Getting Paid I have a friend who worked with me for fifteen years twenty years ago. Think about that for a moment, its been longer since we worked together than the time we worked together. He was one of three of us partners of our firm that were always called upon to act as Master of Ceremonies for whatever gathering we had. I guess that was because we each had a degree of presence that…
Remember Bitcoin? About six years ago I helped a fellow Cornell Business School alumnus launch a new venture capital fund. It was to be focused on Fintech or financial technology companies, an area that held a great deal of interest to me since the democratization of finance had been a topic of thought by me and those around me during my career for a long time. The penultimate Chairman of Bankers Trust Company, the formative…
Terrorizing Myself These days, my morning protocol is to start by understanding what obligations for video calls or meetings I have in the early morning. That is a normal situation I imagine for many people who live on the West Coast since we are three hours displaced from New York and eight or nine hours offset from Europe. While I have done plenty of business with Asia over the years, my connections do not tend…
Todd, I Presume Every day we take risks and we try to manage them as best we can. We do not live in a perfect world and no matter what we do, we cannot live life without some risks. Hopefully we minimize the big risks and get lucky for the rest. Can any of us do better than that on a day-by-day basis? When it comes to personal household security some people believe in fortification.…
Coping In 1997 I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company after twenty years of rising through the ranks and having taken on a wide diversity of roles in many different businesses. I had served in mostly line management capacities, but had also had a few staff positions, all with a growing breadth of responsibilities. In other words, I had risen through the middle management levels and was one of the firms leadership…
Getting Big Enough Ever since I can remember, for at least the last sixty years, I have lived with the reality that I am too big. The relative measure that causes me to say that has nothing to do with life insurance charts that define healthiness based on a height/weight ratio or a BMI (Body Mass Index). I long ago decided that I fall outside those standards and that they just don’t apply to me…
The Buffalo of My Soul By now we all know that the proper name for what we all grew up knowing as a buffalo, is bison. Technically they are Bison Bison in scientific terms and are a subclass of Bovinae or large, even-toed ungulates (hoofed creatures) that are native to the Great Plains of North America. We all know Tatonka (the non-specific Native American word for the buffalo) from Dances With Wolves fame, and know…
Snow Where to Go Today I got spanked by a loyal member of my motorcycle club. This is a group I founded twenty-five years ago. In fact, this past year I authored a 440-page tome titled The Ride is All about the twenty-five years of riding together all over the world. There is an entire chapter up front about all the characters that make up the club. I’m not sure we are any more or…
Working Stiff I have a strange feeling that 2020 was a buffer year for me, not so much by design, but by happenstance. After many years (I mark them as starting in 1966 at the age of twelve…so call it fifty-five years), the inertia of work has set in. People talk about “failing retirement” as a cute tongue-in-cheek way of bragging that they are so busy in retirement or see such a demand for their…
Experiencing the Holidays My youngest son, Thomas, gave us two experiential gifts this year. One of the bright people at Airbnb came up with a revenue filler called Airbnb Experiences and he and his significant other, Jenna, thought it would be a good gift for us. One was the about learning to be Polish, done by a lovely woman from Krakow who is an underemployed tour guide. The other, which we did last night, was…