Sprucing up my Venture Capital knowledge
Today was mostly an indoor day. I need to do some laundry since I only brought about a weeks worth of close on my travels. I wanted to travel light, so I just brought a backpack and travel suitcase for my four months here in South East Asia. There is a laundry area downstairs from my place, and I’ve luckily exploited some laundry machines that require money to use, but these two I found must like me because they are free…Laundry machines were challenging to figure out at first. The first time I did laundry here my clothes just sat in water for 2 hours without the detergent getting mixed into the water. I learned my lesson, and I’ve mastered the laundry machines and dryers.
Since I needed new fresh clothes, I had to stay in and work from home. It was a pretty good day. I finished up all the chapters I wanted to finish from The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital. I also finished my summary blog on the book. I learned quite a bit about the inner working of VC and feel a lot more comfortable seeking VC funding now for Minidesk.
After finishing the book and blog summary, I needed to eat! I worked through lunch and finished around 6 pm. I headed out and was planning to grab some food at the mall, BUT I’ve walked by this outdoor restaurant place every time I go to the mall, and it looked delicious, but it was more for a group type restaurant. Luckily, as I was walking by, the place wasn’t crowded, and I was like “what the heck”let’s do this! So I did… And it was glorious.
Unfortunately, I horfed down the food so fast I couldn’t take a picture of the rest of the skewers I got. It was very good, and I’m glad I ate there. I’m going back…in fact…I already have…So sue me. More on that in a bit. Muahaha
So after dinner, I headed to CAMP coworking space again to get some work done. I got there around 7:30pm and stayed until about 11:30 pm. The awesome part is you need to a buy a drink priced over 50 Bhat, and you get two hours of wifi for free…Must have been my lucky day because the lady gave me two little tickets that offer two hours of wifi bliss instead of one for my iced americano the size of a slurpy. The freebies keep coming 🙂
I ended up doing some research on some VC firms and seeing what connections I have to them through linkedIn. Surprisingly, I had a connection to a partner at The Founders Fund that I met a while back at a bookstore. Younger fellow but I remember just talking to him because we were both buying business books. We connected on LinkedIn a while back, but I don’t use LinkedIn much, so I didn’t check. But I messaged him and just caught up a bit. He’s working at a VC fund in San Diego, but they just deployed their first round of funding and were not likely to invest in more companies at the moment. But I sent him our pitch deck and asked if he had any VC connections that would be a good fit. He’s looking it.
The lesson is: You never know who is going to be some major connections in the future. Always be nice to people. You never know.
Embrace Your Experience
I ended up adding back some experience I had in my earlier years. It’s easy to discount the things that you’ve done because it doesn’t look “good” enough. I had to embrace where I’ve come from and acknowledge the work I’ve done without feeling ashamed of it. Everyone starts somewhere. Don’t let the nagging voice in your head say you aren’t good enough, smart enough, talented enough, educated enough, etc. Just keep moving forward and continue to gain practical and applicable skills.
It was refreshing for me to look back at my experience and see where I should focus my time and energy on honing. I’ve had a lot of sales experience but isn’t in the traditional sense. It’s not B2B sales, enterprise level sales, or even traditional B2C sales. Regardless, I do have a significant amount of sales experience. The one thing I dislike about resumes or professional profiles is that your experience and knowledge can’t be succinctly bundled up into a few descriptive roles and things you’ve done. You’re much more significant than just your resume.
But one thing for sure is that people will judge you by the few lines on your resume or profile. It’s unfortunate but true. In a world that moving so quickly, we need easy metrics to make quick decisions and sometimes it comes down to few meaningful descriptors. It generally pays to have a specialty. An area of deep focus that you’re exceptionally good at. If you keep bouncing around into a flurry of skills, you become diluted and a generalist. That has been my problem. Being a generalist is good in the sense you can see things from many different angles, but the challenge is you aren’t exceptional in one area that can add a lot of value.
Most founders I’ve noticed tend to be good at a core competency. You want to have a skill that can add dramatic value to an organization that they would be hard pressed to find someone as capable as you. You can do that only when you do a deep dive into an area. That doesn’t mean you can’t be broad too. You can be terrific in one or two areas and then have a level of competency or understanding in many other areas. The cross-pollination of ideas from other spheres of education allows you to make these mostly unknown connections and insights you usually wouldn’t have without understanding different worlds.
For example, if you’re a marketer, it tends to pay to have an understanding of human psychology or technology. If you understand humans, you know how to sell to them. If you know technology, you can maximize your marketing efforts through analytics or embedding virality into the products your engineers are creating.
All that to say I had a pseudo epiphany. I need to continue specializing in sales and marketing until I start reaching maximum diminishing returns in my efforts. Then I can focus on honing another skill. I think most people have 2 maybe three really specific and deep competency until you start being less effective. There are outliers of course. The polymaths like Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo Davinci, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, etc. that span the spectrum in their knowledge but they are the exceptions, not the norm.
Serendipity and Supermarkets
After finishing up, I headed back. At 11:30 pm the mall is practically closed down, but the CAMP place is open until 12 pm. It seriously must have been my day because I was forced to go down to the basement level of the mall where the garages are, and I happen to find a whole new level of stores I didn’t even know existed! The bottom floor was filled with unique restaurants AND a supermarket!!! I’ve been living off of a convenience store near my place… I’d seriously try to find any vegetables I could at the convenient store, and it was always just this little container of grape tomatoes and a box of small cucumbers.
You don’t even know how thrilled I was to find that supermarket. Oh, the little things in life. Anyways, now that I see the floor exists, I’m excited to check it out in the next couple of days. I finally found the exit to the mall and started on my way back home. On the road, guess what I do. Yup, I went back to the skewers place to get some to go!
I waited for about 20 mins for the food to be ready but it was so worth it. I grabbed a bag of goods and headed home. Nothing spectacular as finding a supermarket in a mall you’ve been living out of for ten days anymore. The night is over. I came back. Blasted the AC. Ate some fruit and snuck one skewer…okay two skewers before I shower and crash.
That’s it! Good night for now!