Heating Up
It’s morning on the hilltop again and I am listening on my iPhone speaker mode to an old protege of mine (he is actually both the son of an old colleague and a guy who worked for me twenty years ago). He is a wonderful guy who has spent his career drilling down into a specialized area that sounds relatively mundane, but has been very productive for him. He is going on about an investment opportunity that sounds interesting, or at least as interesting as I find any investment idea these days. The truth is that few business ideas hold tons of appeal to me these days. I think it is a phase of life issue for me, not a lack of interest in investing or making money. Venture capital takes X years to mature and bear fruit. As they say, in the venture capital orchard, the lemons ripen first. That means that if I made ten investments in well-vetted and interesting ideas, I would have to suffer a few (if I’m lucky it would only be a few) lemons before I got to any peaches. I have now had two calls from my expert witness partner in Sicily while my old colleague has been explaining the details of his business. I am anxious to get back to my Sicilian friend because it involves putting the finishing touches over the next few days on the expert report I just finished yesterday. I have spent the week writing a 45-page report on this arbitration case and I sent the first draft off last night, as requested. The report is 90% done and, if it is all good to the lawyers who hired me, we need to tweak it, add references and add some data exhibits. That stuff is what Mr. Sicily is busy doing, but I have had to send him texts that I will call him shortly. This all makes me wonder where I draw the line between polite friendship and what I have to get done and care about in the moment. This almost feels like being back in business, where such dilemmas are a daily occurrence.
In the meantime, the weather here in Escondido is finally getting to that hot summer moment where I am looking at a week’s worth of 90+ degree weather, where the only productive outdoor part of the day is this morning time. I am sitting out on the patio and to say that it is starting to heat up to the point of getting to the borderline of comfortable and pleasant versus hot and sticky. The occasional hilltop breeze is helpful, but not quite enough to keep it pleasant. It’s Friday and the household projects are coming to their conclusion for the week, but it has left me in a tough spot. Everything I usually have in the garage is sitting out in front of the garage, covered by plastic tarps. This is because the project being wound up is the laying of epoxy on the garage floor. That started yesterday and wraps up today with a clear top coat that has to sit untouched for 24 hours and can’t be finalized for moving back in for 72 hours. That means everything has to sit outside for the weekend. But Monday, the garage gang comes back to install new cabinets for the garage on Monday. That means everything stays out of the garage until late Tuesday at the earliest. Luckily, my last big project, the Shadesail is making this all feasible by letting all that garage junk sit out under the shady sail. That would be fine at 80 degrees, but at 90+ degrees I am less than thrilled to have everything including my two motorcycles and two cars out in the sun baking at 90+. I suppose this is where I am happy that I bought white cars to keep them cooler in the heat.
The topic of this new investment (yes, the call is still going on) is all about a “radical” new payment processing system for the banking system that improves on the forty-year-old ACH system that we are all pretty darn familiar with. I am a General Partner is a Fintech venture capital company, but the payment system details are probably the single biggest reason why I am not more engaged day-to-day with that venture company. I just can’t seem to get interested enough in the topic to engage the way one must to be actively involved. This stuff has all sorts of blockchain hoo-ha involved with it these days, and blockchain is a lot like calculus. I get what its for and what it is supposed to do, but there is a barrier that my mind cannot quite get past. Calculus was the wall in college that told me I should better not try to be an engineer. Plenty of people get calculus, but I really don’t. Lots of people get blockchain (I too understand the basic fundamentals), but I really don’t in terms of how to apply blockchain to real life opportunities, except in the most primitive way. I am a finger-painter in calculus and blockchain. I hate that I am letting this friend go on and on about something that is going in one ear and out the other while I write a story about it all, but that is what is happening. It has heated up to the point that I am past the point of telling him I am too busy. I am stuck now until I find a logical break point to say, “send me a deck on this and I’ll think it over.” That is an old business trick for these situations and it is not so different that other day-to-day life situations. When things heat up like this one tends to glaze over. My friend just said that and I used it to suggest that I might have already glazed over. It hasn’t stopped him, but he says he is down to the three last sentences. I just heard him start sentence four, so he may know blockchain, but he has forgotten his simple math.
I have taken two in-the-bushes pees at this point and am out of soda, so this has to end very soon. It is a testament to how much I like this guy that I have let it go on for as long as it has. Aha, there’s my opening….I’m going in. Phew, done, he is off to the mountains with his family for the weekend and has said that when he can, he will send me some information and we can discuss it next week. That works, and that ends the call. Suddenly there is a light breeze across the hilltop and my neck feels a little less sweaty.
I have had to talk to the CFO of my little venture company (the one I am CEO of still) and we tackled several minor issues that all revolve around trying to spend less and have less of a hole in the bucket to fill with fresh money to keep moving forward. That ball is now back in his court. I learned from running a faculty tennis club forty-five years ago that the guys who won in the heat were always the old guys for whom economy of effort was a religion. I have become an old guy and I have learned how to use the lob and the chip shot just like those old guys playing in the yellowing whites on the clay tennis courts of Cascadilla Gorge.
I am also now trying to get to my Sicilian buddy to determine how we are going to wrap up this expert report over the next few days. Preliminary feedback from the law firm is that it looked like “excellent work”, but the references and exhibits are important to the overall case, so a little more heat and that gets done. The hot potato (how’s that for a transitional mixed metaphor?) now rests with Mr. Sicily, where they know how to handle heat. The epoxy guys have left with instructions for the next several days of cure-period for the new floor. That means I have to postpone any other work that involves the garage stuff. Handy Brad will paint tomorrow in anticipation of the new cabinets on Monday and Bob’s Your Uncle. So, the key to letting things heat up is always having strategies for cooling down. And then, the next challenge is finding things to heat up next week……