Hi Folks!

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m glad to return to this blog. I have a new experiment to write about. For the next few months, I’m going to be trying to improve the quality, amount, and speed of the feedback we get as we build our business, Dogpatch Technology.

One of the biggest problems in investing is the sheer time between when you make a decision and when you see true results. It’s often on the order of a decade or two if done with the usual “buy and hold an amazing business for as long as you can.” And, it’s one of the primary reasons why investing principles seem so simple, yet are often hard to apply. Whether the topic is investing, engineering, medicine, or almost any other endeavor, the sooner we receive high quality feedback on what we’re doing, the sooner we can adapt, and the better we do. However, this can’t come at the expense of taking a long term perspective, and you have to ensure that feedback is high enough quality to take that into account. Paying attention to Graham’s “weighing machine” inputs and not the “voting machine” inputs is at the heart.

With this experiment, there’s going to be less emphasis on investing, and more emphasis on entrepreneurship, engineering, design, and all those aspects of actually running a business. You’ll probably see some things here you won’t normally see on your usual “analyze a company a week” investing blog, and I hope you’ll find it useful. Investing makes us better businesspeople and business makes us better investors. There are principles we’ll hopefully investigate in this blog that are universal to almost every discipline and industry (feedback being one that’s pretty hot at the moment). I hope we’ll be able to hit on more than a few.

So put on your micropreneur hats, get comfortable with the technology industry, and let’s see where the latest research into behavior change and feedback loops takes us.

Time for some fun.