The Work
Representative projects, 1984–2005. Read them for what each was worth to somebody, not for what got built.
MacDonald Ventures · Santa Rosa, California · Established 1984
Somewhere in a drawer there is a plan that was right.
Good ideas rarely die of being wrong. They die against resistance — the committee that will not decide, the licensee who goes quiet, the feature everyone admires and no one will pay for. Improving the product does not touch any of that.
1984Year the practice opened
120+Markets studied for what buyers would actually pay for
10 yrsHosting the world’s first online entrepreneurs’ conference
28th → 1stWhere one pilot program moved a school of 32
Nobody sets out to lose ten years.
They start with something real. A device that works. A service customers keep asking about. A patent that reads beautifully. Then come the years of near‑misses — the investor who liked it but passed, the licensee who went quiet, the prototype that became a shelf ornament.
Ask what actually went wrong and you almost never hear the idea was bad. You hear that a market was assumed rather than measured, that the pitch described capabilities instead of consequences, and that everyone kept solving the visible problem while the real one sat underneath it, untouched.
Resistance is not an obstacle to route around. It is information. It marks the exact place where the value has not yet been made obvious to somebody.
Research and knowledge map the terrain. Intuition shows what the map leaves out.
Before you finish this page you will recognize at least one venture in the record below that had no business succeeding — and did — because somebody found the problem under the problem.
The work now
The Innovation Engine
Ninety‑five percent of new products and new companies fail, and that number has barely moved in decades. It is not a talent problem. It is a sequencing problem — ventures keep starting with a thing and going looking for someone to want it.
The Innovation Engine runs the sequence the other way: find a need worth solving, size it honestly, convert every capability into a consequence somebody can price, make the decision‑maker’s exposure smaller, and build the alliance that makes the rest obvious.
It is what four decades of watching ventures stall — many of them mine — turned into a method.
Four targets of opportunity
Where the method is pointed now.
- One
Why ninety‑five percent of products and new companies fail — a number that has outlasted every advance meant to fix it.
- Two
What could actually stimulate education, given that its constraint is rarely a shortage of good ideas.
- Three
How health care can be reinvigorated, when better practice already exists and stays unadopted.
- Four
How to mine the vast unread inventories of innovation, technology transfer, and patents held by universities, companies, and government.
The evidence
Four decades, filed three ways.
Investment banks and universities. A $2 billion land plan and a middle‑school character program. A cargo airline that now flies worldwide and a visual aid for WordStar. Different industries, one method — establish what a buyer actually values, then build toward that rather than toward the feature list.
The Range
More than a hundred markets studied — and a hundred lessons in why buyers hesitate, and what dissolves the hesitation.
On Innovation
The working philosophy: where change originates, why insiders miss it, and what makes a solution valuable enough to survive a market’s resistance.
A working chronology
The through‑line is not an industry. It is a question: who is worse off without this, how much worse, and what is that worth to them?
- 1968
Bachelor of Arts in History and Journalism, University of the Pacific. Two disciplines that both insist you check the source before you believe the story.
- 1984
MacDonald Ventures opens. First clients: independent inventors with good technology, and no one yet able to say what it was worth.
- 1985
ProgramKey ships — a first‑of‑its‑kind visual aid for understanding complex software, built for WordStar, then the dominant word processor.
- Late 1980s
A team is assembled for the first presentation to UPS proposing an all‑cargo airline. It became the worldwide UPS cargo fleet.
- 1990s
Ten years hosting the world’s first Entrepreneurs’ conference on The WELL, plus the Brainstorming conference. Small Business columnist, San Francisco Business Times.
- 1990s
Teaching market research and business‑plan writing at UC Berkeley Extension; network and information services at the University of San Francisco.
- 1996–2005
Internet applications: more than 25 enterprise web systems for a $400 million holding company, plus property and community sites built to answer the one question standing between a visitor and a decision.
- 2008–
President, Intuition Network — a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit on whose board the work began in 1980.
- Today
Co‑Founder and Chairman, Edison Innovations. Same question, sharper instruments.
The invitation
One question worth asking about your own file drawer.
Pick the idea you shelved. Not the one that failed — the one that stalled. Then ask what it was actually worth to the person who was supposed to say yes, and whether anyone ever asked them.
Most people cannot answer that. The ones who can are usually holding something valuable and do not yet know it.