Macro Micro Michael Marco & Startups at the Edge (M4Edge)

There is arguably nothing more important to our future economy than the quality of our education system, and there is nothing more important to that than the quality and availability of teachers. But as anyone who's followed the news in the last couple of years knows, we are currently facing something of a crisis in the availability of qualified teachers.

Here are some stats to put that crisis into perspective. According to EdW...

With interest rates rising and the economy slowing, the world of credit is getting a lot harder for both lenders and borrowers — and that’s especially painful in the mortgage market, given how high house prices are. 

Matt Sanchez, Founder and CTO of CognitiveScale thinks that Artificial Intelligence can help: it can help loan officers identify potential borrowers ahead of time, and it can help borrowers get access to the right mortg...

Developing Clean Energy Solutions With KraftBlock’s Martin Schichtel

Across the world, a huge amount of energy is wasted in the form of heat. In industries like glass and steel, manufacturing processes require extremely high temperatures, and those processes generate a lot of wasted heat. That heat is usually blown directly into the atmosphere.

But what if there was a way to capture, store, and reuse that heat, effectively transformi...

In the 3+ years that M4Edge has been around, we've aired over 50 episodes and, as listeners know, we usually ask our guests to give us their view of the future 20 years hence. Sometimes the answers are somewhat expected, sometimes they're a little humorous, and sometimes they're deeply thought provoking. As a holiday present, this episode offers a compilation of some of our favorites. We won't go so far as to sa...

This is the final M4Edge episode of 2021 an we are finishing this year with a bang, Our guest is Alex Rodrigues, founder and CEO of Embark Trucks; he is a Forbes 30 under 30, and more importantly, at the tender age of 26 he has just brought Embark public through a SPAC deal valuing the company at over 5 billion dollars.

Embark is right up the M4Edge alley, where we look at technologies that change the way the economy works: Embark d...

After a long absence, we’ve returned with a very fun episode and right in line with the M4Edge theme. The startup we focus on today is really micro, in the weeds, you might say, with some very macro aims, and it’s about as edgy as can be.

You probably know that we’ve done several episodes on ESG or impact investing, and we’ve also done quite a few food-tech and ag-tech episodes. This episode is part of that series, but with some coo...

It’s not often that a small startup has ties to Google and Bill Gates. Our guest today, Michael Sachse, the CEO of Dandelion Energy inhabits that rarefied atmosphere.

Dandelion Energy was originally part of Google X, Alphabet’s so-called moonshot factory. And very recently, Dandelion received substantial series B funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is the VC arm of a Bill Gates – led organization whose mission is to hel...

We seem drawn to Agtech and impact investing. And good-tasting fruit.
We kicked off our 2021 season with a discussion on impact investing or socially responsible investing, including with a startup (EcoRobotix) that produces solar-power farming equipment for AI-based precision application of herbicide. We've done a few episodes in the Agtech space, including with a startup (Strella Biotech)  that uses sensors to determine ...

We kick off this season with a deeper look at the meaning of our phrase “changing how the economy functions,” specifically examining what you may have heard of as “social entrepreneurship,” which is the idea that entrepreneurial ventures should measure themselves not just by revenue but also by metrics that capture their broader impact on the social and natural environment.

Impact investing takes many forms. It can be venture firms ...

We are joined again by our friend and former colleague Ricky Buch. We’ve had Ricky on the show several times as small segments we called Ricky’s Reports from the Edge or sometimes full episodes we called Ricky’s Startup Reality. Ricky started a clean tech company - now the term of art is climate tech – called Loctricity. It was a great idea started by a smart guy with skills, knowledge, industry connections, in the right place and ...

In this episode, the third in our series on startup strategy, Marco and I interview Guy Levy-Yurista , the chief strategy officer of Sisense. Sisense is an unusual business analytics or business intelligence (BI) startup, and Guy is an unusual, well, guy. Before becoming a CSO, Guy’s career included being a CTO, VP of Product, a PhD in physics, a sommelier, and more. So he brings a wealth of expertise and perspective to his job and...

Our miniseries on startups strategy continues today with Ron Carucci. Ron is a renowned strategy consultant with three decades of experience in large and small companies, and currently he is the owner and managing partner of his own strategy consulting outfit, Navalent. Ron is also a Harvard Business Review contributor, and a TED speaker.

Through the lens of his extensive experience, Ron shares his views on the different s...

Today we kick off a new, special miniseries on strategy. We’ll unpack the different aspects of business strategy that a startup needs to develop, discuss how strategy evolves through time as a start-up goes to market and starts to grow, and talk about how strategy for a startup differs from strategy for a large corporation.

We wanted to go well beyond our own strategy experience and expertise, and bring you a wide range of different...

Our guest today is Sandeep Ahuja, co-founder and CEO of Cove Tool. Sandeep has been named to the Forbes’ prestigious “Thirty Under Thirty” list; the recognition has given her a great boost in exposure and credibility, but it can prove to be a mixed blessing in the construction industry, as you will hear. Sandeep founded Cove Tool to help fight climate change, and here are the two numbers she wants you to focus on: worldwide, buildi...

M4Edge is about startups with technologies that can change how the economy functions. There’s very little that is as central to a functioning economy as energy, and that’s one reason why climate change is such a deep societal problem. There are also very few industries that are as important to a growing economy as the construction industry. And so today’s episode is one of a two-part miniseries on technologies that are aimed at the...

Our episode today is about the future of ____. We left that last part blank because you can decide for yourself. We interview Jay Rogers and Vikrant Aggarwal who are, respectively, the CEO co-founder and president of Local Motors. I could tell you that Local Motors is an automotive manufacturing company, but that would be criminally uninformative. Local Motors makes vehicles that are unusual, and makes them in an unusual way. Their...

Today's bonus episode is about the multiple layers of uncertainty we are all facing right now. More specifically, the episode is meant to give you some insight into how M4 Strategy Garage can help your business untangle those uncertainties as you try to navigate the murky waters ahead. We have categorized the covid recovery uncertainty into five elements, and within each element have identified several variables we believe are...

On today's episode we speak with Paul Appleby, the CEO of Kinetica. Paul has held leadership roles in some very prominent tech companies, including SAP, SalesForce and C3, and he's now at the helm a big data startup, so he’s definitely been at the center of our changing economy, and has a lot to reflect upon. 

We recorded our interview with Paul in early March of 2020 and we’ve delayed the release a bit because w...