Discoveries and Epiphanies

I was going through some of my old Fortune magazines and decided to scan in an article that covered the general feel in Silicon Valley almost exactly 10 years ago.

Here are the scans. Life was a big different back then and I’d like to see where many of these people are now.

Here’s a short summary of some of the companies/people mentioned in the article.

Katie Burke now works at Palm after working at SkyRider and having co-founded and selling Desktop.com which she launched after leaving Yahoo.com where she worked for a bit after getting acquired at her company Four11.com. She was on the product team at Four11 that created RocketMail which is what most of us know as Yahoo mail now. This gal is a rock star with a Stanford degree and Harvard MBA. Super impressive.

Kurius.com was shown as a huge sticker on the back of some car. Oddly, it doesn’t appear to be anything but a rotating gif.

Xuma.com went out of business in February of 2002. The company was an internet application service provider, Xuma combined the speed and reliability of an ASP, with the complete customization of a traditional systems integrator. The firm provided an e-business engine, professional services and Internet hosting and managed services solutions. (from linkedin.com)

The next three generations of China will permanently change the economic landscape of the world.

I had the unique opportunity to visit China as part of a Discovery Trip for Eminent Overseas born Chinese. Our group of 80 overseas born Chinese citizens toured several major cities of China and met with government leaders who shared with us the economic and demographic growth plans of China. Members from our group of overseas Chinese were involved in various fields including law, medical science, commerce, new technologies, real estate, and hospitality. Of the cities we visited, Beijing, Jinan, and Shanghai have made the most progress in the past 10-15 years with a building filled skyline as far as the eye can see. With modern freeways, a Mag-Lev train in Shanghai, and world-class airports, China is successfully paving the road to elevate the average citizen’s standard of living. In addition to accomplishing so much, the government officials I met proudly announced that China also saves approximately 50% of their GDP.

It is all VERY impressive.

The direction for developments in these key cities has set the tone but since change can only happen so quickly across so many people, China still has a lot of work ahead of them. Of the 1.3 billion citizens, 700 million live in rural farming areas and have little to no formal education. The other 600 million are scattered in small towns and some major cities across the country but the standard of living for the majority is only several permutations more advanced than those in the farming communities. Among this group of 600 million, only 40-50 million (less than 5% of the entire population) live a more modern lifestyle found in the larger cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Jinan, and Hong Kong. These numbers are important to keep in mind because the media, both in the US and China, tends to focus on the more advanced parts of China. For that small five percent of the population, it is, but for the majority, it still is the old China.

This is slowly changing though. The Chinese government, being aware of the dangers of advancing one demographic while ignoring another, aims to transition 10 million rural citizens to urban citizens each year. This accomplishes two things for China. One, it drives demand for domestic consumption so factories need not rely so heavily on exports (which mainly go to the US). And two, gradually raises the average quality of life while allowing the agricultural industry necessary time to learn how to feed the same number of mouths with fewer workers. This brings to light one of the more important issues regarding China’s growth, education. The cost of higher education in China limits the country’s efforts to raise the average standard of living. The Chinese government funds nine years of early education but education beyond that is the responsibility of the parents. With the average citizen’s salary of only 3,000RMB (42USD) per month and college fees ranging from 40,000RMB to 60,000RMB for a 4-year degree, only the very hard working or successful families can afford to send their children to college. Again, the shift to migrate more citizens is slow but it is happening.

While the global economy takes time to recover, China is shifting their manufacturing efforts to meet domestic needs as citizens steadily migrate more toward a modern lifestyle in their larger cities. As the next few generations of China flourish in more modern lifestyles, China will become an even more enticing home for foreign investment. The government has already set forth initiatives to protect intellectual property rights of foreign investors and building up of the country’s own intellectual property as much of the current technology in China is owned and led by foreign entities.

This is all exciting news for overseas Chinese citizens. As these demographic and economic developments earn China more credibility in the world’s eyes, it quickly becomes apparent that overseas Chinese citizens have a unique opportunity, and some may argue a responsibility, among their peers. During our visit, it was clear that it is China’s hope that overseas Chinese will take the opportunity of sharing solid blood ties to motherland China by promoting working relationships and cooperation between China and other countries in the future. During our tour we visited Qufu, the small hometown of Confucius. In Qufu, many of the older roads are broken and some of the city walls used for protection during violence in the past are crumbling. Electricity is conserved at night and the occasional street light offers mediocre light in the dark neighborhoods while many people walk, ride a bike, or use a small gasoline motorcycle since cars are expensive. Surprisingly, this lifestyle is shared by over 1 billion citizens across China but for the most part, they are happy. Not content, just happy and ambitious as they all strive to better their family’s quality of life generation by generation.

Ever since I got back from China in November of 2008, the idea of moving there has been a little thought in the back of my mind. More recently though, I actually took another trip to China, Thailand, and Hong Kong to explore what life is like on a more normal basis. What I found made me think more about moving to China.

1) The cost of starting up a business is cheaper and there are fewer restrictions.
2) The cost of labor for a company is significantly lower. For example, a fresh college graduate would only cost you $1,200 USD per month to employ. AMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZING.
3) If you’re in the import/distribution business like I am, this is a great way to be in the thick of it all.

But there are others who are moving to China and they don’t even have work experience yet. Check out this article that got published today in the New York Times.

American Graduates Finding Jobs in China

Makes you want to move huh?

I often go out for lunch with friends so they can pick my brain about how I started my online store. This got me thinking, if my friends are interested, then others may be as well. Well, I can’t have lunch with EVERYONE so here’s the next best thing… I wrote a book on how to start up your own online store and priced it for $8.95 which is about the same as taking me out to grab some coffee at the local Starbucks.

Pick up the book here: http://www.smallshopbigbusiness.com

New Markets.

Imagine driving down the street in a car filled with friends. You see a sewing store on the side of the street and you think nothing of it. In fact, you and your friends wonder how does a sewing store even make the rent. Well, although nobody in your social circle would ever buy enough product from the sewing store to cover the rent, it obviously thrives because there IS a demographic out there that patrons this sewing store. So clearly, as much as you may believe you are “in touch” with what consumers want, that sewing store’s existence is proof that you may not be as “in touch” as you believe.

In an earlier post, I mentioned thinking differently and looking for subtle hints at what new opportunities may present themselves. If you have a web site, study the statistics of the site closely and you may find small hints of how possible new markets are actually seeking you and the products/services that you offer. If you see some small clues, change a few things on the site and watch for an uptake in interest and keep the phones lines open, they may just start ordering on the first call.

Throwing away routines.

We all have routines at work. Wake up early to beat traffic, end up in traffic with everyone else wanting to beat traffic. Swing by the local coffee shop on the way into work. Greet everyone while you check out the day’s workload and get started until lunch time when undoubtedly you’ll have some coworkers who are interested in going as a group. Lunch. Lunch coma. Try to start working again. Get a few things done. Clock out to suffer through traffic again, work out or go straight home and fabricate something that is described as dinner, watch tv, and then go to sleep.

What if you were to throw away this entire routine? If you were to become independent and create your own way of making money. Suddenly, there’s no need to have a routine because you simply do what you want to do, when you want to do it and at your own pace. You could work until 2am, sleep for a few hours and continue at 6am to finish up or laze away the day until 5pm to get some work done The mentality of being an employee where you measure your value by multiplying your hourly by your hours worked or dividing your salary by 2080 hours goes right out the window because you’ve come to the conclusion that there is a larger goal and doing whatever you can do to get towards that goal sooner is all that matters. You can’t measure your progress by time, you MUST measure your progress by achievements and by doing so, you’ll find that you accomplish more. It sounds so simple, because it is, but so many well educated individuals go through life measuring their lives by time spent at work vs the accomplishments achieved overall. Don’t fall into this rut. When you’re running, you don’t stare at your feet, you keep your head up and look at the horizon to see what’s coming up - do the same in life.

Morning toast.

I had the recent opportunity to spend time with a couple of extended family friends who made their fortunes doing what they love. One through commercial real estate in Hong Kong and another who created a shipping port years ago that helped make him a very rich man.

The story about the shipping port fellow will have to wait but I’ll share the story about the real estate mogul right now.

We were talking over morning toast about all kinds of things when suddenly he shared his perspective on how smart people choose where to make their mark. We were watching CNBC about the government bailout money and he referenced Warren Buffet’s (WB) investment into Goldman Sachs. He noted that WB, being an older man, has seen cycles and cycles of troubled/good times over his lifespan and because of this, his ability to spot an investment gets better as he ages.

He also noted the young ages at which accomplished scientists and artists in the world made their marks. These people spent the rest of their lives trying to do an encore (linearly) but couldn’t because as they grew older, their knowledge handicapped them from dreaming the impossible and that achieving the impossible has usually been left to the younger generations who knew no boundaries.

The economy, in contrast, is cyclical, and once you’ve seen the merry-go-round rotate once, you know what to expect as time goes on. So his quick lesson was - if you want to make money in the long term, watch the market and learn to invest.

Honestly, that was the best piece of toast I ever had.

When I was growing up, I liked jigsaw puzzles. Once I was able to put one together, I would move on to new puzzles that weren’t necessarily harder or easier, just different. Once the puzzles were done or I got bored with them, I went out and played.

Jobs are like puzzles and going out to play, well - is still going out to play.

The job you have right now has rules and idiosyncrasies that you have learned in order to do your job well and in exchange, earn XYZ dollars per year. In this job, you may be super comfortable since your job comes with a nice title and as a part of a larger organization, you have that “safety in numbers” feeling. Along with the nice title and connection to a larger entity than yourself comes a steady check of *imagine your paycheck amount here* every 2 weeks. Naturally depending on who’s reading this, the paycheck amount will vary but let me ask you this - if you imagined your paycheck amount in that bolded above, couldn’t you have just as easily imagined a larger number? If you make $45k a year, that’s a respectable sum of money and I certainly wouldn’t offend anyone and say that’s a paltry amount, but why couldn’t it be $150k or even $220k?

You ALREADY KNOW how to make the number of dollars per year you’re making right now. Why not challenge yourself in discovering a new way to make even more? Start a business, offer a unique service, make and sell widgets - do anything!

Is it because you feel like you lack the talent to discover a new way to make more?

If that’s the case, you DON’T lack the talent! Read example 1 about the guy who grinds down baseball bats for a living and makes nearly 100k A MONTH! How much talent does that take? Anyone could learn that process within 2 weeks!

Are you scared of making a lot of money? Why? The CEO of the company you work at probably makes your annual salary in one month! Aside from your positions in the company, is there a rule that says they must make more than you or that they can go out and play and you cannot?

Of course not!

This sounds like a silly question but some people truly are afraid of success. DON’T BE. We only live this life once. If you’re an undergrad in college with a ton of spare time, don’t waste it. If you’re 23 years old with tons of time to spend at the bars, don’t waste it. If you’re 30 and you’re fortunate to have a little more time left in your life where you don’t have to worry about your parents getting older or your biological clock screaming at you to crank out a few kids - don’t waste that precious time you have left to change your life.

Stop wasting your time playing with the same puzzle over and over again. Start something up and come out and play!

First off, I know people have been using their mobile phones as modems to surf online with their laptops for years. Second, I’ve had a windows mobile phone for the past 2 years and I’ve never been able to use it as a modem with my laptop.

Until the other day!

So I want to share with you my discovery. My phone uses WM6 but this may work with other versions of WM- I’m not sure.

1) Download Active Sync from here.

2) Find and open the file on your WM phone named “IntShrUI” in the windows folder of your phone.

3) Connect your phone to your laptop using the normal USB > Smart Phone cable that it came with and press “connect”

So my initial post has started some talk with various friends and MANY of them have told me that they like the “rah rah” spirit but they’re not sure how to get started. I invited a friend of 14 years to the house and I had a few suggestions for him on how to get his thought process going.

1) Turn your TV to CNBC and listen to channel 127 on XM Radio. Part of adjusting the way you think is adjusting the information that is going into your brain. I know this sounds so simple but I guarantee you’ll find valuable programming on CNBC and develop an appreciation for the content they have. It will also train you to think with a business mindset.

2) Read magazines and keep up online with various blogs/news threads. You don’t necessarily need to fully understand EVERYTHING you read, just get a read of the general direction of society’s interests. Successful entrepreneurs, consciously or unconsciously, do this. They have an innate ability to sense patterns in society’s interests and act before the rest of society.

Look at Google’s ability to harness web traffic by giving people a straight forward way of searching and then turning those eyeballs into interested clicks that are auctioned off to the highest bidding advertiser for just about ANY product/service you can imagine. They understood back in 1998 that the web would be big and the globe would need a reliable search engine that served up relevant content.

Look at Apple - there were dozens of MP3 players out on the market before their iPods were released but they knew that only people who were more tech savvy were the ones messing around with these MP3 players. Their goal? Make it easy for EVERYONE with iTunes/iPods.

These companies think differently and choose to be on the proactive side of society and help guide the rest of us while we busy ourselves with our own lives. You can too!

3) Expand your horizons. The business you start may not necessarily be entirely related to what you do now and that’s a good thing. Stop and think about what you do at your job. What have you learned to do your job well? Is it knowledge that is ONLY applicable to your job or can you apply it elsewhere? Reflect enough and you’ll realize that you DO possess newly acquired skills that can be applied to a business of your own. Not only do you have skills that can be applied to your own business but by expanding your horizons and looking into other industries for a business opportunity, you’ll realize opportunities that may not be apparent to those already in the industry.

Example 1: Guy works at a Internet start up and toils away in the customer service department. By putting himself in the customer’s shoes and understanding their frustrations he learns how important customer service is in a company. Guy vows to change things in the company and moves on to SEVEN other roles in the same company where he learns valuable lessons in managing people, data harvesting, search engine optimization, customer buying trends, etc… Guy finally oversees software development that rakes in $20M+ a year, happens to look into the automotive lighting industry where he notices customer service is lacking and starts up a company to fill that niche. Business booms and he resigns via text message to the VP of HR. Guy now runs a one-man-band business and sends light bulbs to thousands of customers a year and loves it.

Example 2: Guy works at an Internet start up in 1999, fresh out of Stanford with a Masters in computer science. Despite him being a software coding genius, the dot-com tanks but he goes on to work at a few more start ups where he witnesses the importance of intellectual property law. Enrolls into law school in 2003. Guy is now an intellectual property patent attorney where his experience as a software developer gives him the technical insight necessary to do his job exceptionally well. Guy doesn’t necessarily own his own business yet but he’s well on his way to making partner or starting his own firm/consulting company.

Example 3: Guy gets a masters in accounting and works in the head finance department for several high volume car dealerships. Guy learns how to manage a business and develops a quick eye to identify healthy/unhealthy business situations. Saves up cash and quits to revamp high end homes. Armed with capital and the financial acumen from his car dealership days, he identifies an opportunity acquire a night club and turns it into a hit. After selling the club he moves on to acquiring and ramping up a struggling flight school. It’s a hit. Guy sells it and acquires a struggling auto body shop where he pushes all the financial statements from the red deep into the black. Guy sells and celebrates and just recently acquired a small restaurant in a historic district in Virginia Beach with massive potential for growth.

None of these businesses have a common thread and he went from INDUSTRY to INDUSTRY! His uncanny ability to identify businesses/industries where an opportunity exists is truly rare but it can be learned and if he can do it not once but five times in 15 years! You can do it once!

4) Put on your Sherlock Holmes hat on and explore the world. Subscribe to Inc, Fast Company, Business Week, etc and check out the resources Inc.com offers to people interested in starting up their own company. At any given moment I personally have these and other magazines strewn around my house and office so I can read up on what other companies are doing and how they’re tackling problems that I may be dealing with or may have to deal with in the future.

Every week I also interface with good friends who happen to be fellow business owners around my town to get a feel for the retail market and what is cooling off and what may be warming up. Not only do I try to get a barometer reading of my immediate surroundings, I also read newspapers in other major markets including Asia, Europe, and Australia.

John Donne: No man is an island And likewise - no country is an island (well, in our metaphorical sense…)

China:
SINA
China Daily

Hong Kong:
The Standard

Australia:
The Age

Interested in another country? Check out this site.

As the title says - being “unemployed” does not mean “unproductive”. I would say that close to 98% of my friends all work for a nice company in which they are given goal/tasks each day/week/month by their manager. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad thing. Having things to do at work keeps you employed and gives you that satisfaction of accomplishing something. And that is PERFECTLY FINE.

However, I would actually like to challenge you to really think about your job. If you did not have a manager who gave you goals/tasks, what would you do?

A popular answer I’m sure would be “nothing”, however, one must make a living somehow and afford a roof over their head and food on the table so one cannot just do “nothing”.

And that brings me to the real question of this post - What CAN you do?

Forget about your job and your bills that you owe at the end of the month. Please stop and think about it because if you reflect on this question enough, you’ll realize your internal desire to do great things on your own.

For example, you may be able to make the best pancake in the world and if you truly can, you may have a calling to start a crepe cafe. Or maybe you love to play softball and you happen to know how to give that winning edge to your fellow teammates at bat and you want to share.

Whatever the case, I am sure that if you pursue that ability, you’ll succeed because you can make money doing just about anything out there. And I mean ANYTHING. The only question after you pursue that ability is how much money do you want to make? This sounds totally cheesy but only if you don’t stop to think about the possible ways of making a living in the world.

Here are three great examples.

Example 1: Guy loves playing softball. Guy realizes that he has the tools to modify softball bats to make them hit balls farther than normal. This is illegal in the rules of softball but hey, where there is a demand, there will be a supply. Guy sets up a web site and starts charging people to modify their bats at 120-150 per bat. Sales skyrocket and soon he’s modifying 30-35 bats per DAY. You can do the math.

Example 2: Guy loves software development. Guy understands in the lending world that banks have a chain of events that require human input at various stages in a bank loan. Guy produces a piece of software to automatically inform the humans when the lending process requires their input and charges the bank $1 per loan. Imagine how many loans a decent sized bank processes per month.

Example 3: Guy likes light bulbs. Guy realizes that there are specialized light bulbs in medical devices/equipment in doctors offices and hospitals across the country. Guy does massive amount of research to compile a list of light bulbs for all kinds of medical machines and distributes a catalog to hospitals/doctor offices across the country and turns around to be one of Philips’ largest buyers and acquires mass quantities of all the bulbs at a heavily discounted price and sits back to ship light bulbs off. Imagine the number machines in a hospital and think about how many hospitals and doctor offices there are in your city. Now fathom how many there are in your average size state. Now multiply that by 50.

These aren’t your normal stories about how people make a living. I’ve shared these real stories with you because I want you to understand that you CAN do something else other than your job. Also… if you think about it - when you’re not at work, you are “unemployed”. Meaning, you are not working and thus have the free time to work on exploring another way of making a living.

Do not think that the only way you can make money is by working at your job. Remember that.

The world will see you in the morning, roll by you in the afternoon, and leave you standing there by yourself in the evening if you let it. I encourage you to grab a part of it and mold it so the world NEEDS you to continue.

Everyday people/businesses do/see/buy/use things/services. Reflect and realize what your true ability is and run with it.