Had a 7AM start and cleaned up a bunch of small things to make time for the evening available. As it turned out the evening was spend with the EO boys talking about business, so the time wasn’t directed at any particular tasks, but nevertheless the time was well spent.
I have moved on the corporate ownership and restructuring and met with Andy to look at the Chinese VAT side and look at the competitors position. Good stuff out of the discussion although the general conclusion was that there was not much room for optimization in this area. So, the good thing was that at least this area for now is not a focus for me since it is nearly optimal and as such I can focus on other areas.
EO forum was great, as they always are, and one of the things we did was to present our lifelines – my lifeline turned out to be rather rambled and well structured – but a good lesson in how to look at the lifeline again – and refocus it on major inflection points.
Middle of forum I hired a Pakistani researcher to work on some background deep background work on the market opportunities in Germany. Amazing that from my iPhone I can hire a guy thousands of miles away, and can create a virtual employee in less than 1 hour. I used odesk for this, since I found compared to elance response times are faster and bids more aggressive. Good news is I will have some material to read on the airplane that will give me deep background into the market. This is not mission critical, but I like the deep research as it gives me deeper perspective into the issues and through that allows better brain storming and idea generation.
Julia came to the EO board meeting today and did a great job fitting in. The board was in ‘high’ spirits today, and lots of back and forth – but I was pleased to see that Julia didn’t get scared off, but rather enjoyed the challenge. Good stuff.
Had a pretty deep discussion after forum about membership into EO and some of the value based decisions on how people view different businesses. Cannot get into the details into the issue here (will in private section) but one conclusion I saw was this. The human capability to spin a story into what we want to fit is extraordinary – and that it takes a well balanced and open minded person to look at both sides of the story before drawing conclusions. Certainly, for me, I felt a certain push when presented with one side of the story, but through withholding judgment, and awaiting to hear the other side, a balance was achieved. So, moral here was to stick the philosophy that there is always two sides to each coin, and that one must look at both side before knowing the value of a coin. A rush to judgment only leads to misjudgment! (hey, I’m going to put that into my insights)! 🙂
Its now almost 2AM – I have a backlog of emails – but some of them require high attention level so I’m leaving them till AM.
Overall, a great day, great discussion, great insights and and another wonderful day in the journey of life!
Almost forgot: my challenge over the last few days has been the “equity as means to get the A+” team. This is new to me, so I’m struggling a bit with the decision of giving away equity to bring A+ players on board. Event the language in my last sentence is indicative of the struggle – “giving away” rather than “gaining”. Another words, perhaps I should be looking at it from the point of view of “Gaining A+ players through equity offering”. In a way, what is flattering, is that I do have option to bring on A+ players on board, purely on future valuation and future vision. Another words, I have people that are worth $200-300K a year, willing to come on board for nearly nothing in exchange for the future. When you look at it from that point of view, I’m a very lucky guy that I am in the position to attack this kind of talent, based on the vision and direction. Looking back, these kinds of doors where not even visible to me 3 years ago – and now I standing at them right now – and I just have to turn the handle. Huh. A new insight into my position through simply writing it out to the blog. 🙂