The Cost of Control

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In baseball, you have two approaches to hitting. If you hold the bat at the very end, you can get a heck of a lot of power in your swing, but you'll have less control once you set it in motion. If you choke up on the bat, you [...]

By | April 28th, 2014|

Entrepreneurs, Scarcity, and Success

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker I recently read "Freeing Up Intelligence," in Scientific American, and it got me thinking about entrepreneurship and success. The article talks about how scarcity of any kind - money, time, and other resources - affects our mental abilities. In a scarce situation, when we are strapped for money, time, [...]

By | April 24th, 2014|

What’s Up With Clinkle?

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Clinkle is the name of a digital-payment app startup that has recently made a bit of a media splash. Both Business Insider and BloombergBusinessweek have covered the company not for its revolutionary product, but for a Titanic-like story of young entrepreneur who seems to be steering his brilliant idea [...]

By | April 21st, 2014|

Securing the Heart of an Enterprise

   By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The Internet is buzzing over Heartbleed this week. Heartbleed is a simple human error that has compromised millions of transactions people thought were secure because they were performed using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption. Users are encouraged to change passwords, accounts, and cards to foil hackers of affected [...]

By | April 18th, 2014|

Exercise, Productivity, and Richard Branson

  By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker One of my angel investments is with a company called Infinity Fitness. Unlike high-profile fitness chains, Infinity prides itself in bootcamp-style workouts and personal training. Exercising at Infinity is about sweat and sacrifice, not just showing up and socializing. I invested in Infinity Fitness because I believe in [...]

By | April 17th, 2014|

Writing a Book is Like Starting a Business

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker When I (Ed) first started out to write “The Purpose Is Profit,” I thought Wyn and I would be able to crank out the book in six to nine months and quickly interest a publisher. But creating a book is not quite that simple. It takes far more than [...]

By | April 16th, 2014|

Going With The Flow

   By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In What I'm Still Learning About Managing Cash Flow from the New York Times' You're the Boss blog, Jay Goltz shares his experience as a small business owner with cash-flow management challenges. He describes with some chagrin his experience of having made a shortsighted financial choice that had repercussions a full nine [...]

By | April 14th, 2014|

Who Wants to be a Real Entrepreneur?

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In the world of video gaming, there are different strata to the social hierarchy. Someone who plays a lot of Candy Crush or Words with Friends on a smartphone is considered a "casual." This is not a compliment. Real gamers, it is said, build their own top-of-the-line computers just for gaming, [...]

By | April 11th, 2014|

Entrepreneurship is Thriving at Princeton

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Over the past 20 years, I (Wyn) have heard countless pitches from entrepreneurs at venture events. On Friday, April 6, 2014, I had the wonderful opportunity to judge some of the best pitches ever during the semi-final round of TigerLaunch at Princeton University. Sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Club and [...]

By | April 9th, 2014|

Money money money

By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The recent collapse of Mt. Gox brought digital currency to the front pages of news outlets all over the world. Bitcoin was the first digital currency to gain enough traction to emerge from the all-nerd community into the public realm. It seemed like science fiction at first: a futuristic society with invisible credits [...]

By | April 8th, 2014|