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Robert Hacker
Miami, FL
Robert H. Hacker is a strategist, financial consultant, author, professor and blogger. He manages GH Capital Partners in Miami, FL, a boutique firm that focuses on integrating strategy and finance.
Interests: Bob manages GH Capital, a boutique in Miami that specializes in developing growth strategies and related capital for early stage and middle market companies in North and South America. For 35 years he has worked in the private sector principally in Asia and Latin America. He built a billion dollar publicly traded company in Indonesia and prior to that provided strategy consulting for ten years to Fortune 500 companies in Japan. He began his career as a lending officer with Chase Manhattan Bank. He is the Chief Financial Officer of One Laptop per Child Association and an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Florida International University Graduate School of Engineering. He taught a course in social entrepreneurship in January 2011 and 2012 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of "Billion Dollar Company: An entrepreneur's guide to business models for high growth companies". He has spoken at many universities including HBS, Sloan and IESE. He also does paid workshops in Spanish and English on a wide range of business topics related to entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. "My interest in technology is what now gets me up in the morning; my ability to develop strategies is how I differentiate everything I do; my knowledge of finance is how I earn much of my living."
Recent Activity
The Good blog has a video posted (below) of Peter Norvig talking about online learning at this year's Google I/O conference. Norvig is well known for his online course in computer science that attracted 160,000 students. He is also an AI expert who heads Google's search quality unit and a professor at Stanford. Continue reading
Posted 2 days ago at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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There is a very interesting post about the changes in the hiring practices at Google on iDoneThis Blog. Continue reading
Posted 2 days ago at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article, "The New Science of Giving", that focuses on the philanthrophy of Houston couple Laura and John Arnold. Continue reading
Posted 5 days ago at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
It's rare when I find a list of books on entrepreneurship or business where several of the books I have read and found worth reading. Continue reading
Posted 5 days ago at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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Design process probably dates back to the Romans, but it became formalized beginning around 2000. The concept of this process, called "design thinking", is perhaps most easily understood by this simple graphic below Continue reading
Posted May 13, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
I spoke about the relationship between entrepreneurship and design, ways to think about "impossible" problems and a little on OLPC. Continue reading
Posted May 8, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
I laughed at this story from The Chronicle of Higher Education Continue reading
Posted May 7, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
There is no reason to expect these trends to change in the near future: Continue reading
Posted May 6, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Everybody should try to read more during summer vacation. Some of the books I am considering for my new course Continue reading
Posted May 3, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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The number of professionally run venture capital firms in Miami can be counted on one hand with fingers left over. This is one of the major reasons that Miami is a city of SMEs and few high tech startups. Continue reading
Posted Apr 29, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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This recent quote from Nicholas Negroponte in Spain at the IaaC Lecture Series: "Design school is the future, business school is dead." Continue reading
Posted Apr 29, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Many experts are considering what a school should be in the 21st century in order to foster "21st century skills" in children. 21st century skills generally are described to include: Continue reading
Posted Apr 25, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
However, neither of these processes individually or together explain the difference between great new business ideas and mediocre ones. What explains the difference is the quality and type of thinking that one brings to the development of the startup. Continue reading
Posted Apr 22, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
"The ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic... Continue reading
Posted Apr 22, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Since the 1960s and the advent of computers, productivity gains have been a major driver in the growth of business profits. Continue reading
Posted Apr 18, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
The NYT Sunday Review had an article, the Secrets of Princeton, in which they criticized the university for selecting upper class students over lower class students with higher GPAs and test scores. Continue reading
Posted Apr 8, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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As Thomas Friedman so eloquently states in this Sunday Review NYT's article, there are only: Continue reading
Posted Apr 1, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
I also think the article is the best development of a moral framework for capitalism that I have read. The power of the argument is that the authors derive the requirement for moral behavior from classic economics writings alone with no reliance on another discipline. Putting Friedman in a compelling moral framework is long overdue. Continue reading
Posted Mar 28, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Much has been written about Google's decision to cancel Google Reader, their RSS feed reader. This decision troubled me for several reasons, not the least of which was that I had been using this free product for several years. However, something else troubled me about this as a strategic decision by Google but I could not figure out what it was. This morning Fast Company provided the answer in an article "The Danger of Free Google Software". Google is one of the best examples of what Clayton Christensen calls disruptive innovation. Christensen correctly argues that a more limited feature set... Continue reading
Posted Mar 27, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
George Polya, the famous Stanford math professor, once quipped " I am too good for philosophy and not good enough for physics. Mathematics is in between". Amongst the many implications of this quote, Polya implies that there is a relationship between philosophy and physics. The intersection of philosophy and physics is an admittedly escoteric subject but a great example of interdisciplinary thought. However, as physics advances and becomes increasingly complex, the challenge is for the philosophers to understand the physics and identify the philosophical questions that must be considered. The discipline that addresses such issues is the philosophy of science.... Continue reading
Posted Mar 27, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Much has been written about the "upside down classroom", where students access online lectures at night and work on problems in class with the teacher. Yesterday I tried something new Continue reading
Posted Mar 19, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Many have reported that Dropbox bought Mailbox. Continue reading
Posted Mar 18, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
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In this post from 2011 I pointed out that over 700 million people will move into cities in the next 20 years. Continue reading
Posted Mar 15, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
Suppose your boss asks you to send him the year-to-date six month P&L. What would you send? Continue reading
Posted Mar 15, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE
The writers at Edudemic were nice enough to present their take on the 10 themes at SXSWedu, the edtech spinoff of the popular SXSW event. Continue reading
Posted Mar 8, 2013 at SOPHISTICATED FINANCE