Author: James David (Page 15 of 27)

I attended my second Rhodium event last week. This meant another trip to Las Vegas. Once again, the trip was bereft of gambling and shows and only saw mixed results in trying new restaurants. Perhaps by next year I’ll feel secure enough to treat myself to a blowout experience or two but that wasn’t on the cards for this year.

It was a different experience this year. There were times when I knew I belonged. I had seen most of the people before even if I hadn’t talked to them previously. I knew how the sessions would flow and was more deliberate about the roundtables I attended. I was part of a bonus session at the start that I’d been unable to attend the year prior, a session for a smaller group that holds more regular meetings that I’ll be more involved in during the coming year. Throughout the conference, I spent as much time reconnecting with people I already knew as meeting new people (the former being a much easier task given my temperament).  

Then there were times where I still felt like an outsider. Some of these stemmed from my energy management strategies of walking off or sitting by myself for a few minutes to recharge, deliberate moments of physical separation. These weren’t an obstacle; they were planned. More telling, though, were the moments when I was reminded that this is a conference full of operators and I’m a service provider. They may be my clients but I’m not exactly one of them, not yet anyway. That may only be a subjective difference but that doesn’t make it any less real. I don’t know if this difference can be bridged. A law firm is a different business than those operated by the other attendees and any strategic or tactical insights have to be translated into our specific context. There’s no problem with this. It is just a reality to navigate.

I met up with friends on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday last weekend. Sure there are the necessary caveats that Saturday and Sunday involved the same people and none of these people are new friends, but so be it. It was the sort of weekend I’ve not had in a long time. There was a new brewery and restaurant to try on Friday. Then I continued to assist people get settled into a new place on Saturday and met them again for a food truck festival on Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t the healthiest weekend I’ve ever had, but I did eat a wide variety of foods.

I still haven’t hosted anyone at my apartment after I’ve completed furnishing it. It’s not that I haven’t tried. I offered on both Friday and Sunday. It just hasn’t worked out yet. Maybe that will come in a few weeks once I finish the current round of traveling I’m doing. It showcases me more than any of my prior residences, taxidermy included, and is more comfortable than the constant change in backdrop that marked my life through the late spring and most of summer.

I don’t consider last weekend to be a final iteration by any means, but it was a step in the right direction, a good start that I’ll build on in the weeks and months to come.

Operating a small business can be a roller coaster ride, ups and downs, twists and turns, and often in rapid succession. This has been one of those weeks.

In the middle of last week, we sat helpless as a buyer walked away from a transaction we’d been assisting with for months. This is a client we really enjoy working with and he’s built an incredible business. Everything was in line for an end of month close, then the buyer backed out. It was a gut punch for everyone involved. We will continue to support this client as he and the broker implement a strategy in the coming months to find another buyer and we’ll jump in to help again when the time comes. Then by Friday we were brought in to start an even larger transaction and now have several warm leads through our referral network.

The last couple of days have been filled with reviewing purchase agreements and letters of intent and having client calls to go over these transaction documents. These are the grinding days and the grinding calls, the sorts of calls we liken to a trip to the dentist. For me, these are the sorts of days when the emotion of Miles Davis playing his trumpet is the perfect background soundtrack. They are good days, but there have been fewer of them than I would’ve preferred over the past few months.

Today we had a closing. Sure it stretched out longer than it should have, but that happens with certain forms of financing. This was another closing that gave us more relief than euphoria but no matter, it’s accomplished. There is another small transaction where the documents are signed and it will close on Monday. Again, just momentary relief and onto the next one.

It’s been an eventful week. Most of them feel eventful now. During a conversation yesterday with a classmate from law school who stayed in the big firm litigation world, I was smacked in the face with the reality of how crazy that really is.

This was a much quieter week than I’ve had in a while. I didn’t drive hundreds of miles or fly across the country or move into a new apartment. It was a chance to finally feel settled in my new surroundings, try a few new restaurants (a very good pizza place and a not-so-good bbq place), and put things in their place in my living space. Well, mostly, as there is still one project that needs to be finished.

Over the next week, I’ll continue the push to settle into my new home. I’m going to join a coworking space downtown but with different purposes than when I’ve tried coworking spaces before. This time I’m not getting an office and will probably spend no more than a couple of hours at a time there. I already have an office that works just fine for deep, uninterrupted work. My aims are twofold, to have somewhere to anchor as a workplace that requires me to leave my apartment building—it’s a ten minute walk, just long enough to allow a mental frame shift—and to gain access to the member events. It is for that latter reason that I chose the most established and biggest coworking space here instead of one that might have more amenities. I don’t consume caffeine anyway. Will the coworking space experiment work this time? I don’t know, but the odds are higher than for my prior attempts. I also continue the search for new activities to try, even if some of those won’t start for a while yet.

After a few days in the South Bay for the SaaStr conference and related events, I spent a couple of days north of the Golden Gate Bridge (which was shrouded in fog both times I crossed it). That meant that I spent zero time in San Francisco itself this trip; I didn’t want to see it in its current state. Even stores I visited during my trip last year have now closed and I prefer happier memories.

It was a pleasant and relaxed couple of days in a place that feels like it’s a world away from the city just across the bay. I even rode along for a work-related journey some distance inland and got to experience the insanity of Northern California’s microclimates. In the space of about 30 miles, the temperature increased almost 20 degrees even as the altitude increased by no more than a few hundred feet. In this country that only really happens near the Pacific coast.

These couple of days were about closure. It was a natural coda to the cross-country road trip that saw me snake across America through the spring and early summer. There was also confirmation that I made the right choice for me. It is a nice place to visit and I’m sure I’ll visit again, but California could never be my home. The mindset and zeitgeist are too different from what I’ve known and am comfortable in even though I now live and breathe technology companies. Instead, I’ve committed to North Carolina and building a home here. Curling season starts up in just a few weeks and I’m looking to add a few more activities to my plate before then.

I will admit that it is a little odd that I’m flying to the west coast so soon after having driven to the west coast, but that’s life. This week is going to be another iteration of the continued experimentation that is our law firm. We’ve done small conferences before, will do another one in October, but this is the first megaconference we will have attended as a partnership. It’s also going to be a much quicker turnaround than when we went to Europe for a conference last year and each stayed for several weeks. I am going to spend a few extra days in the Bay Area but I’ll be alone in doing so.

My goal was to finish setting up my apartment before leaving on this trip. That didn’t happen as I’m still waiting on a few more deliveries. It’s close though. This scramble also meant that I didn’t finish packing until this morning. No one who has travelled with me will be surprised by that news.

I was on the road for almost three months this summer. There were positives and there were negatives, surprises and predictable bits. This short post is about the most impactful moment of the whole journey so that I can record it for myself.

I’d just finished dinner at a local Tex-Mex type of place in Denver near the end of my time in the city. I didn’t pick the place but I made it work. It wasn’t about the food anyway but instead about the people I was with.

At the beginning of my car ride back to my lodgings, the three people I’d had dinner with crossed the street in front of me. I don’t even know if they saw me. There wasn’t anything special about the moment—my friend was pushing his son in a stroller and walking alongside his wife. And still it hit me hard. It was an image of where my life isn’t, where I want it to be, where I thought it would be. I couldn’t think of anything else for the rest of the evening. Then the next day was a long and empty drive across Wyoming, which only let the image seep deeper into my consciousness. It wasn’t that moment alone that changed the final destination at the end of my road trip, but it certainly played its part in the decisions I’ve made over the past month and my plans for the months to come.

I spent most of last week sleeping (or not sleeping) on an air mattress while searching for an apartment. Bill was gone on an unrelated trip so his apartment was available. That part worked nicely. So did the search itself. I knew the area in which I wanted to live and what I was looking for in an apartment—size, features, etc. Then over a couple of days I toured every building in the relevant area and matched them against my criteria. At the end it came down to two buildings, but I’d have to wait several weeks on one of them. That made the decision an easy one. Then the complications started.

This weekend was move-in weekend for UNC, Duke, and NC State. That did not help me. I scheduled a move for Saturday using a moving company I’d used more than once before. It was on short notice so they wouldn’t confirm the reservation when I made it, no big deal. Then at 6 PM on Friday they called me to tell me that they’d been unable to find movers. Not great. The moving company told me that they’d rescheduled me for Sunday morning. This would’ve worked, but I’d also received an email from my storage facility on Friday. They would be resurfacing their parking lot on Sunday and so access to the facility would be very limited. This was the only time I’d received a closure notice during the months my things had been stored in the facility, because of course it was. This meant several more phone calls, emails, and text messages with the moving company to coordinate another reschedule. Eventually I got through to them and my things were moved yesterday. I’m still very much in the unpacking phase but I have version one of my workstation setup, cooked myself breakfast this morning, and was able to sleep in my own bed for the first time in months. Over the coming days, I’ll work to make this place feel like what it is—my new home.

There is a video on YouTube of a short speech by the British actor Hugh Laurie called “America is Too Big to Know Itself.” The speech is an ode to the cultural and geographical diversity of America. Even in a Starbucks and McDonald’s world, that diversity still exists. I’ve experienced it first-hand over the past three months as I drove a circuitous route from the Atlantic to the Pacific and then back to North Carolina. I made a conscious effort not to eat at fast food chains, or at least to avoid the national fast food chains I’ve had so many times. This meant some really good meals in places like Billings, Montana and Hood River, Oregon, and some not-so-good meals in some other places that I won’t name here. Overall that effort was worthwhile and if anyone takes a road trip I recommend it—stop just outside of town, do a quick search on the maps app of your choice, and give a local place a shot. If nothing else you’ll get the chance to talk to locals about their home.

There will be more detailed reflections on parts of the journey in the coming weeks in this column. This week I’ll just record a few of the summary figures. I did not count the total mileage of the trip but 9-10k miles in total doesn’t sound crazy given all of the extra driving I did when I was “stationary” in Austin, Denver, or at the national park destinations. I drove through 19 states, including 5 new states for me, and on 19 interstates (excluding any with triple digits). I explored or skirted Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Olympic, North Cascades, Yellowstone, and Theodore Roosevelt National Parks. I didn’t have any insane wildlife encounters by my subjective standards, but I saw plenty of animals, from and owl and bald eagles in Tennessee to bears, big horn sheep, and bison in Montana to marmots and grouse in Washington. I even added a new baseball stadium to my list when I watched the Twins beat the Diamondbacks in Minneapolis.

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts over the past few months. Most have just washed over me. On my latest extended drive, though, I listened to an episode of Hidden Brain that bucked the trend. I used to listen to Hidden Brain on a regular basis but hadn’t done so in some time. Now I can’t remember why.

The episode delved into the construction of arguments and how we often err when doing so. People making an argument will often stack as many supporting premises as possible in support of their conclusion. The underlying rationale is that more is better and each additional premise is additive and increases the strength of the argument. This isn’t actually what occurs, though, when people listen to arguments. Instead of adding supporting premises, listeners average them. This means that adding weaker supporting arguments is actually detrimental in convincing someone; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You’d be better off only given the strongest argument(s), even if there is only one, than in filling a quota of three or five with weaker arguments. The framing anecdote of the episode was congressional testimony concerning funding for PBS. There were hours and hours (not played during the episode) of people discussing different statistics and providing lots of different reasons why there should be continued funding for public broadcasting. It all blurred together and became noise. Then Mr. Rogers drilled a single point and only a single point and in doing so single-handedly swayed the committee members—a masterclass in persuasion.

The Episode is “Less is More” in case anyone wants to listen on their own podcast player.