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Five years ago I started Product Storyteller to shine light on the durable edge of capitalism - where people build great products that create new value.

As of today, February 10 2025, generative AI is that frontier, and its a boomtown! When OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago, over 1 m people used it in the 1st five days.

That’s insane, and the breadth of interest and opportunity surrounding this technology has only accelerated. Immediately, I investigated and wrote a few articles on its impact.

But what really has me interested now is the chance to ride the next wave of computing, as big as the Internet was when I started out in product management, Only now, I am an investor.

That’s why I am redirecting my content efforts to growth company investing, in public and private companies, with a focus on generative AI and other massive market gaps.

Please join me in a quest to find the next set of multibaggers, stocks that will grow 10x or more in value as investments.  You will see me post 3m videos here that investigate the contenders.

Here’s my promise. I will use a five factor structure to organize the content - market gaps, competitive advantage, unique value, profitability and ability to execute.

Outside the basics, I follow two guiding principles.  FIrst, I will highlight products that amplify human wisdom. I believe that they have the highest upside potential.

Second, I will shine light on the companies that value collective humanity. I believe that they have the least downside risk.

My belief is that any capital you have should be deployed in businesses that create value. Win / win outcomes will survive the boom and pay handsome dividends later.

Join me, and let’s build wealth together. You can register your email with me on this site for notification of updates, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or follow me on one of the socials.

Further, it would hone her storytelling skills. After MythBusters, she went on to author Crash Test Girl and co-found EXPLR Media. She hopes now to create empathy in the world, searching the globe for stories that will bring us together.

From Kari, we learn that the secret of MythBusters was its permission-less science. No one told them how or what to think. They had to create and run the experiment to see the result. As she says, "We blew stuff up, and used a lot of explosives."

Today, Kari makes art at home with black powder. With meticulous care, she tailors the black powder, the paper, and the grain of the ignition system to the image in mind. Chaos makes the final piece.

Knowing that this high energy artist shares an interest in blockchain and non-fungible token (NFT) technology, I had my friend and podcast collaborator, John-Michael Scott (BloxNexus), join me as co-host. We found fertile common ground.

But the book that everyone remembers is their first, One-to-one Future, because it makes ten predictions that change direct interactive marketing forever. Landing just months before the first web browser was introduced, they had the guidebook that would lead an entire generation to create the future around their principles.

Every major point gets built out except for one - our privacy was invaded.  That’s what we are going to talk about in this second half of my very special interview with Don Peppers.  It still sits wrong with him.  There are reasons that he and Martha made the prediction they did in 1993.

In the next 40 minutes, you will hear what they thought was going to happen, the reasoning behind that, and what the future can and should be now.  If the best way to predict the future is to create it, let’s hear what Don would have us build today.

Encouraged by testimonials from Tom Peters and other leading strategists, Don and Martha would go on to co-author 13 books on the subject of one-to-one marketing, and launch, the Peppers and Rogers Group consulting firm, which still today, drives customer-centric thinking into brands around the world.

What I want to share with you in parts 1 and 2 of this interview with Don Peppers is the prophetic nature of the first book that Don wrote in collaboration with Martha Rogers. In One-to-one Future, Don and Martha essentially created the direct marketing future we live in today.

Of the ten predictions they made, all came true except for one.  They fully expected that businesses would emerge to make money protecting consumers’ privacy rather than threatening it.  It still gnaws at him that this doesn’t exist today, as he sees trust to be critical to an authentic company - customer relationship.

As we recorded this interview, it became clear that we would need to split it into two parts.  In this initial segment you get the chance to meet Don, learn what drives him, and begin to understand the power of his authentic approach to sales, marketing and life.

With respect to privacy, we decided to go deeper into possible paths that marketers and governments can take now to bring us back to a more trusting relationship.  This important conversation comes in part II.

Carlos works on the durable edge of capitalism as a volunteer for #leplusimportant.  As you will learn from Carlos in this interview, business people in Europe, and Paris in this case, understand the need to retrain people who would otherwise be left out as technology relentlessly moves towards higher productivity.

As we in the US consider our own issues with worker displacement, it should prove useful to hear how this group of French business people have approached the problem with entrepreneurial flair.  They don’t see government as an enemy, but rather as a partner who can deliver the solutions that they propose and test.

This is a quick episode that will leave you wanting more.  Let’s listen now.

There are two very important points to take away from what you are about to hear.

First, Erica calls for each of us to express why our products matter.   We usually say what we offer and how it works, but we need to paint a very clear picture of why the thing that we have created matters in the world.  Our clients and customers are bombarded by messages all day.  They simply don’t have the time to translate the technical details of what we offer into a solution to their problem. They need an anchor, which is our brand.

Second, we should be thinking big. What is our audacious vision?  Erica sees a vision of decentralization, of reconfiguring the way that we distribute value in community.  Though you might know this vision as blockchain or crypto, Erica reminds us that there is more to this movement than technology.  There is enormous opportunity to add value and create wealth here, but we need to express this opportunity in terms of why. <pause>

So, what makes positioning and vision a path to the durable edge of capitalism?  As economic value builds from value then we can imagine ourselves better off as a community when everyone in the community is engaged.  That means we all add value to meet unmet needs, and have our own needs met.

Erica is constantly, persistently working with clients to get them into a hyperniche, where they are special, and valued.  This is their positioning, where they add the most value, which can be seen where their solutions relieve the pain of the customers they target. Everyone wins.  Her clients make more money and work efficiently.  The client’s customers with unmet needs are now satisfied.  <pause>

Such win-win outcomes are the foundation of civil society, and are especially important when companies are introducing disruptive innovations.  The big audacious vision that changes the world needs to make sure that no one is left behind.

That is why Erica’s brand messaging practice matters, and why I am pleased to call her my friend.

We first met when I led the pitch night for data privacy companies at his first ever Responsible Digital Leadership workshop. The global business leaders in attendance talked about the need for companies to build good social practices into their products from the beginning.  I wanted to know more, so I asked Soren to sit down with me for this conversational interview.

We talked about how companies need to move on from breaking the rules, to a place where people make new rules responsibly.  Does that come from industry regulation, or from an industry that self regulates?

From his European perspective, Soren relates an ethical approach to durable capitalism that comes from shared understanding and the setting of community standards.  I hope that you appreciate our conversation as much as I did.

I believe this to be a durable edge of capitalism where spiritually led innovators hold themselves to a higher standard, a moral constraint, defined through a relationship with their Creator.  They pursue wealth beyond that which is material, even as the monetary gain they create sustains their work in the material world.

This interview was recorded in June 2019, with Annanda Barclay, my partner on the Applied Wisdom podcast series.  We found Dr. Jolly to be an inspiration, a wise person who chooses her words very carefully.

On the panel are Erica Blair (brand communication expert and blockchain advocate), John Michael Scott (enterprise product developer), Byron Bland (international conflict negotiator) and Cybele Zufolo Siegel (word performance artist and master communicator).  

This panel session will change the way you look at business, and give you new tools for building sustainable brands.  I introduce the event and frame the conversation around Facebook and the opening it has left for disruptors.  Each person on the panel introduces him or herself, and then the questions begin.

Our lives intersected at Geoworks, at the very beginning of the handheld mobile device revolution, where we were part of a crazy awesome turnaround, in which a company known for competing with Microsoft Windows for the desktop GUI pivoted massively and took on the Apple Newton PDA.

Though we have many stories together, we used our time in this episode to talk about the structure of story itself, specifically how we use story in marketing, and how story has changed with the revolution in technology that we saw first hand.    For Mike, this is a perspective that informs his work at Gartner today.

From the start of the interview, Mike talks about the advice he gives to his clients.  It isn’t that they should have a set of tactics for mobile marketing, but that they should leverage the fact that every single person out there is mobile and make their brand available at every phase of the customer journey.

Butt does that fundamentally change the narratives that we use to speak to our customers?   As a product storyteller, I look for the thread that integrates the work of the developers, the marketers, and the sales people who bring a new product to market. Does mobile marketing and news cycle acceleration change the story structure that they use?

Our conclusion was that technology accelerates and amplifies what we say, so we had better start with a solid foundation grounded in authenticity.  The better we know ourselves and our teams the more likely we are to deliver a strong message in the moment that stays consistent as it evolves.

This interview was done on the outside patio at the Village Bakery in Woodside, California.  Music almost immediately starts playing in the background.  So, I must apologize that the audio quality isn’t up to the quality of my guest.  But the good news for you the listener is that there is no deep fake here.  You get the raw take, and that can be a very entertaining thing.  Enjoy.

For software to take over the world, Tom and his cohort had to lay the foundation of Unix and TCP/IP.  And his cohort is impressive, including Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt and Bill Joy.  These brilliant technologists wrote reliable and efficient software for their own use, enabling the many products we use today.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise then that the entrepreneurs who disrupted networking 40 years ago, would be the same ones to commoditize it today.  Tom now builds the kind of next generation products that the Cisco’s of the world can monetize, which gives his companies excellent acquisition exits.

His current focus is DriveScale, a company he founded with Satya Nishtala in 2013 to commoditize the endless server SKUs from Dell, HP and others.  With DriveScale, one can create, deploy and adapt servers on the fly to meet the demands and distributed nature of containerized applications. It’s a perfect match for Kubernetes.

This interview puts you in the mind of an engineer who has repeatedly broken down the walls between networks and systems.  From the origins of Unix and the Internet to the virtual machines that run all of IT today, we cover it all.  I hope you enjoy the trip.

I met Rob when we worked together on the NouGit team that won the EOS Global hackathon in San Francisco last November.  The value added that caught the judges attention that weekend was decentralized and incentivized git repos on the EOS blockchain.

NouGit is incorporated now with an alpha release on the way.  The concept has evolved though, to focus more attention on emerging open source projects that need contributors to stay strong.  I’m one of the advisors, and super excited about its future.

Working together, I’ve become a friend to Rob, watching him through the lens of my own experience.  In 1990, many of us were bringing value to the Internet when others couldn’t see a future there.  But a few years later, the world around us did begin to figure it out and investment demand went absolutely bonkers.

The recent ICO froth in crypto reminds me of the dot com boom 20 years ago.  Rob tells a story in this interview that at one point with Token Agency, he helped clients raise over $150m during a twelve month period.  And yet, what matters now is what mattered then.  Companies must add value to survive.  From this interview, I think you will find that Rob is one of those people who seeks that value.

In the following interview, you will get to learn more about Dan and Apoll01.  Do listen all the way through, as Dan really gets into the details and makes an impassioned plea for participation.

Afterwards, please go to https://www.apoll01nation.org, and sign up to participate in the community. This is an excellent opportunity to get involved, make a difference, and reduce your anxiety.

The initial interviews explored what I called at the time "the durable edge of capitalism." This is a place where value chain disruption does not come with ecosystem destruction.  The audio here speaks to that idea, as does the text below.

Then 2020 happened, and gave immediate evidence to both the disruption and the destruction. It also showed the serious problem of social media content bubbles. We must be able to communicate with each other to address global issues globally.

Thus, I intend to add product marketing best practices into this podcast going forward. Please join me as I ask new questions. Here are some examples.

How can we reach people effectively and efficiently, beyond narrow segments of interest? What tools do we have? Is story the way?  

You may listen on Apple iTunes or any of the many feeds that stream my content.

Durable Edge of Capitalism

What matters most to me is a future where new value creation satisfies our need for economic resilience and ecological sustainability. Innovation drives the future, but will it act with restraint that recognizes externalities?  I believe the next generation will pursue, what I call, the durable edge of free market capitalism.

What has become more important to me recently is the influence that spirituality has in that intersection.  Though politics and religion seem to split us apart, I hear people telling me that there is something guiding them to a place of connection with others.  

Perhaps there is an alternative to the hopelessness that many people feel.  Beyond the zero-sum game, there are win-win outcomes.  Perhaps such outcomes will sustain a crowded earth filled with 7.7 billion people.  My podcast explores this possibility.