Month: November 2021

I attended my first crypto-meetup last Thursday. I’m glad I did as I was exposed to parts of this burgeoning world about and some people doing interesting things. Tiptoeing into this world is a chance to be on the steep gradient of a learning curve again just as I’m finding my feet in the world of corporate transactions and startups, so the timing is great to keep my mental energy up.

The main event was a speaker discussing various elements of decentralized finance, an amalgam of protocols that has the potential to change the way money flows through the economy. That was a fire hydrant of new information for me and one I still have not sat down to process as I furiously took notes of different things to look at as part of my self-taught curriculum.

The topic of discussion during and after the main talk was ConstitutionDAO. I had not heard of ConstitutionDAO before Thursday, but it offers a powerful example of what these new technologies could enable. The exegesis of this organization was an original copy of the United States Constitution, the only such copy that is privately owned, coming up for auction. In the space of a few days, ConstitutionDAO came together and raised something like $47 million in order to bid at the auction. No crowdfunding campaign in history has raised that much money so quickly. We set up a TV and watched the auction live on YouTube—who knew that was even possible, but I should not have been surprised. The group did not win (the organizers decided they would be unable to purchase insurance if they bid any higher), but the final price was more than double Sotheby’s estimate.

So what is a DAO, you ask? DAO is an abbreviation meaning decentralized autonomous organization. Exactly how they will work in practice is still undecided and they don’t fit into any existing corporate legal form so there is residual uncertainty about them. That said, there are already DAOs with more than $1 billion in capital, so I can’t ignore them if I want to be on the cutting edge. They aren’t yet decentralized and count me a skeptic as to whether they can ever function that way, but the basic idea is that the governance of the organization will be handled using rules coded into smart contracts. I am not technically sophisticated enough yet to delve into more detail and even that brief description may be slightly incorrect, but I plan to learn more about these structures. The new world of Web 3.0 is going to offer all sorts of new and weird and exciting things. This was a strange introduction for me, but it is just the beginning of a journey.

I went to the Miami area this weekend to visit my brother in his new apartment. He moved there for a new job a few months ago and I had a free weekend, so I booked a flight. I was greeted with South Florida humidity as soon as I left the terminal, and it felt like I was back in Latin America again after a few years away.

I ordered in Spanish for dinner on Friday. Fair enough since the place was Venezuelan food, but I was disappointed in the arepas. We watched the US beat Mexico dos a cero and talked about how his new job is going working to improve the efficiency of giant cargo vessels to and from ports throughout Latin America. He is the only native American in his office and none of the routes he works on serve American ports, but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

Saturday we drove to Wynwood so he could see the street art and murals of that artsy neighborhood for the first time. It is one of those neighborhoods where developers cannot build apartments fast enough, the sort of neighborhood where the feel will change and become more sanitized. I had been there during my previous trip to Miami and ate better food that time, but it was fine to be walking around in shorts and t-shirt in November. Then we drove out to Miami Beach and up Collins Avenue a few blocks from the water. Ocean Avenue is now pedestrian only along most of its length, which was the correct decision even if it meant I didn’t get to ride past the famous art deco hotels this time. The traffic was terrible there and everywhere else around the city. The volume is one thing, but even more than that is that the traffic rules are treated as mere suggestions. People weave in and out of lanes, cut you off even when it’s unnecessary, and generally act like driving is one big game of bumper cars. It grated on me just as it did when I drove the judge around during my prior trip to the city. I want no part of that in my everyday life.

Sunday morning we went to Don Pan, which roughly translates to Boss of Bread. I had some refreshing passionfruit juice, but what was more notable was the setup of the bakery. Inside it were three separate additional businesses, a travel agent, locksmith, and money order business. We were also the only ones speaking English and the place was full. It gave new meaning to the trope that the best thing about Miami is that it is close to the United States. None of this bothered me, but I did find it annoying and a little soul crushing that we had to get in the car to go such a short distance from the apartment. Six lanes and never-ending strip malls may be the norm in Florida, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

We drove down to Key Biscayne and out to its end where there is a lighthouse. My brother just had to get his beach fix for the week even though I was with him and wanted no part of being on the sand. It was also part of his efforts to continue to explore his new home.

Then we went home to eat wings and watch football. This was the first football game I have watched in its entirety all year and will probably remain so until at least the opening round of the playoffs. Yelling at the television together, though, was enjoyable. A little while later I got to deal with the chaos that is the Miami airport. Miami is not my town—it’s too loud, too brash, too showy—but that’s okay. I got a reminder I didn’t need but got to see my brother making the most of a new start. That alone was worth the trip.

Have you ever had a dog look at you as if you were an idiot? Well last week I did, several times. I traveled to Northern Kentucky for some upland bird shooting with Dad and a few others from home.

To watch a bird dog at work, running back and forth in front of a line of hunters and periodically stopping to raise its snout so that it might better pick up the scent being carried on the wind, is wonderful theater. They are happier working a field even than when their owner returns home after a long day at work; this happiness makes a mockery of the lives that these same breeds of dogs have in city apartments. Just in case I needed a reminder of why having a dog is a bad idea at this point in my life, I got one.

When the dog knows a bird is close, it points—tail straight back, head forward, body rigid—and it will stay that way until the bird flushes. It is a statuesque pose that is developed through substantial training. As the youngest member of the shooting party, it was my task to kick up the bird after one of the dogs pointed. In tall grass, game birds are almost impossible to see and these birds held tight as a survival strategy. This meant I had to trounce through the tall grass kicking about until the bird finally flew up into the air. Whenever this required more than one pass, I looked back at the dog to get my bearings (the dog always pointed towards the strongest smell of the bird) and each time I looked at the dog it was judging me. Can’t you smell it? It’s right there you idiot. I would then go back to thrashing about and eventually the bird would flush and at least one member of the shooting party would get a shot.

In law school, there was befuddlement among some of my classmates when they found out that the late Justice Scalia regularly hunted upland game birds with Justice Kagan. There was a dissonance in their minds about Justice Kagan enjoying the activity; Scalia was too far gone as far as they were concerned. I never asked what their mental holdup was, but I always chalked it up to not appreciating the beauty that is watching a bird dog work a field and not understanding how much fun upland hunting can be. I have only done it a few times myself but now that I have more control over my schedule I expect that number will increase. I plan to not only take many more short trips like this, but also to try entirely new activities both here and elsewhere. That, after all, is one of the reasons I left BigLaw in the first place.

Last week, one of my cousins and her husband were in town to see a hockey game. He is a Boston Bruins fan (not sure how that happened since he grew up in Eastern Tennessee) so when they realized tickets are cheaper here than in Nashville they decided to make the trip from Knoxville and buy me a ticket too. This was only my second professional hockey game and I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the sport, but that wasn’t the purpose of the evening. Our seats were about five rows back from the glass in one of the corners, much closer than I would have selected but with a great view of half the rink.

We got there nice and early to watch warmups and soak up all that was on offer in the arena. For me, the arena offered way too much. Mainly, it was too loud. This may have been due to our seat location relative to the direction of the speakers, but you shouldn’t have to raise your voice over artificial noise to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you at a sporting event, especially one that hasn’t even started yet. Even more frustrating was how they pumped music through the speakers any time the puck wasn’t in play during the game itself. For most of my audience that has not been to many hockey games, this would be like music blaring between every pitch at a baseball game or between plays at a football game. It completely destroyed the rhythm of the spectacle. Is the average attention span really that short now?

Sitting there through the third period (the outcome was sealed by then with the home team dominant), I thought some more about how my experience was hampered by the music preventing me feeling the rhythm on the ice. Just a few moments’ quiet would have done so much to add to the atmosphere, if only to increase the tension before a face-off.

There are not many parallels between the experience at a hockey game and the client experience in working with our law firm. I’m not going to try to force a connection. Just let my experience be a reminder for you as well as for me—as a business owner you must always focus on the client experience. How you make your customers feel is often more important than even the results they achieve from using your products or services when they need your products or services again.