There are some things in life that you have to see to believe. One is Niagara Falls. Another is the We IPO S-1, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filing that reveals the inner workings of a company before it goes public. An S-1 is like seeing a company’s scat while on the hunt.
This is that little falls between the USA and Canada.
The other day I read an interesting blog post by a former client of mine, Anthony Bucci, former co-founder and CEO of Revzilla. He was an early client and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him as he scaled Revzilla into a powerhouse eCommerce business. He blossomed into an excellent CEO and monetized the company in a world class exit. Pay window.
His blog post which you can find here is excellent. He is taking a summer breather, focusing on his five bambinos.
Anthony, who I have never called “Fredo,” gives you a nice cross section of the current literary offerings and podcasts of those who are seeking knowledge at the inspirational C-suite level. All good books.
A professional recruiter who I have advised — real pro — put up an article on Twitter that caught my interest. It discusses the essence of recruitment failures and why they happen. It takes a long time to get to the nub of things, but it is filled with wisdom.
I had also been building a file to write about this and they both came together at the same time. I take an earthier view of things having been in hiring mode for more than three decades.
I have always maintained that a good CEO is always recruiting and that recruitment is a seduction — meaning you want to create a reaction in the target that they want to work at your company rather than you need them to fill a job. Perhaps, overly subtle, but it is the way I think and I always had good luck in hiring.
Here’s a hiring challenge for you.
You probably haven’t seen too much about the riots in Hong Kong because the Chinese are trying to keep a lid on things and the American media is covering a far more important story, the suicide of the predator Epstein.
China is on the verge of a bloody suppression of dissent in Hong Kong of the likes of Tienanmen Square. Remember this?
Tienanmen Square was filled with protesters on 4 April 1989. [We have seen this movie before.]
I like the ride sharing business and use both Lyft and Uber, probably more Uber. It is very convenient when I have to go downtown for a meeting. It is cheaper than the cost of parking and less stressful.
I am concerned about the prospect of Uber ever — EVER — becoming profitable. You have to ask yourself how a company can come public at a huge value when they are neither profitable nor are they likely to be in the near term.
Bit of warm weather in the ATX which makes me get out and do my outside chores first thing before the sun sets things ablaze. Going to be 103F today, but I don’t believe it.
Get a call from a CEO, who says, “I have this burning in my gut all the time. Butterflies and napalm.”
Nice turn of a phrase. I laugh to myself because I never laugh at CEOs. Not a good practice, ungentlemanly.
So, he continues, “Does it ever get better? You were a CEO for 33 years, when did it all settle down and the flaming butterflies took a vacation?”
I wanted to comfort him, but I always speak the truth, so I hesitated for a second.
“They never go away,” I said in my most comforting Saint Michael the Archangel voice. “You know how sometimes when we discuss one of the List of Horribles and I tell you, ‘Sorry, that’s normal.’?”
“Yes, you also say the only normal people are the ones we don’t know very well. I get that,” says the CEO. “When did the flaming butterflies go away and everything was peaceful, calm, and you didn’t lay awake in bed thinking about things? Tormented by things?”
“Sorry, amigo,” I said. “They never go away. In fact, what you see as butterflies, flaming butterflies even. They become condors. Big, vicious condors with enormous talons that rip your guts apart while they are bathing in acid. On bad nights, you can feel their talons slicing and the acid flowing into your abdomen. When you scale, your problems scale with you.”
If you are born in America that first day you will have much of your future defined by the family into which you have arrived. There are no do-overs or Mulligans.
The first question is this — were you actually born into a family?
As you can see, a substantial portion of babies are not born into a nuclear family — a mother and a father in a stable relationship that will foster the development of a child.
The obvious first impact is that a single-parent household is limited in the number of person hours they can dedicate to child rearing.
A Tactical Officer who had an influence on me when I was a cadet at Virginia Military Institute died back in March. I didn’t find out about it until the other day. This man had a profound impact on my life.
His passing made me think about what I call “organizational mentoring.” It is not an exact thing, but I think it is something worthy of discussion.
In our lives, we join organizations either voluntarily or involuntarily. They are places like schools, sports teams, churches, clubs, and other organizations that impart structure and discipline into our lives. There is something called MeetUp that exists to create a critical mass of folks with similar interests.
We long to be with people like ourselves.
Not every organization provides a platform for organizational mentoring. In my life, it was the church, work, school, the Army, and business. I am talking about a time after I was away from home and my parents.
I want to take a second and explore the power of mentoring and organization when I went off to college at Virginia Military Institute. I had never seen VMI when I arrived on the bus.
It looks like a prison.
That’s Stonewall Jackson and the Rockbridge Battery of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — combat veterans of the Mexican War and the Civil War.
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