hi-tech or startup environment that is focused on a more ethical, and ultimately more long-lasting, industry.
My Daughter Asleep, by David Whyte
A touching poem by David Whyte that a mere seven months ago would have been unremarkable to me yesterday left me speechless.
Carrying a child,
I carry a bundle of sleeping
future appearances.
I carry
my daughter adrift
on my shoulder,
dreaming her slender
dreams
and
I carry her
beneath
the window,
watching
her moon lit
palm
open
and close
like a tiny
folded
map,
each line
a path that leads
where I can’t go,
so that I read her palm
not knowing
what I read
and
walk with her
in moon light
on the landing,
not knowing
with whom I walk,
making
invisible prayers
to go on
with her
where I can’t
go,
conversing
with so many
unknowns
that must know her
more intimately
than I do.
And so to these
unspoken shadows
and this broad night
I make
a quiet
request
to the
great parental
darkness
to hold her
when I cannot,
to comfort her
when I am gone,
to help her learn
to love
the unknown
for itself,
to take it
gladly
like
a lantern
for the way
before her,
to help her see
where ordinary
light will not help her,
where happiness has fled,
where faith
cannot reach.
Read the rest on David’s Facebook page…
Father Peter, il-Buffu
Nahseb kelli madwar disgha jew tmien snin meta l-ewwel niftakar nisma u nara lil Fr. Peter jitkellem. Zgur kien dak iz-zmien ghax konna ghadna nghixu ir-Rabat (igifieri qabel is-snin disghin) izda l-gazzetti kienu diga bil-kulur (allura wara l-1987).
Kien xi programm ta’ diskussjoni fuq Television Malta; na niftakarx l-isem ezattament ghalkemm ghandi amment li kien ta Lou Bondí. Forsi Pjazza Tlieta?
Dak iz-zmien konna nkunu ta spiss flimkien id-dar filghaxijiet naraw it-television wara l-ikla tal-familja. Hafna drabi dan kien jinvolvi xi Varietá fuq ir-RAI jew Canale 5 u fil-weekend dejjem issibna naraw Cinema in Famiglia u Domenica In. Pero ommi w missieri dejjem kienu jinsistu li naraw l-ahbarijiet fuq TVM u meta bdew jixxandru dawn il-programmi ta diskussjoni malajr saru parti mir-ritwal taghna. Allura ta tfal kont imdorri nisma, nara u “niddiskuti” grajjiet kurrenti u politika.
Izda f’dak il-programm rajt xi haga gdida. Dan ir-ragel li kien qieghed jitkellem b’mod differenti hafna mill-politici li naraw issoltu kellu caption mhux tas-soltu li kienet tghid “Hassieb u filosofu”. Sa dak inhar ma kontx naf li dak kien titlu li wiehed seta jaspira ghalih b’mod realistiku. B’dak il-mod stramb li certi memorji tat-tfulija jibqghu ittimbrati f’mohhok, dik l-istampa baqghet f’tieghi. Meta aktar tard f’hajti xi buffu (jew tnejn) qaluli “U ajma, mela int tista tkun XYZ”, dik l-istampa kienet tigi quddiem wicci u tghamilli l-qalb.
Izda lejn l-ahhar tal-programm smajt xi haga hafna aktar straordinarja. Il-Prezentatur saqsa lil Father Peter “Kieku kellek taghmel xi haga ohra b’hajtek x’kont taghzel?” Kwazi minghajr hsieb huwa rrisponda “Kont inkun buffu.”
Buffu? Father Peter elabora.
“Il-Buffu huwa dak ir-ragel jew mara li xogholu huwa li jdahhak in-nies. Mhux bil-bravura tieghu izda bl-inkompetenza. Dejjem lest li johrog fuq il-palk fejn xi hadd iehor ser jghaddi z-zmien bih. U dejjem jghamel dan b’dahka fuq wiccu anke jekk forsi m’ghandux dahka gewwa fih. Jista jkun li kellu gimgha hazina, li forsi ggieled ma xi habib jew tilef lil xi hadd li jhobb izda dan ma jzommux lura milli jpingi wicc ta ferh biex jaqdi dmiru lejn l-udjenza tieghu. Izda fuq kollox, il-Buffu, jaqa kemm kemm il-darba jaqa, wiccu fit-trab u fit-tajn, dejjem jerga jqum fuq saqajh u jkompli b’dak li kien qieghed jipprova jaghmel.”
Ghalkemm Father Peter ma kienx buffu ghex hajtu b’dan il-mod li ddeskriva tant snin ilu. Karriera bhal tieghu ma tigix b’xejn. U zgur ma ssehx jekk dak li jkun jaqta qalbu ma l-ewwel intopp.
Kwazi ghaxar snin wara kelli l-opportunita li niltaqa mieghu regolarment bhala ir-rapprezentant ta’ l-istudenti fuq il-Bord tal-Junior College. Fil ftit diskussjonijiet li kellna sibt fih li mhux talli kien ragel ta intellett kbir izda ta umilta kbira wkoll. Ta sittax il-sena min jaf kemm kont nghid, minghajr ma ndur mal-lewza, cucati. Izda dejjem tani wicc u sema x’kelli nghid bl-akbar serjeta u attenzjoni.
Nies bhalu, u bhall-Professur de Marco ma tantx kellna, jew ghandna, Malta. Nies li lesti jiddedikaw ruhhom ghal-hsieb, il-filosofija u kburija umli. Nispera li l-Maltin li kienu jafuh ma jinsewx l-ezempju tieghu u li fil-gejjieni ikollna aktar politici, akkademici, kittieba u hassieba li jgibu ruhhom bl-istess mod.
U nispera li Father Peter, skond it-twemmin tieghu, jerga jqum, ifarfar it-trab u jkompli jispira lill-istudenti Maltin.
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English Version
Father Peter, the Clown
I must have been around eight or nine years old when I first saw Father Peter talking on TV. I’m not sure of the exact dates but it must have been around that time because we still lived in Rabat (making it late eighties) but newspapers were already being printed in colour (so post-1987).
It was definitely some discussion programme on TVM; although I don’t quite remember which one. It might have been Lou Bondí’s “Pjazza Tlieta”.
At that time our family used to often be gathered around TV of an evening after supper. More often than not we’d be watching Italian TV. My parents however were quite adamant on watching the local news and as these sort of programmes became more commonplace they also became part of our daily life. As a result my childhood tended to include political and current affairs “discussion” on a fairly regular basis.
However in this particular episode I experienced something new. This man, who spoke in a manner quite different to your average politician, had an unusual caption to his name. It read: “Thinker and philosopher”. I wasn’t aware until that point that that was a job title one could realistically aspire to in Malta. That image stuck with me in the way some childhood memories are wont to do and came back to me later in life at those points in time in which certain people would skeptically say that certain dreams are out of reach or just plain ridiculous.
Towards the end of the show I heard something else which struck me, at the time, as being even more unusual. The interviewer ask Father Peter “If you had to start over and pick a different career what might that be?” Without hesitation he replied “I’d be a clown.”
Seriously? A clown?
“You see, a clown is somebody whose job it is to make people laugh. However not through his cleverness but by his incompetence. He makes people feel good about themselves. He’s always prepared to go on stage where somebody else will be making fun of him. And he does this with a huge grin on his face, night after night, even if he’s possibly not laughing so much inside. But most of all, however many times the Clown may fall down flat on his face, he will always get back up, grin, and continue with the job at hand: giving his audience what they came for.”
Now Father Peter was no clown but he certainly tried to follow his own advice in this regard. A career such as his does not come about lightly after all; and certainly not if one gives up at the first hurdle.
Around ten years later I was lucky enough to run into him on a regular basis in my role of student rep at sixth form. In the few conversations we had I found him to be not only a clever man but a humble one too. At the age of sixteen God only knows how naive I must have been, especially when discussing student “politics” and college policy. He never once disregarded me and always made me feel like what I said was valuable to him.
People like him are rare in the world, even more so in Malta. People who are both deep thinkers yet in touch with life’s practical challenges. I hope that Malta doesn’t forget him too quickly and that those who knew him personally or were taught by him continue to be inspired by his work and ethos.
Above all I hope that he will get back up on his feet, grin and continue to inspire Maltese students now and in the future.
The price of “Free”
In my last post I promised that I’d elaborate on why I think “Free” is a flawed and misunderstood business model. This is that post. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now; ever since I read Chris Anderson’s book Free around two years ago in fact.
My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles.
Free is Lazy
My colleague Dom Reed has just been interviewed about his wildly popular and ongoing self-portrait work. He’s been taking a photo a day for a year and a half now and doesn’t show any signs of stopping. Unsurprisingly he claims that the hardest part of his work is coming up with fresh and funny ideas for his daily photo. It would be terribly easy, he says, to take a daily photo of his dinner plate but why would anyone want to see that on a daily basis?
Creativity, in entrepreneurship as well as photography, is hard. Creating something that is of superior value for a given audience is not an easy task.
Free does not push you to create something evocative that users and customers are willing to commit to in the long term.
Free absconds on the entrepreneur-customer commitment: by asking for nothing you also promise nothing. Both parties can walk away because there is no relationship. On the other hand by asking for money (or some other form of commitment), however large or small an amount, you create a self-imposed drive to produce creative and valuable products because not doing so would mean letting somebody down.
Free undermines entrepreneurial creativity by giving you the lazy option: the dinner plate photo.
Free Destroys Value
Last year, my boss Neil Davidson (<– blatant flattery warning :-P) wrote an excellent short guide to software pricing called Don’t Just Roll the Dice. As the title suggests, the book argues that software pricing shouldn’t be decided randomly. There are three big reasons for not doing this: first, you might be missing out on revenue; second, your product price says something about the quality and intended audience of your product; third, your price also sets an expectation of how much effort has gone into production and how much value a customer should expect.
Choosing Free as your product price runs the risk of attracting entirely the wrong audience for your product or service. Although you may get tens of thousands of users, it is probable that those users are unlikely to ever consider paying you because by definition you have attracted people who are looking for free stuff. Reversing this decision later can be extremely painful: you will piss off your existing user base, potentially generating very negative publicity and you might need to start from scratch in terms of looking for the right audience.
However, you may have done something even worse in the meantime, especially if you’re in a new space. You will encourage your competition to also produce free stuff which will in turn set the expectation in the market that your kind of product should be free thus entirely destroying the value of your market.
Free is Ugly
At some point or another you will realise that you do need to create a revenue stream. If you end up in the situation I just described above, i.e. encumbered with an audience of people unwilling to pay for what you’re providing, you will be faced with a dilemma: start over and risk the bad press or try to squeeze some pennies out of a reluctant user base.
The latter is a slippery slidey slope that leads towards intrusive in-app advertising, pop-ups, link-baiting, shady affiliate marketing, email spam and a total lack of focus on user experience.
Shipping software, for instance, that is crippled by in-app advertising and ‘cross-sell’ pop-ups unless the user pays for an ad-free upgrade is madness. Not only is the revenue you may gain purely of the short-term sort but, it is a result of users running away from an annoyance rather than going towards something of value. The moment something better comes along, your customers and users will defect because they are not being treated with respect.
Free Inflates Bubbles
The idea that things can be free is behind a lot of financial bubbles. In the late nineties we thought that we could get distribution and infrastructure for free and we got the dot com bubble. A couple of years ago we thought we could get loans and bank credit for free and we got the property bubble. In both cases we left something very important out of the equation: delivery costs in the former and ability to repay mortgages in the latter.
Today a lot of companies in the web and social media space are similarly leaving something important out of the equation: paying customers. The paying customer of course doesn’t necessarily need to be the end-user but there needs to be one. If there isn’t one what happens is that entrepreneurs with a few thousand subscribers to their free service suddenly realise that hey, they do need money to pay the bills and a slide deck and couple of pitches later they’ve raised some funding with the promise of ‘monetisation’. Other entrepreneurs and VCs see this happening and think “hey, those guys can’t be that dumb, I’ll try the same thing” and hey presto, you suddenly have impossibly high valuations and smaller investors being squeezed out of start-up deals. The classic signs of a bubble.
If you’re putting together a business plan or a slide deck that claims there will be an initial period of “short-term loss” while you establish a user base which you will then monetise, just remember that that is exactly what most of the pre-2000 dot com business plans were like.
So When Does Free Work?
Almost never. Somebody always pays. If healthcare is free, your taxes pay for it. If the flight is free, the extras aren’t. If the search is free, the advertiser is paying.
The only time when Free can really work for you is if you set your sights on having a specific outcome: acquisition. If you’re building technology, or a team, that is valuable to somebody else than you can afford to provide a free service and raise finance to fund that service until you’re in a position to be acquired.
Further Reading
If you’d like to grab a copy of Chris Anderson’s book “Free” to decide for yourself you can find it on Amazon in various versions.
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Repeat after me: “It’s not a bubble”
Questions are starting to be asked seriously about whether we’re in the middle of a second internet bubble. Some say No: PwC, Fred Wilson, Sarah Lacy and Paul Graham strongly deny the existence of a bubble. On the other hand, some say Yes: Mike Arrington and Don Dodge think there is one.
So what’s really happening. Is there or isn’t there a bubble?
First, what is a bubble? It’s when lots of people (investors) pay more for stuff (companies) than they’re really worth. For instance, if you buy a share in a company for 1 Dollar, you expect that share to be worth, say 2 Dollars after a few years. At which point you can sell your share and make a 1 Dollar profit. What happens in a bubble is that investors and entrepreneurs misjudge the worth of the shares they’re buying and expect a 2 Dollar share to be worth 5 when in fact it later turns out to be worth 10 cents. The bubble is said to ‘burst’ when shareholders realise this and suddenly there’s a mad rush to sell stock as fast as possible to at least recoup some money, which drives value and prices further down.
This is what happened in 2000 and I think there’s a strong possibility of a repeat in the next couple of years. Probably not as disastrous as last time but still pretty serious. Here’s why:
The Basis of Valuations
The key question to ask here is: What were company valuations based on that it went so wrong? Well, the situation 15 years ago was that there was this exciting new thing called The Web and nobody really had any experience of valuing web-based businesses. So investors made mistakes (to the tune of 4 trillion USD). They were faced with a game-changing technology, misjudged the way it delivers value and got bitten. Lesson learned right?
No. Just a couple of years later there was the lesser known (because less people got bitten) WAP fiasco in which mobile operators sunk millions of Dollars and Euros into a new technology because they misjudged the way mobile delivers value. Lesson learned right?
No. Even later, we get the housing bubble, one we know pretty well because we’ve just lived through it. Now, surely, lesson learned right?
Hmmm. If we look around us, is there any game-changing technology that we might be misjudging because we’ve no experience of valuing it? My bet is on social media. If we were to be brutally honest with one another we’d have to say that we have no idea of how to value companies that operate in this space. Irrational exuberance has taken the place of revenue and, therefore, there’s a strong possibility we might be making a few mistakes.
A Misunderstood Business Model
Another problem we had 15 years ago was that entrepreneurs fundamentally misunderstood how to make money on or from the web. We thought that a business could be profitable just by virtue of being online and if we could get enough traffic – eyeballs – to our website everything else would fall into place.
Today we are seeing the mirror image of this and it’s called Free. The mad rush to $0.00 peaked with Chris Anderson’s book Free (currently retailing at £15.19 on the Kindle) in 2009 and hasn’t abated since. The thinking around the Free business model is that there’s a huge psychological jump from $0.00 to $0.01 and users are more likely to adopt if the price is Free. So we build and give stuff for free and then figure out how to monetise later. Basically, we seem to think that a business can be profitable just by virtue of being online and if we can get enough traffic – eyeballs – to our … hang on a minute. How is this different to 1999?
Free is a woefully misunderstood business model. There’s no doubt that it works for some companies but its not for everyone. Free works well when you can deliver a large and engaged audience to an interested third party: Google, Facebook, TechCrunch, (possibly) Twitter, blogs and newspapers operate this model successfully. It pretty much doesn’t work anywhere else.
That’s a possibly controversial statement and I plan to elaborate in a separate post but, in a nutshell, if people only use your stuff because its free, you don’t actually have a business and its likely that your product doesn’t embody enough value to generate profit down the line.
Recent Acquisitions, Investments and the IPO Market
When you think something’s too good to be true, there’s always the possibility that you might be right.
Twitter just purchased TweetDeck for $40 million. I read that as “company that makes very little money buys company that makes no money”. More shockingly, Color Labs just raised $41 million to develop a mobile photo sharing app. That’s $1M more than what Twitter paid for an app that at least has a large user base. Last week LinkedIn IPOed and in one day its stock more than doubled in value valuing the company at almost $9 billion. eBay bought Skype a few years ago for $2 billion ($4.6 including non cash value), sold it a while later because it wasn’t performing well enough and now, Microsoft buys Skype for $8 billion.
And these aren’t isolated data points. Start-up and non-start-up valuations are going up across the board, smaller investors are getting squeezed out of deals and the tech IPO market is on the rise again.
So where does all this value come from? Answer: nowhere.
It’s another gold rush. This time its not for domain names but its for the “social graph“. Everybody wants a piece of it but, and here’s the catch, nobody can explain why. Oh sure its “game changing” and “disruptive” and “it’s changing the way the world works”. What it really really means though is that, once again in the space of a few years, you can get $40 mil for a business plan.
And that’s what we all promised ourselves would never happen again after the dotcom bubble.
Repeat after me: “It’s not a bubble”
The thing is that nobody will actually tell you there’s a bubble. It’s not in the interest of the investors who’ve put their money into these ventures to do so and it’s most certainly not in the interest of the entrepreneurs who’ve placed their bets on somehow monetising the social graph.
For every one of the reasons I’ve mentioned above you will find a counter argument. And certainly a strong one is that I haven’t a clue what, for instance, Color’s business plan is. Or what Twitter’s monetisation plans are.
All I can point to is a remarkable resemblance in the current turn of events to what happened last time.
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Persistence
I haven’t really been diligent with blogging these past few weeks. And yet…
…the readership of this very humble blog keeps growing. It’s no Robert Scoble or Fred Wilson-like traffic, but hey, I’m just a lowly designer after all.
Posting reasonably regularly to this blog is the one thing I’ve persisted at in the last couple of years. The results are fairly gratifying to me. So persistence can be a good thing; and persisting at something you enjoy doing is much easier. There’s a lesson there but it’s way too late for me to go on and on about it 🙂
However, perhaps it’s time to finish off some of those posts I have in my drafts folder…
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Why Copenhagen won’t work: Hypocrisy is built into the system
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Ethical Business & VRM
Following Monday’s London event I’ve been refining my thoughts about the whole VRM concept. It interests me because it is very closely related to a subject I have a strong interest in: Ethical Entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is one of those topics that polarizes people: some evangelize and others vilify it. Whichever side of the fence you’re on, it is incontrovertible that entrepreneurship is one of those phenomena that have a significant impact on our kind of society. Many entrepreneurs create new ideas, disseminate information, create jobs, tend to be politically influential and often donate substantial sums to educational and charitable institutions. At the same time, many entrepreneurs also tend to be greedy, ruthless and inconsiderate to environmental or social considerations in pursuit of their financial objectives.
VRM, is but another model for entrepreneurship (like Social Entrepreneurship, Permission Marketing and Ricardo Semler‘s approach) that is trying to change what I call the “Traditional” Entrepreneurship Model. I put together a small diagram to show what I mean by this:
In the Traditional Entrepreneurship Model there is an exchange of value between customer and entrepreneur. The relationship hinges on the exchange for both parties but the outcome is often wildly different. The customer parts with money in exchange for a perceived set of values that far exceeds the price paid. For instance, in return for the price of an iPod, the customer gets aesthetic beauty, a feeling of importance, a relief from boredom when traveling, a portable hard drive, ownership of a physical object and a sense of belonging to a particular commuinity (friends, Apple fans, etc…). On the other hand, the entrepreneur typically gets only a financial return.
I believe it is this imbalance that drives entrepreneurs to unethical business practices. Practices that range from spamming and deceitful marketing right up to employee/third-world exploitation, misuse of natural resources and environmental disregard. (In short, all the stuff that Naomi Klein has been warning us about.)
VRM and similar entrepreneurship models are, in different ways, attempting to address this imbalance. An “Ethical” Entrepreneurship Model would look something like this:
The core difference is that both entrepreneur and customer obtain more than just a financial return from the value exchange. This is not to say that business ventures should not be profitable. Rather, that profitability should not be measure in purely financial terms.
How to go about doing it, and how some people are already doing it successfully is a topic for another day however…
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