Avanoo Blog

A few days ago, I was sitting with the CEO of a medium-sized manufacturing company talking through our 2018 strategic roadmap, when he asked an interesting question, “Why have so many of my best decisions been the ones few others understand at first?”

In 1955, the government of Thailand decided to build a highway in Bangkok through a location where an old temple stood. They purchased the rights to the temple, and agreed to let the local monks move a centuries-old clay Buddha to another location.

Three years ago, I had dinner with an investor in my company who led a prominent fund that had invested in dozens of early-stage startup companies. He’d seen some of those companies go from ideas to being worth billions of dollars.

In April of this year, MeiMei Fox wrote a beautiful article in Forbes about the company I co-founded, Avanoo. As I read it, I felt strangely exposed and out of place. It was the first time since I co-founded Avanoo in 2013 that any journalist had shared our story.

An older hispanic woman was sobbing, and had bags strewn about at an airline ticket counter in Nevada. Worried, I approached the counter. The older woman was speaking Spanish, and the airline ticket counter attendant wasn’t understanding.

Three years ago, my company, Avanoo, was still in its infancy. We were four people and not much more than a vision and a team crazy enough to believe we could achieve it. Somehow, we’d just closed a deal with a large, well-known consumer brand.Making that deal was an amazing m...

When I was 12 years old, I had the opportunity to watch someone I idolized speak to a large, standing-only crowd of people. His words were mesmerizing. Everything he said felt masterful; poetry about how to create a life well-lived. Afterward, I was given the chance to meet th...

A few days ago, I spoke with the CEO of a medium-sized company who shared with me a [confidential] story about a group of unethical people who he felt were trying to ruin him and his company. He was distraught, and he asked for my advice.

Earlier this year, polling company Gallup released their State of the American Workplace Report for 2017. They begin with a bombshell:

Yesterday, a large multi-national client took me on a tour of their corporate offices. They showed me, proudly, how their values were pasted all over their walls, alongside pictures of many of the employees who’d helped drive success for the company. When the tour ended, we wa...

By mid-2014, Avanoo had been around for a year. We had a product people loved, but we barely had enough money to pay for rent and ramen, and our highest paying client allocated more of their budget to Kleenex than they did to Avanoo. Cofounder Prosper Nwankpa and I expected mo...