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Archive for August, 2010

The Entrepreneur Ride: Can Get On, But Not Always Off

Posted in business, entrepreneur, tagged , on August 20, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Here’s a great analogy to being an entrepreneur of a high growth start-up company:

“It’s like getting to ride the coolest, baddest roller coaster. It’s exciting just thinking about getting on board. Then, that first ride is so exhilarating that you want to do it again, and again. But when you’ve had enough and are finally ready to get off, the ride conductor smirks, telling you that you don’t get to choose when you can get off.

“Swoooosh… you’re off on another and another ride”.

Some people can’t take the ride for too long. Others chicken out and leave the line even before the first ride. Then, there are those who never want to get off. The thrill drives them. They are start-up junkies or even deal junkies. They thrive on the wide gyrations of emotions. On any given day, your vision is headed for unimaginable success, or it is about to crumble on top of you.

Want a ride?

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Richness of Life, A Matter of Perspective

Posted in People, personal stories, tagged , , , , on August 16, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Last night, I enjoyed a home-cooked Vietnamese dinner, a day after just returning from Ho Chi Minh City. A Vietnamese-American friend visiting from San Jose prepared a wonderful meal for a group of us.

She asked a lot about my trip to Vietnam. She reminisced about growing up in Hanoi with her extended family. She described carrying heavy buckets of water to her house, with a younger sibling on her back. She remembered such times with fondness. She described how life in the US was full of modern-day conveniences, but that it could also be very cold.

People here generally live for themselves, she observed, and not for others.  Grandparents live in nursing homes, children are taught to be independent and move out of the home early in life. Siblings don’t talk for days, months and sometimes years.

She said she wants to matter to others, especially family. What good is material comfort if no one cares for you? Is good fortune that great if not shared with those whom you love?

When she first came to the US, she worked in a nail salon that was below a nursing home. So many of them never had visitors, she said. One time, an old man died and no relative came to claim the body. As the body was about to be carted out, she vividly remembers the body bag being zipped shut over his head. The sound is something she will never forget.

In Vietnam, she said, that just wouldn’t happen. People have the richness of family and relationships. People support one another and get self-worth through those relationships.

When I’ve visited Vietnam and other developing countries with fellow Americans, I’ve listened to the sympathy of pitying Westerners toward the local poor. It was interesting to hear the pitying sympathy of someone feeling the coldness of American lives.

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Good Bye Vietnam, For Now

Posted in entrepreneur, tagged , , , on August 14, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

So concludes another trip to Vietnam.

It was cooler than my last visit in Spring. It’s rainy season and the overcast skies provided some relief from the sun, and the occasional down pours cooled the city.

The Intrepid research center moved during my trip. While the start-up office, two rooms in a large house, was adequate for the first year, we needed to create a better working environment for our growing team. The new location is a nice commercial office building in District 4.

Everyone enthusiastically helped in moving the equipment. There were a lot of excitement in claiming personal work areas in the new bright and open environment. Well deserved. After all, this group of analysts are a large part of our recent success.

I also had a couple of American visitors on this trip. Showing them around and seeing their reactions to the unique elements of Vietnam reminded me about my first trips here: The shock of seeing the scooter traffic for the first time; the hesitation on the first few attempts at crossing the street;  the utter delight when sampling the wonderful local cuisine; feeling the vibrance of a developing economy; the pleasure of that first hair and face washing at the salons.

I realized that I have learned a lot about Vietnam since first coming here to start the research center about a year ago. I was able to answer most of their questions. I even taught them a few Vietnamese words, or at least my version of those words. We made a lot of the locals smile with our attempts.

I also have a great network of friends here who fill any open time with meals, drinking and even dancing at times. Again, they kept me out pretty late last night and I only got  to the airport less than hour before my flight.

Just another typical Vietnam trip. I leave now with manicured nails, a bit of a hangover, and the knowledge that as the company continues to grow, there will be many other trips in my future.

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Getting All I Asked For – Lots of Traveling

Posted in business, entrepreneur, social media, travel, tagged , , , , , , on August 8, 2010 | 1 Comment »

“Be careful what you wish for.”

I was very specific when starting Lift9 (which has since become Intrepid Consultants) that I wanted a business that was global.  I had a lust to travel again as I had done during most of the 90s when helping to build ARIS to its IPO in 1997.

Last month I was in London for three weeks, returned home to Seattle for just the past week, and am now on an airplane to Ho Chi Minh City for the coming week.

The good news is that our company is doing so well that such travel is necessary. It’s exciting to see a plan come together. It was about a year ago that I initially came to Vietnam with the idea of starting a social media research center in Ho Chi Minh City. Now, I’m visiting again because the group has been so successful that we’re moving the research center to a better and bigger facility.

Our vision was always to make sure that our global offices, including the one in Ho Chi Minh, were going to be integrated into one core culture. In other words, we wanted to allow people in each office to all have equal opportunities to grow and contribute to Intrepid. After watching the “two-class” dysfunctional relationships that were built with many of the off-shoring efforts of the IT industry,  we wanted to build something very different.

To that regard, when I return from this trip, one of our most promising rising stars, a researcher from the Ho Chi Minh, will be accompanying me back to Seattle, then to a trade show in Chicago. It wasn’t easy to get his visa for such a trip, but lots of people helped to make it possible. It will be his first trip to the US, and the Seattle office has some good events planned for his welcome.

So, while the jetlag and the long-stints in hotels can be tiring, when I see what we are building, and the relative success in such a short period of time, I’m still happy to be getting “what I had asked for.”

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