Angry, looks like 'W' has a friend - what else is happening in the world?Speaking of what is happening on foreign shores, maybe I'll tell you some time soon of road trips I took over the years - the idea being, just rent a car, and just head out there - go - for anywhere between 1 to 4 weeks. Done that in a few places - Australia, the USA, France ... and planning more. Great way to see things, leave the door ajar for the unexpected, and .... travel all night looking for a place to bed down. More on that later, I guess.
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Speaking of what is happening on foreign shores, maybe I'll tell you some time soon of road trips I took over the years - the idea being, just rent a car, and just head out there - go - for anywhere between 1 to 4 weeks. Done that in a few places - Australia, the USA, France ... and planning more. Great way to see things, leave the door ajar for the unexpected, and .... travel all night looking for a place to bed down. More on that later, I guess.
And what about business trips? No, don't yawn quite yet ....
Business trips can be very funny. As in, ferociously hilarious. Like the morning I woke up in a US hotel bed, awakened by a phone call from Paris. A venture I had funded out of my own gelt had gone off to an entirely deadly showstopping start. Yes, quite funnily so.
Arising abruptly from slumber - I was just being told that I had just lost oodles of cash - I almost choked on guffaws even as, slowly, the picture emerged. The very first deal of our new venture had involved my two co-directors flying from London to Paris together with the director of a medium-sized bank, let's call him Dr. Joe, who was slated to become our first paying customer for a revolutionary data handling system we'd devised.
In Paris, they were visiting a beta site where we were road-testing cum fine-tuning our system at a local private bank. Trials were good - but had consumed a lot of resources to get us to where we stood now.
Paris on that day happened to be enshrouded in pea-soup fog, so Dr. Joe and the two co-directors landed too late to go straight to the site. They called ahead to reschedule for 2pm and, at Dr. Joe's helpful suggestion, went to lunch first. He kindly suggested a swell mooky eatery he'd heard of .
Hey, needless to say we were paying - since this was supposed to be a huge, company-establishing first deal, no effort nor expenses spared, just clinch that deal.
Snuggily ensconced in the restaurant's Louis XVI bergere chair, Dr. Joe started tasting the white wine. Mmmmhhh, not bad at all. Hey -he'd ordered it, not off the plonk section.
Second course - there just had to be several courses, this was Paris, we were paying - he switched to red wine.
Dessert, he asked for a glass of port. Then a brandy, then a second one.
By the third cognac not only was he slurring his words, but he had discovered in himself that - although happily married - he had unexpected homosexual leanings. He insisted on slushily holding hands with my senior manager - a 60 year old white-haired priggish conservative type, and telling him maudlinly how great he was.
All three of them (unwisely - I should have been present and politely put a halt to the emerging insanity) still dutifully walked to the local bank trial site .
Hand in hand.
Once on site, the local banker quickly grew quite wide-eyed at the scene of a slurring and shambling, utterly blotto colleague purportedly trying to investigate a vendor's offering at a trial site, accompanied by two thoroughly sober and stony-faced representatives of said vendor. He, initially at least, tried to put his best face on it.
Until Dr Joe, perhaps slowly emerging from the alcoholic haze he was in, tried to reassert his perhaps stricken machismo by demonstrating, despite the hand holding, that he was really a man's man by quite very unsubtly grasping a passing cleaning lady's bottom.
They were all asked to leave. Subsequently, the lady threatened to sue all and sundry - and had to be placated by her ultimate employer - the Paris banker (I never learnt how.) We received a few irate letters and requests for apologies. The company soon dissolved: business with the early adopter, Dr. Joe, was its essential, make-or-break milestone, a very solid bet until the fog struck.
We never ever heard of Dr. Joe again - he never replied to any mail and never returned any phone calls. Unsurprisingly, he did not know us any more.
Main lesson, when it's your money on the line - be present at all the key events, do not entrust them even to conservative, business-like white haired respectable types.
There's a law - ultimately rooted in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which kicks in when the effects allowed by the uncertainty principle back loop upon themselves and amplify- that used to be called catastrophe theory, nowadays most often hight / yclept the butterfly effect, a.k.a. chaos theory, that says that at the outset of anything, small seemingly insignificant events can be amplified beyond all measure.
E.g., a drunken salesman on one sales call cannot possibly sink a behemoth like IBM. But he sure can kill a startup in a jiffy.
The devil always lurks in details unforeseen. Which is why most Nasdaq-quoted companies will enforce well-established processes to govern and monitor essential business functions, thus leaving almost no room for chaos.
If you're in charge of sales and you miss an important sale at a Nasdaq-quoted, or any other no-nonsense company: you won't be in too much trouble if you can show that you closely hewed to the relevant established procedures (themselves devised because they, statistically at least, yield the highest success rate.) Miss that key sale when you did not follow procedures, and you're Donald Trumped: fired.
Now for another funny tale from the road.
I'd been telling this European CEO of a very fine medical devices company how he can raise millions in venture funds the US.
He can.
Sales of his system suite would be driven - aided and abetted - by the most powerful combination of factors there is out there: on the one hand, his system uniquely enables compliance to some very stringent regulations in the field, the violation of which would entail dire consequences. On the other hand, he is protected by patents. So he can both force his system on certain companies, but he can pretty much set whatever price he pleases.
Indeed, these two factors together amount to a licence to print money. Have a system whose use is well-nigh indispensable if your organization is going to be able to comply with the law. And have a roadblock against any possible competition through your patents.
That's how Ross Perot of EDS fame made at least 6 billions - billions, not millions - for himself in his time.
But our CEO needs funds, and he needs US stakeholders too. Mostly, he needs powerful US interests aboard to stave off imitation and circumvention. And upfront funds to pay for commercialization on a worldwide scale.
The scene: a dinner table at a very upscale restaurant in California.
For the past 2 weeks, I have drummed into our dear CEO - at some cost to myself, since it's always better to be seen as a smiling positive reinforcer I-love-you you're-wonderful type than a nagging nattering admonisher : do not smoke. Do not eat with your fingers, even when it would be acceptable to do so, perhaps, in Europe.
Do not fall either for the easy friendliness and backslapping informality of America's moneymen: do not ever forget that you are being tested and examined and on probation: do not lower your guard at any time.
The US Venture Capitalists show up - they are friendly, good humoured, exchange PC but funny jokes, they are very complimentary throughout of the CEO's, his product, his company, himself.
The CEO sneaks me a slightly puzzled look, I'm the last moron, paranoid, I don't know what I've been talking about, these guys are friendly and laid back - all this drill and preparation and drumming to finally confront .... a bunch of über-friendly guys who recognize how very good he is, and with whom he'll of course do business.
I watch with disbelief as our friendly CEO lets himself go. He does not light up - that would be illegal in the restaurant. I see him finger-grab orts of food from his plate with his fingers and blithely shovelling same into his trap, as he laughs out loud at yet another millionaire's bon mot.
The evening continues pleasantly, and soon the VCs are on their way. Godspeed and farewells and we'll be in touch soons and even a backslap or two are exchanged
We never ever heard anything from the VCs afterwards.
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