I’m coming back to California after working in Vietnam as a business consultant for the last eight months, and I thought I would use the transition as an opportunity to keep in touch, and share what I’ve learned.

This is the consolidated story of my experience. Why I went to Vietnam, what I did there, and why I’m coming back. In it I talk about how to find work and opportunity abroad, and what business is really like in an emerging market. I share some unexpected lessons that I’ve learned about traveling and about myself. If you’re ever tempted to run away and start a new life, some of this might be really helpful, or it might change your mind.

It would really mean a lot to me if you’d read it (when you have some time, it’s super long) and get back to me with your thoughts and feedback.

- Dangerous Ideas -

Often, while studying it, I worried that economics might be boring. Actually, it turns out that economic ideas can be extremely dangerous. The idea that an investor can increase returns by moving around the risk almost destroyed the world economy. Now financial models are being called weapons of mass destruction. Not bad.

For me the most dangerous idea I ever learned studying economics was the concept of “opportunity cost”. Opportunity cost is the realization that the true cost of something is not its price, but rather the value of what you could have had instead. An investment was only a good investment to the extent that it made more money than the next best thing. To spend a day shopping for a $30 pair of shoes costs you not only your money, but also a day that could have been spent swimming, or reading, or whatever. And for me that’s a big whatever.

I was very lucky to be born into the time, place, and situation that I was. I have never been called on to provide for my family, or defend my country, or really do anything for anyone but myself. A California style childhood of loving family and nurturing teachers has assured me that my opportunities in life are limitless and my only responsibility to the world is my own happiness. I can do anything I want with my life. Sounds good right? Except for the opportunity cost.

It turns out every hour I spend cleaning my toenails is an hour that I’m not climbing mountains, making friends, or founding companies. With infinite opportunity, every choice I make is suddenly infinitely expensive. Stupid economics.

Wait, wait, relax. That’s ok. My only goal is to be happy. A trivial luxury compared to most people’s lot in life. Frosting on the cake. Simple, right?

I wish. As if studying economics wasn’t bad enough, I had to completely cripple my ability to function in life by also studying some philosophy (not a lot, just barely enough to be annoying).

It turns out, that at some point back in Greece all these damn philosophers got together and decided that happiness is a rather silly concept, a temporary state, like being sleepy or gassy. So they came up with a much more robust version of happiness called eudaimonia.

When Doctor Kevorkian kills some someone who’s in pain, it’s called euthanasia, which roughly means “a good death”. Eudaimonia, alternatively, means a good life. And what did Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle decide a good life was? According to my philosophy 101 class, it’s human flourishing, virtue, living up to your full potential, fulfilling your opportunity in the world. Crap.

So I can’t just be childishly happy, that’s stupid. I have huge opportunity and I have to fulfill it. I have to be Jack Kerouac. I have to be Bill Gates. I have to be Siddhartha.

So, naturally, I moved to Vietnam to become a business consultant.

- Wait.. What? Why Vietnam? Why Business Consulting? -

Last June I graduated from UCSB with my degree in Business/Economics and Technology Entrepreneurship. It was finally time for the “real world”, whatever that is. I think it might have something to do with paying my own rent.

At the time I was working on two business projects, an art licensing and poster retailing company called PostersforHumans.com, and a clean tech materials startup called Nitride Solutions. Neither project was going anywhere in a hurry. Nitride Solutions was having trouble convincing Venture Capitalists to invest. My role in the company was shrinking and my attention was elsewhere. Poster retailing was barely breaking even, and publishers weren’t on board with our vision of promoting independent artists. Neither of these ventures was going to be paying any rent any time soon. So, by my definition, neither of them counted as the real world.

Furthermore, I didn’t want to stay in Santa Barbara. After graduating I saw many of my friends transform into zombie shadows of their former selves. I call them “Happy Hour People”, because I now only see them at some stupid bar during happy hour. Friends whose formerly rich and interesting lives as students are now reduced to sitting in their entry level accounting jobs, staring at excel and slowly counting down the minutes until 5pm Friday evening when they can finally go meet with the other happy hour zombies to drink mildly discounted beer and complain about work. They called this the real world, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I had a great thing going in Santa Barbara, but I  needed a fresh start. Rather than cling the scraps of my college life I wanted to face adulthood head on. My girlfriend still had a year of college left. I had enough money saved up to do something cool. Everyone agreed that I should carpe my diem while I had the chance.

I have had some opportunities to travel before, summers backpacking around Europe and the usual tourist clichés. I no longer believe in the value of seeing the world from a train window, letting your guide book lead you from hostel to temple to cafe to museum, taking pictures of yourself standing in front of old stuff. I wanted a real experience. I wanted to go to one place and really get involved with something, really let it sink in. And I didn’t feel like graduating from college deserved a vacation, I wanted something that I could put on my resume.

So I packed my suitcase, printed some business cards that said “David Pricco - Business Development Consultant” on them, and bought a one way ticket to Hanoi, Vietnam.

I chose Hanoi because I had briefly studied abroad there four years ago and had really liked it. It was a cheap, tropical city with a good balance of traditional and modern elements. Despite the economic apocalypse, Vietnam still had strong positive GDP growth projections, and the beginnings of Startup and Venture Capital scene. Plus I figured if I didn’t find anything there I would move on to Singapore, Malaysia, Bangkok, or wherever. I didn’t have any contacts or any Vietnamese language skills, but I ended up staying in Hanoi and building a whole new life there.

I chose to be a consultant because I knew that I didn’t want to start a full entrepreneurial venture. I had already been down that road and I knew how much of a commitment starting a new business was. Doing it in Vietnam probably would have tied me to the place for a few years at least. Actually, the main reason I became a consultant is that you can’t write “unemployed” on your business card. My real goal was just to find a job, and handing someone a business card is a better introduction than handing them a resume. Besides, I figured if someone actually hired me as a consultant in the mean time, it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

- What I learned about networking and finding work abroad -

The funny thing is that back in school I would always get mad when someone told me they wanted to be a consultant after graduation. I insisted that consulting itself, is not a job. It’s an employment relationship. It just means you’re around temporarily, that you’re billing by the hour, and that you don’t get any health insurance. I always demanded to know what people were actually going to do, and no one ever really had an answer. Now it was my turn to not have an answer either.

I moved into a cheap hotel and bought a map of the city. I found a tailor and had a suit made. I bookmarked all the websites for the various business groups in town and started going to business events and conferences to network.

After a while I figured out that sitting next to high powered global executives at business conferences, chatting, trading business cards, and sending follow-up emails is not a particularly effective method of getting a job. No one really gives a damn about you, and usually the important people in a company aren’t involved in hiring for entry level positions. Big companies have HR departments and systems in place for finding new employees, they don’t just hire random folks because they sat next to the CEO at some conference. I was just a business groupie (lamest vacation ever).

Eventually I found that the key to networking with more senior executive director types was to meet them in a non-business context, like a cultural or charity event. My first consulting contract came as a result of a charity event that I had volunteered to be the photographer for. It was a bike race. I motorbiked out in front of the cyclists, squatted on the ground, and got shots of them rushing past markets and cows and temples. It was a lot of fun. At the after-party I gorged myself on free snacks and idly chatted with whoever was within 5 feet of the food table. Somehow I ended up talking about my experience with business plans, and pretty soon I had a consulting gig helping write the business plan for a health communications NGO that was applying for its next round of funding. I wasn’t even wearing my suit.

I worked on that for two months, and did a really good job, I think. At the end I didn’t know how much to bill for. I went online and found a bunch of calculators that let you add up all of your living expenses, and your equivalent annual salary to figure out your billable rate. If I tweaked all the numbers in my favor I barely hit $25 an hour. So I asked for that salary to see if I could get away with it. I charged $950 total, and they went for it. I was now officially a professional business consultant.

I learned that it was actually much more effective to network within your own peer group. People my age or other recent arrivals were a lot more willing to talk, had more time for followups, and were much more sympathetic to the challenge of getting a foot in the door. Finally, I ended up getting a full time job as a “Strategic Consultant” at a major Vietnamese financial firm. I got the job through two buddies my own age with similar interests and disposition. I had met them through the normal process of making friends, rather than by actively “networking”. They happened to live right next to me, and happened to have a position open at their company.

My new job was to work on various projects in the company, help get brokerage services up to international best practices, help with research and English language marketing, and to work with my friends to create the companies new strategic consulting division: Management Solutions. (pro-tip: businesses with “solutions” in their name don’t know what the hell they’re doing)

The idea behind the consulting division was helping the many Vietnamese companies were born during the huge business boom in 2006 and 2007. During this time foreign investment poured into Vietnam, and businesses were able to prosper doing almost anything, often without much of a plan. Now business was tough, companies needed good research, planning, and outside expertise. We spent the next few months convincing our board to approve the new division, writing our copy, making our logo, creating marketing material, researching common business problems in Vietnam, and building a network of other consulting allies that we could call in to collaborate on projects. We even got a budget to hire another four people and pretty soon I was on the other side of the table, reading resumes and conducting interviews with people way more experienced than me.

We were interviewing Harvard, Princeton, University of Chicago, and IIT grads, people with experience in Merrill Lynch and the World Bank. It almost didn’t seem fair. Doing the interviews was enlightening. I quickly realized that I had screwed up a couple of my own earlier opportunities by not being able to properly answer the simple interview question: “What can you do for me?”

I read a lot of business news and business books, so I like talking about business. A few times early on, some poor business guy would take enough pity on my attempt at networking to meet for coffee. When this happened I would start ranting and raving about my insights into their industry, clever things similar companies have done, and the sorts of problems I supposed they were facing. Eventually they would stop me, knowing that my grand purpose in all this noise and fury was to get a job, and give me a chance to pitch myself by asking me what I could do for them if they hired me. I never really have an answer ready, I usually just explained that I had a lot of business skills and was happy to do whatever. I figured they should know what to do with me. But of course I wasn’t applying to a defined job in a traditional way. What I should have said is that I could do some research into the best practices of their competitors, help them improve their website, do some online marketing, do some analysis of cost and sales data and help them figure out how their different business segments are doing. I should have spent some time thinking about this stuff before meeting them. Next time I’ll know better.

Once you master these soft networking and interview skills It’s amazing the kind of work/trouble you can get yourself into.

- What I learned about doing business in Vietnam -

Soon after getting this new job I moved into a new house with my friends Kris, Joe, and Jon. Combined, we were the only foreigners in our company. We were all early twenty-something American recent college grads with a strong interest in business and a similar short term strategy for getting the most out of life. While I was busy building this consulting division one powerpoint stack at a time, Kris and Joe were building databases of stock prices and running regressions to pull out trends, writing reports and giving talks about the economy, getting interviewed on TV about investment strategy, and advising on bond issuances. Jon was upstairs advising our fund management company, sitting in on investor meetings, brainstorming ideas for new funds, and other stuff that 22 and 23 year olds would not get to do at home. We all got motorbikes. We had a big fancy house down a crazy ancient alleyway near our work. We had food delivered every night and hired two maids to come three times a week. Little old ladies sold fruit in front of our gate in the mornings, and crazy loud frogs kept us up all night. I was making $1000 a month. My rent was $150 a month, my motorbike was $50 a month, and eating out for every meal was costing about $8 a day. Life was absurd.

Some of that excitement was canceled out by how ungodly boring Vietnamese businesses are. I’m used to California where every business is some high tech organic web2.0 paradigm shift startup disrupting a new industry with a breakthrough product and a quirky name. In Vietnam, on the other hand, there are two ways of naming a business. Half the businesses here are some combination of place, product, number, and “Joint Stock Company”. Duc Thanh Wood Processing Joint Stock Company, and Construction and Investment J.S.C. no 492 are two of our clients. The other half are Vina+product, including Vinamilk and Vinaphone. These businesses all make normal stuff in normal ways, and sell it domestically. Most industries have one or two leading companies that compete more by buddying up with customers than by worrying about improving products and methods.

In school I had learned a lot about the sorts of companies that Venture Capitalists invest in. I figured where there are Venture Capitalists there would also be interesting startups. While there are two Venture Capital funds in Vietnam, offshoots of IDG and DFJ, their portfolio companies are all just localized versions of established US web2.0 models. Vietnamese websites are able to quickly build their user base, but don’t have the supporting local advertising or online retail industries to properly monetize. As far as I know, between these two fund’s combined 40+ Vietnamese portfolio companies there is only one company, Vinagame, which has been profitable. I think it will still be a while before we more innovative startups coming out of places like Vietnam.

As we got the new consulting division off the ground we were forced to confront certain… realities. We were three inexperienced white kids armed with only our undergraduate degrees, excel, powerpoint, and a bloomberg terminal. We were operating in an environment in which business decisions are usually based on the whims of the boss, deals are made according to who was friends with who, and everything happens very, very slowly. We’ve pitched our services to a few companies, and they showed some interest, but none of it has led to anything yet.

Despite all the conferences and books and reports about how Vietnam is poised to be the next “Asian tiger” economy like Taiwan or South Korea, doing business here is a disaster, a slow motion train wreck, and no one’s really interested in fixing it. The Vietnamese stock market is a good illustration of this. Part of our work is writing research reports on publicly traded Vietnamese companies. Our firm makes its money from brokerage. Since all brokers do pretty much the same thing, we try to differentiate ourselves from our competitors by offering better research. So we run discounted cash flow models, do industry analysis and projections, interview management, and make these big fat beautiful reports of everything there is to know about this or that Vietnamese company. We recently flew down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and pitched these reports to a dozen different investment funds. But it was all just a big waste of time.

Why? The Vietnamese stock market moves up and down in one giant blob, completely independent of the actual performance of its companies. We found one publicly traded company that runs a cable car up to a pagoda on some holy mountain in the south.This company is completely detached from the rest of the Vietnamese economy. Every year thousands of people come to pay their respects at the temple during lunar new year, and they certainly don’t base their decision on their expectations of future GDP growth. Yet this company has a beta of 1, which means its stock price fluctuates in perfect lock-step with the rest of the stock market. It’s stock price goes up and down right along with the cell phone providers and construction consortiums. Another company, a cotton producer, is such a disaster that they have a negative profit margin, and 100 times more debt than money to pay it. They can’t even get their shareholders to meet to liquidate the company. Yet, on a good market day recently their stock price hit its daily trading ceiling.

In the US you could make a fortune if you spotted these sort of inconsistencies, because you could rely on the prices to eventually correct themselves. But here a savvy investor has no advantage. The market soars when an upbeat article in the economist causes some huge fund manager in New York to slightly increase their portfolio’s exposure to emerging markets. The market tanks when the Vietnamese investors suddenly get excited about gold and pull all their money out of equities. Yet all these fund managers are sitting in their fancy offices in Ho Chi Minh City, going through the motions of raising capital, allocating investment, and collecting their fees. It’s a joke. All the ideas we learned about in school require some consensus to work. You can’t be the only one in the room with your way of thinking. If you tried to drive down the street in Hanoi using the same traffic rules as at home, you’d never move a mile.

This isn’t to say anything bad about Vietnamese people. They’re incredibly flexible and have amazing abilities to work together and improvise. This business stuff is just all very new here. With developing infrastructure, education, and legal systems, business in Vietnam will truly thrive one day. But for now, it’s foolish to bring over a bunch of standard Western business models and systems and pretend they work in such a different environment.

And this explanation implies that we even had those models to offer. Recently at a conference we made friends with two guys from Deloitte (a big famous international accounting firm) that were also setting up a similar consulting division in Hanoi. They invited us over to their office, patiently gave us all sorts of helpful advice about consulting, showed us their database of research, case studies, templates, the full materials from thousands of completed consulting contracts, and their worldwide network of experts and underlings to do their bidding. They had decades of experience doing business in tough markets. Their business cards said consultant, just like ours, but we were definitely operating on completely different levels. We were essentially the “Vietnam” of business consultants, a lot of big ideas, but not much experience or planning to back them up.

After six months of this I reached a point where I realized none of it was going anywhere any time soon. I could either finish my projects and neatly wrap up my time now, just as the new hires were arriving. Or, I could dig in, get back to networking and pitching, and really dedicate myself to this for the long term. I chose the former. Screw it. I miss my girlfriend. I’m going home.

- What I learned about traveling and living abroad -

When I arrived in Hanoi I was still somewhat under the impression that the key to being a good traveler was to blend in with the locals, live off a few dollars a day, walk the streets and explore the alleys hunting for street food. That, I figured, is what set us true travelers apart from the loud, awful, fat, sunburned tourists waiting in line for their overpriced buffet. I was a travel snob.

After a month or two of hanging out in weird food markets and visiting temples and pagodas I realized that not only am I not Vietnamese, I’m not a little old lady, or a monk either. And if I were Vietnamese I wouldn’t be hanging out in stinky alleys eating gross street food. Living that way is just a silly indulgent fantasy, pretending to be poor and ethnic with none of the hardship. Instead I learned to embrace the life of the expatriate. I found all the local cafes and restaurants that expats go to, not because they’re ethnically authentic quaint little secrets, but because they’re good, and because it’s nice to hang out with other expats. I found a nice swimming pool and a cool arty movie theater. I learned to go out without a backpack, or a water bottle, or a notebook, or any other silly tourist/traveler junk.

I made a pretty decent life for myself out here. It’s really no big deal living in a foreign city. You can easily learn enough of any language to order food or direct a taxi, and most any big city will have enough English speakers to build a good social life. I’m lucky that these two guys in Hanoi, Tom and Elliott, made a really good expat info website called the New Hanoian. Everyone gets the idea to make one of these websites once in a while. They spring up all the time, and usually wither away in a few months after failing to solve the chicken and egg style problem of building both content and users early on. The New Hanoian worked because Tom and Elliott were on the ground everyday, getting people to use the site, and helping to add all all the info for restaurants and bars themselves. They personally programmed the hell out of it too. They managed to build in maps, different languages, and a Q&A section. Now, after a few years of development, you can rely on the site for information about almost everything you need in Hanoi. Expat businesses live or die according to their rating on the New Hanoian, and because of that accountability, are probably a lot better than they would otherwise be.

At first I was frustrated that all expats seemingly ever wanted to do was go out to restaurants and bars. I don’t really like bars, and I got sick of hanging out in restaurants. But after a while I began to discover little pockets of culture, small groups of people that have gotten together to pursue mutual hobbies in their free time. My housemate Jon is a rock climber. He found a subculture of French rock climbers that all hang out on a little rock wall set up in the rooftop laundry room of this one guy’s place. Some of my other friends here set up a DJ collective, they play dubstep and arrange big events at the two or three decent clubs in town. One of my buddies even organizes weekly ultimate frisbee games.

If I had to classify myself socially, I would have to say that I’m a hippie/nerd. Eventually I found a local stash of funky hippie brethren. They live in crazy old houses, make yummy salads out of organic mint, sit on the floor, hang out, drink tea, play drums, talk about crystals, and rarely feel the need to go to bars or restaurants. I even managed to put together my own little band of fellow nerds to play StarCraft and watch Star Trek with after work. Sometimes the new friends I’ve made remind me so much of this or that friend back home that I’m sad they’ll probably never meet. New cities are very lonely at first, but if you work at it, you can either find or make your scene.

The flip side of becoming this integrated is that as time passes, being in a foreign place becomes less and less magical. The novelty wears off. It all becomes ordinary. Your quirky part of town just becomes the normal background of your commute.

A few times, when I met with long term businessy expats, I would get asked how long I planned to stay, and half jokingly pressured to settle down and find a Vietnamese girlfriend. The real expats saw right through me. They knew I wasn’t one of them, I was just a half-pat. I was just like all the other twenty-somethings that float through Hanoi to teach English or intern at some NGO and “find themselves” for a year. They knew it wasn’t really worth their time to buddy up with me too much, because sooner or later I would miss home and fly back.

They were right.

- What I learned about  life -

Coming out here was an attempt at optimizing my time, my effort, and my savings. I was trying to optimize the next step of my life according to what I thought was important.

Studying economics primarily involved learning how to take complex real world situations, reduce them to equations and graphs, and then use calculus to find the highest point, the optimum. After years of that it’s impossible not to try and apply the same framework to your own life, even if subconsciously, to imagine some ideal ratio of fun/sleep/love/money/health/travel/food/work and to constantly update your plan for getting there.

I’m finally starting to realize that you can’t optimize life like this. It’s too abstract, or maybe in some ways not abstract enough. Furiously thinking about it renders the whole point moot anyway as you’re not even mentally there to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Instead of living in the moment, you’re too busy optimizing the next thing, or at least I find that I usually am.

During school we had these standard definitions of “doing well”, like going to a good university and getting good grades. We knew when it was time to try harder, and when we could relax. We don’t have that any more, and making important life decisions is a lot harder.

It’s a cliche but I’m really trying to “live in the moment” and not always worry so much about what to do.

- What I learned about myself -

When deciding to come to Vietnam I was afraid to leave the safety and comfort of California, but I was more afraid to stay and miss out on an opportunity to travel and challenge myself. I figured this was the optimal choice. I put a high premium on leading an interesting life, and I thought I was pretty damn interesting for coming out here. I felt special and exciting. But recently I’ve realized I’m actually really just a typical American, and that thinking I’m so damn special is a big part of that.

Here in Hanoi I’ve got about a dozen American friends and acquaintances my age, and about a dozen other European or Australian friends and acquaintances my age. If you ask the Euros or Aussies what they’re doing here and why, they’ll mostly sort of shrug their shoulders and explain that they’re just doing their thing. They’ve got a good English teaching job, and life is easy and nice. Most of them stay in Hanoi for a couple of years.

Americans, on the other hand, what a bunch of silly people we are. Every one of my American friends either works for an NGO, doing traffic safety or health communications or protecting the environment, or they’re working in finance or economic research, investing money and crunching numbers. We’re all either trying to save the world or take it over. We’re all writers and we’re all photographers too. We all have some big story about what we’re doing with our lives and why we’re in Hanoi, and we have hundreds of quasi-artsy photos to prove to our friends on facebook how much fun it is. Few of us last even a year out here before we move on to our next big opportunity to be even more special and exciting. We are completely absurd.

More than just an American, I’ve also realized how much of a Californian I am. My other American friends here can’t understand why I prefer to spend my vacations just hanging out in one place instead of furiously motorbiking across the country, and why I’m willing to spend more money than I need to on fancy lunches and daily fruit smoothies. The three other Californians I’ve met in my time out here clicked as friends right away. I miss California and I can’t wait to go home.

And just as I was originally afraid to leave the comfort of home to try my luck in Vietnam eight months ago, I’m now afraid to leave the comfort of Hanoi for yet another uncertain future. I’m afraid of missing out on everything that will continue here without me. Everyone who leaves Hanoi for a wedding or something returns with reports of economic desolation in the wasteland of the outside world. Back at home, where all this started, going to Vietnam was my plan B. Now in Vietnam going back home has been my plan B. After this I’m out of plan Bs, and maybe it’s for the best, as having a plan B is dangerous.

I’ve worked on three major business projects in the last year: Nitride Solutions, PostersforHumans.com, and now the consulting division. I’ve bailed out on all of them. Each time I’ve gone with my plan B, and I’m not sure if those were the right choices. They were easy enough to justify at the time. All three projects had slowed down when the demand we were expecting never materialized. But that’s only half the story. All three times I got lazy, and stopped trying. I approached each project with a burst of energy and enthusiasm, but soon my effort was waning and I was looking over my shoulder for something else to do.  It’s only my first year out of college and still very easy for me to say “it’s just not for me”, and no one really expects me to build a financially successful business anyway. Still, I feel like next time I really need to see things through instead of running away.

I rely hugely on my friends. Growing up, my mom and I were our entire family in this country, and for some long awkward teenage years I was horrifically unpopular at school. Since then I’ve always made a massive effort to be social and maintain relationships. Besides companionship and fun, I’ve relied on these relationships to find work, housing, and opportunity. Here in Vietnam I got my job and my house through my friends, and when I get back home I plan to crash at a friend’s place back in Santa Barbara and hopefully get some part-time work with a friend doing computer repair.

But as a young person what you can get through cronyism is limited. Friends can help you find opportunities, but you need to fulfill them for yourself. Being social is a lot more fun than actually working, and the illusion that it’s just as useful is a dangerous one. I need to learn how to work hard, stick with a project, and achieve things for myself.

- moving on -

As a whole, my experience in Vietnam was fantastic. I found the interesting work opportunities I was looking for, went on fun adventures, learned a lot, and made some amazing new friends. The eight months ended up costing me about $5000 net, including a week on a tropical island with my girlfriend for new year, another week motorbiking around thailand with a buddy over Vietnamese new year, having two suits tailored, and a lot of expenses that were foolish and avoidable in retrospect (including a chinese knockoff iphone). I think it would have taken me another eight months of work to break even on the trip.

Moving on now is bittersweet, going home yet leaving so much behind. It includes the recognition that I have spent not only my money here, but also my time. I have grown older out here. The great sadness of growing older is seeing your opportunities disappear as you choose one path at the expense of others. You can change your mind, and you can change your plan, but you can’t stop time. One way or another you’ll end up doing something, that something will be “the real world”, and it will probably involve doing some hard work.

But don’t despair! I’ve discovered an up-side!

Sharing this story is part of an effort to shift my narcissism from photography to writing. I used to take photos of everything I did. I wanted to prove to myself and to the rest of the world that I had been there and done that. That I wasn’t still sitting alone at home like the awkward kid I was in middle school. Recently, I looked through some old photos of myself from early college and I was so embarrassed. What an asshole I was, making some stupid face at some stupid girl at some stupid party. I can’t believe the things that I thought were important to photograph. My intentions were so shallow and obvious. At the time I thought I would treasure these memories, but now I hardly identify with the person I see in the photos.

Maybe years from now, I’ll re-read this, and I won’t lament the tragedy of all my lost possibilities and unfulfilled opportunities, and I won’t congratulate myself on my business insights either, because I’ll no longer think any of that is important. I’ll simply say to myself “well, at least I’m not that guy anymore.”

Blogging is a tenuous relationship. It requires a regular and ongoing commitment from both the writer and the reader. (You and me - the blogger and the bloggee.)

Work’s been slow. Lately I haven’t been doing much of what I’ve been calling entrepreneurial travel, and the blog reflects that.  I’ve decided to wrap things up here in Hanoi and fly back home to California in June.

In this blog I have tried to stick closely to the theme of entrepreneurial travel,  avoid re-posting other peoples work, and develop my thoughts to the point where they’re worthy of at least a few paragraphs before posting them.

I have a whole folder full of half formed projects and essays that never quiet managed to grow up into full blog posts. I’m taking all these little ideas, along with a lot of what I’ve already written about in this blog, and using them as ingredients for a consolidated story of my time in Vietnam and what I’ve learned from it. I’ll post it here when I’m done.

Once I’m home I’ll no longer be traveling, so the current topic of this blog, entrepreneurial travel, will have to be transformed into something new.

Stay tuned.

It’s been really interesting to work on an entrepreneurial project within an existing firm.

In a lot of ways it’s great. From day one you already have a fax machine, an established brand, and a pay check. You get to skip all the mundane work of actually setting up a new business entity. You have whole departments at your disposal to do your bidding. It feels so good to just send something to the marketing department and tell them to make a press release for it and send it out.  And getting an actual paycheck in the first months of a new venture is an uncommon luxury for entrepreneurs. (although it’s at the expense of equity)

Entrepreneurship within a firm isn’t a new idea, but it’s often overlooked. Macintosh started as an entrepreneurial side project at Apple and ended up becoming their main product line. Post-it’s started as an independent project at 3M that employees worked on on their own time.

I feel like right now, with the economy being what it is and all, a lot of firms with too many idle employees could really benefit by putting some of them on entrepreneurial projects.  They could be developing new projects or divisions, doing consulting or training for partner firms, figuring out how to make or do something internally that the firm used to have to buy, etc.

In a lot of ways though I miss the wild-west style of doing a real standalone startup. I find that I do a lot better work at 2 in the morning than at 8 in the morning, and I don’t think wearing a suit makes my work particularly better either. And I’m also having to get used to the idea of working on a project, emailing it off to the boss, and never hearing of any feedback or results.

The funniest part of it, which I’m completely unaccustomed to, is the dilbertesque world of office politics, inefficiencies, and paradoxes.

Some departments just don’t get along with other departments. We have an IT department who’s primary task, as far as I can tell, is figuring out which websites employees are using to goof off, and blocking them. But they block sites in a very absurd way, they block all web addresses that contain certain strings of 3 letters. For a while we couldn’t use our google spreadsheets because they had blocked the letters “ads”. (spreadsheet)

Today one of us was goofing off, and he discovered that the letters “imo” were blocked when someone’s facebook profile wouldn’t load (someone with a long silly russian name that had “imo” in it).

Probably there is some sort of Vietnamese social networking site or chat client that has “imo” somewhere in the name, perhaps a site for sharing opinions, who knows. I don’t, because I can’t load the url.

I’ve made it a minor personal quest to go yell at the IT department whenever they block websites or disable some functionality on my computer. I got my google chat functionality back by showing them that the google powered search on a Vietnamese news website had been disabled by their shennanigans. Once one of my partners had to get management approval to use his USB thumb drive.

So I sat and sat, but I couldn’t for the life of me think of any important business words that had “imo” in them. Eskimo? I needed a good reason to go mess with IT.

I tried to search online for words that contained imo, but of course my searches got blocked. So I enlisted my friends on google chat to help me out (previous victory paying off!). I found this site that lets you search for a piece of a word: http://www.onelook.com/?w=*imo*&scwo=1&sswo=1&scwo=0&sswo=0 and my girlfriend was nice enough to load it on her computer and email me the results.

Unfortunately none of these words could be reasonably related to any of my work online. I guess I might have been able to argue that I needed to search for “Vietnam antimonopoly law”, but that’s a stretch, and antimonopoly isn’t really a word.

although this part of the list does make a cool word pyramid:

135. limous
136. limousin
137. limousine
138. limousines
139. longanimous
140. magnanimous
141. magnanimously
142. magnanimousness

check that out.

Next I tried to search for Vietnamese business news that contains the letters imo by clicking through archives and doing a page search in my browser. I found this article http://www.vnbusinessnews.com/2009/01/vietnamese-kimonos-win-japanese-hearts.html which I guess must be about kimonos that are being manufactured in Vietnam and sold in Japan. Still, not very important.

So I don’t have a good reason to go yell at IT today. They win this round. Bastards.

I wonder if I were at a real startup if I would have actually been working on my work during that time instead of trying to thwart my rivals in the next room.

I can’t blame it on the suit because today was dress down friday, woo! office life!

Every day I wake up at around 7:15am, get dressed, bike to work, and spend the first hour of my day reading the news.

I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and about a billion other miscellaneous business, economics, and entrepreneurship related publications, news aggregators, and blogs. I also have a growing list of English language Vietnam business news sources which I slowly work through over the course of the day. So probably about two hours of average total news reading daily.

I feel like studying the news is an important part of what I do. It allows me to know what’s going on domestically and internationally, to tie it all together in my mind, and to sound smart when I speak to clients or partners. I recently had a phone meeting with a brokerage VP from Morgan Stanley and he seemed a bit annoyed that I didn’t really know anything about the Morgan Stanley + Citigroup merger. Mostly though I feel that I have a pretty good overview of what’s getting discussed in the press these days.

Reading so much news is definitely distorting my perspective, but I can’t tell how.

I figure that I might have developed a hugely exaggerated view of the craziness of the current global economic and political situation, as I am constantly being bombarded by a magnified version of the worlds day to day freakouts. Or, I might have the exact opposite distortion; I might not really understand or appreciate the massive scale and importance of the changes occurring in the world right now because I am lost in the foam and froth of daily details.

Right now journalists are all grasping at understanding the potential direction, aftermath, solutions and ramifications of this current global financial-economic crisis/recession/apocalypse.

Despite really dedicating a huge amount of time and thought to figuring it all out for myself, I don’t have much of a clear idea of what’s actually going right now on or what exactly any of it means for the future.

Whatever happens though, everyone is going to claim that they saw it coming. Looking back on it, everybody says that they saw the tech/dot-com bubble coming, that it was obvious. I think at the time there were legitimate reasons to believe that tech really was the new economy, and the websites that staked their claim now would have huge ongoing advantage. Now people are starting to come out of the woodwork and claim that they saw this entire current mess coming. I doubt it. If you go back and read people’s economic predictions from a few years ago, most will probably have some argument about oil prices. Remember oil prices? Ha.

I don’t normally re-write about things that I’ve read elsewhere online, I feel that bloggers already waste far too much effort on that kind of churn. But I’m going to deviate from my rule this one time, as a kind of thought experiment.

I am going to attempt at sort out some of the major themes that I’m seeing in the news these days, and try to make some predictions about what they might mean for the future. If I’m actually right about anything, I too can look back and say “I saw it coming.” But what I expect is to look back in embarrassment and maybe some added appreciation of how unpredictable things are.

Davids interpretation of the news, and vague predictions of the future, April 2009:

There seems to be a major re-evaluation of the basic nature financial investment and risk going on. Stock prices have collapsed. Banks and huge companies are failing and getting rescued by the government. No one is investing. There was only one US IPO so far this year, and venture capital investment is down 71%. There is a global consensus that Wall Street finally went too far, fueling huge debates about new regulation and executive pay restriction.

The common wisdom used to be that the key to getting rich/financial independence/retirement in America was saving up your money and putting it in the stock market. Some stocks would do well, some would do less well, some years would be especially good, some would be not so good, but on average you could expect your money to grow about 10% annually as it had historically until about the year 2000. Even better was to buy a house, you could live in it, there were various tax benefits, and it was less abstract. This system of building wealth was implicitly promised to us by modern financial society.

This promise has been broken, and this system has failed those who relied on it. While there was always the recognition that investing involves risk, assets prices weren”t supposed to collapse like this.

I don’t believe that this happened because of any grand conspiracy or some epic level of greed in the financial industry. Everyone was playing the game according to what they thought the rules were. We all just overestimated how much asset prices were based on their underlying value, and underestimated how much they are based on peoples demand for things to invest in.

Of course we saw this in the 2001 tech bubble, and in various other historical examples of asset bubbles, all the way back to the often cited stupid Dutch tulip craze of 1600-whatever. But we don’t usually see the entire financial sector go pop. And this time the pop took the entire world economy down with it. Whoops.

We also failed to realize the extent to which our financial institutions were taking big, leveraged, bets on these assets. And how intertwined these positions were with everything else. Whoops.

So now we’re in this period of spiraling doom as the slowing down of some things fuel further slow downs in other things. Great.

Eventually though, barring further catastrophe, we’ll probably snap out of it.

That’s the big thing that everyone is trying to predict right now, how long this recession will last. Some say a long long time, some says it’s already wrapping up. I don’t think you can predict it. There are certainly still big problems to overcome: unemployment, unused capacity, toxic assets, and what have you. On the other hand there is still a world full of people that would like nothing more than to go back to making and buying stuff as usual.

Lately we’ve seen just how much economic activity relies on confidence, not just consumer confidence but also investor confidence and business confidence. People feel uncertain. How they’ll feel in six months or a year depends on the news, and the news by definition depends on random and unpredictable events. How long the gloom will last is anyone’s guess. Some percentage of predictions will be right regardless.

Whenever the economy really starts to recover, I expect that investors will want back in as they slowly regain their risk tolerance. I predict that we’ll probably see is a rush of people and cleverness back into Wall Street. New types of investment vehicles will get dreamed up, probably by new firms we haven’t heard of yet. They will have to work their way around the new regulations and figure out some clever ways to ensure investors that there is some tangible underlying value to their assets. There’s going to be a lot of money to be made by making people feel safe.

Another big theme I’m seeing dispersed through the news lately is a serious challenging of the standard beliefs of how monetary and fiscal policy are enough to stabilize the economy.

When studying economics I learned about how careful tweaking of government spending and interest rates supposedly help keep everything running smoothly.

During the last years, we’ve been hitting the monetary gas pedal as hard as we can by maintaining super low interest rates. Now we’re also injecting an incomprehensibly large fiscal stimulus to shock the economy back in to motion. This seems like the best thing to do.

Economic activity is facilitated by money, and it can be limited if there’s not enough money, or if the money is not moving fast enough. Economic also activity feeds on itself, so it can be boosted by an stimulus of cash or spending by the government. The reason we need this massive stimulus to increase the money supply so much right now is that the velocity of money is so low, everything is moving in slow motion. This should get things moving again.

Some time in the long run, I could see this hugely expanded monetary base, combined with the mounting pressures of the national debt, and growing grumpyness from countries about holding all their reserves in dollars, leading us into a situation of serious inflation.

Once the economy picks up, and the velocity of money along with it, we are going to have way too much active money flying around way too fast. If  foreign governments eventually start dumping our debt it’s going to further increase the supply of dollars looking for something to do.

The other edge of that sword is that it would become a lot harder for us to continue to pay for our debt. We won’t be as able to just roll it over by selling these endless dollar bonds to countries building their reserves, as we’ve been doing. So allowing some inflation, making it cheaper for us to pay back our debt, might start to look really tempting. And that could easily get spin of control.

I can’t really say I expect this to happen. It seems like the current fed and Obama administrations will be smart enough to properly control if things get overheated, and long sighted enough not to undermine the nations long-term creditworthiness.

But then again, as we’re seeing now, sometimes the economic systems we rely on have a funny way of all failing at the same time. Something weird could happen and we might not have a choice.

My more likely prediction is that we’ll just have to get used to watching the economy very closely from now on, and controlling for new kinds of potential problems as they start to emerge - even at the expense of economic growth - instead of just trusting that the market will automatically work everything out.

It seems like this Chinese and Russian talk about moving away from the dollar as a reserve currency might be nothing more than a bunch of jumping up and down and arm waving for attention. Just a political chance to say “haha, your economy broke.” There just really isn’t any other reasonable alternative way for them to hold their reserves. They need dollars to clear international transactions, other currencies have at least as many problems, and the talk about using IMF SDRs doesn’t make any sense as they are not a currency, just a claim on other currencies. SDRs don’t do anything that you can’t do for yourself in forex markets. There is also some discussion of creating a new non-dollar international reserve currency, and I don’t think that makes much sense either. You’d still have to convert it to something to use it.

What this does show is an official grumpiness from other countries about the dominance of the dollar, and opens the window for people to imagine a non-America-dominated global financial system.  But for now the structure of our global financial systems and institutions is pretty sticky and ingrained, and it really isn’t the time to be messing with them. Eventually though, these things will change. That’s always an easy bet to make.

Ok, that’s the world and the future as best as I can figure it out based on the news I’ve been reading.

I don’t think anyone else has any real idea exactly what the hell is going on either, and I have yet to read any thoughtful or convincing predictions about what to expect from it.

Of course, 5 or 10 years from now, once whatever the hell is going now has all played itself out, everybody is going to say that whatever came next was completely obvious to them all along. And I alone will be able to look back at this and prove that I never even had a clue.

It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them.

A couple of times during my informal networking style job hunt I had meetings with people who were in a position to potentially hire me.

I got these meetings by putting myself out there, networking with as many businessy people as I could, making a big deal of my interest in business, telling everyone that I was looking for a project or opportunity to get involved with, and then following up by emailing them my resume. So when someone took enough interest/pity to meet with me, it was completely removed from the normal hiring process in which you are interviewing for a clearly defined position.

I would go and chat about their business, and share my various insights on the industry, talk about related articles I had read, and talk about other businesses I knew about in Hanoi. Then I would talk about myself a bit, tell them about my background and what I was looking for in Hanoi. Eventually, a point would always come in the meeting where they would take a break from the bullshit and flat out ask me “So, if we hire you, what are you going to do for us?”

I never knew what exactly to say to this. I usually explained that I had a variety of business skills, particularly relating to my experience in startups and my economics education, and that I was excited about any opportunities to use them. This never seemed to satisfy the question, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I figured that it’s their business and they should know what to do with new employees.

But they didn’t need any new employees, they were just nice and open minded enough to spend some time listening to some kid talk about himself, and I should have had an answer ready for them.

While they might have appreciated that I had an interesting mix of abstract skills, they were trying to imagine hiring me to run around their office doing something useful, something concrete, not just sitting around basking in the aura of my own potential.

I realized that one of the big reasons the boss at my new job was excited to hire me was not my experience with startups or my education in finance, but that I thought to say that I could also work on revamping the company’s English language website.

I’m not a web designer, and I don’t aspire to be one. I feel like writing copy and working on websites is a necessary part of any small business or new project. I don’t really think my web design skills amount to much more than your average nerdy teenager. I made the websites for my last two businesses, the advanced materials company and the art licensing company, and they came out ok. But I can always tell when a company has a site that was just thrown together by an employee instead of hiring a real marketing and design firm. There’s more to a site than just a name on the top and some sections with info.

Still, I don’t think any of that mattered to my new boss. What mattered is that he saw the clear chain of events; I hire this kid, and BOOM - better website, oh and he’ll also run around and do all sorts of smart stuff for the consulting division.

In the future, when looking for ‘informal’ positions, I’m going to make it as easy as possible for people to hire me. Before I meet with a company I will think of a few potential projects that I could work on for them right away. And as a complimentary long term strategy, I’ll build more skills that are instantly applicable, not just the theoretical stuff.

My girlfriend is currently taking a grant writing class and I think that’s a great example of the perfect sort of skill for this type of situation. She doesn’t want to be a grant writer any more than I want to be a web designer. But if I ran a non-profit or NGO, and I met someone who said they had experience in grant writing, and could come in and get right to work on a grant that might bring in some new funding, I would be a lot more excited to hire them for whatever the full time position that they actually wanted was.

What I want to do is leverage all the abstract skills that I just spent 5 years of college learning. I want to direct the macro level strategy of meaningful long term projects and ventures. But if making the occasional website is my foot-in-door opportunity to do that, then I’ll do it.

So here is the expanded version of my original point: It’s important to tell people exactly what you can do for them, to think of practical projects you can start on right away, even if they aren’t the part of the job that you’re most excited about doing. So you better build up some useful skills, otherwise, good luck convincing someone to hire you just to do the abstract stuff.

I’ve been off the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been adjusting to working full time and finally finishing this business plan consulting project which has been eating up my free time.

So here’s an update:

After a lot of powerpointing we got our division approved. My two partners and I are now officially a strategic consulting team. We’re hiring four more people who will come in over the summer, and we have our work cut out for us.

We are stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Large Vietnamese firms and international firms operating in Vietnam already have have a bunch of consultants from the big law firms, funds, and international consulting agencies running around. Plus, most of their staff have a lot more experience than we do. Small and medium sized Vietnamese firms on the other hand often don’t really understand what consulting is and whatever it is they don’t have much interest in paying for it.

This leaves us with a very narrow band of potential clients: up-and-coming mid sized Vietnamese firms that are hip to the idea of consulting and aspire to be a bit more up to international standards, but don’t really have the resources to pay for fancy real consultants and are willing to give a chance to a couple of white kids in their early 20s.

This all begs the question of “what exactly do we do anyway?”, and we’re still in the process of answering that for ourselves. From our point of view it’s  basically anything we can get people to pay us for and actually do a good job on.

externally the answer is going to be something like:

“[Our division] works together with top management teams, boards, and investors to create the detailed analysis, long term strategies, and practical plans needed by firms to survive and to thrive in Vietnam. We provide external, objective advice offered from an independent perspective that successful firms rely on to help direct and validate their strategy.

Our international team brings the tools and best practices used by the world’s leading organizations to tackle the specific objectives of our clients. Then, by combining the resources of Thang Long Securities and Military Bank with our network of partners, we facilitate the implementation of these new plans, ensuring that they translate into real world results.”

What I wish we could just say is “Look, if your firm is having some sort of a problem that you’re not sure how to deal with, why not let us come in and take a crack at it? We’re relatively cheap, we’re smart, and we might have a different approach than you.”

Once we get good enough at making this argument we’ll have to deal with what happens when it actually works. It’s not that we’re useless, far from it, it’s just that most of our skills are very direct and analytical. We’re good at economics, which is to say that we’re good at running big sets of numbers through excel, pulling out some key ratios, running a a couple of regressions, and figuring out what causes what.

I’ve been doing the opposite kind of research lately. I’ve just been running around and meeting with everyone who will take the time to see me at funds, law firms, commercial organizations, and every company we have any sort of relationship with, and just having lunch with people and picking their brains about business in Vietnam.

What I’m figuring out about Vietnam is that solid, reliable data to analyze and to base your decisions on is very hard to come by. Because of this, and just because of the culture, a lot of decision making is very informal. Deals get made because of who knows who and on the whims of whoever owns the company

What I’m learning is that while in a place like Vietnam, because there aren’t as many qualified people, it’s more easy to jump right into doing something at a high level. The counterbalance to that is because there is so much informality it takes a really long time to actually figure out what’s going on and how to get things done.

All of the macroeconomic reports and estimates these days are guessing that Vietnam will snap out of its economic funk around the end of 2009, which should also be right about when we can expect to really get this consulting thing off the ground, and right about when I expect to really get a good sense of how to operate in this environment.

The end of 2009 is also about the very latest possible time that I plan to be leaving Vietnam.

Still, by that time I probably will have learned a lot about informal and intuitive information gathering and how to navigate through subtle social and political constructs to get stuff done as an outsider.

I figure that will be a valuable skill set when doing business back in the developed world where everyone else is just running the numbers.

Hopefully. Or maybe I’ll just get fat.

Woo!

Until then, here’s a sneak preview of Vietnam’s hottest new strategic consulting team:

People are often confused or offended when I use the word hippie.

Some people either think the term is derogatory, or they think that hippies were something that only existed in the 60s, and that you can’t be a hippie today any more than you can be a flapper. These people haven’t spent enough time on the west coast lately.

Most of my friends in California are, as you can see, obviously hippies and I genuinely consider myself to be a hippie as well. I’ve even got some hippie buddies here in Hanoi, they do drum circles in Lenin park on Sundays.

I really can’t think of any other term to use to describe the ongoing social/cultural movement that I’ve been living in for most of my life. I don’t even like to call it a movement because it’s really not going anywhere, it’s just how a lot of people think and live. It’s more of a lifestyle philosophy.

The parts of hippie culture that resonate most with me are: the focus on a happy and healthy lifestyle, living within your means and enjoying what you have, eating well, being social, relaxing and taking it easy, being experimental and open to new ideas and cultures, being politically progressive and believing in peace and the environment, traveling, helping people, enjoying food, music, and art, but not necessarily by the same rules as the critics and experts. In short, living well.

On a Friday night, when my more mainstream friends are standing in line to see some stupid $9 movie, my hippie friends are having bonfires and potlucks, playing music and dancing, jumping in the surf at the beach or finding hot springs (or at least sneaking in to the movie through the back door).

And while a lot of people seem to have a natural tendency to forming fixed and closed off social groups,  most of the hippies I know are a lot more open minded and quick to make new friends and invite them along for the fun.

I guess if someone held a knife to my throat and demanded that I describe hippies without saying the word “hippie” I would say progressive, alternative, bohemians.

There are also some parts of hippie culture that drive me completely nuts: embarrassing and counterproductive protests, blind allegiance to all things alternative, chard. But what especially gets me is the prevalence of, and often militant belief in, poorly thought through political, metaphysical, and scientific theories. (How can someone concurrently believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and an afterlife!?)

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So what does this have to do with business? Well, they say the key to marketing is to find your niche. And many companies have targeted the hippie niche, as many hippies have a lot of money.

People often think that hippies having a lot of money is hypocritical, and to some extent it is, but it also makes perfect sense: It’s a lot easier to reject the traditional goals of career success and material wealth when you’ve grown up around a lot of wealth and you realize that big houses and fancy cars don’t really add much to the day to day quality of your life.

It also really helps if your parents pay for you to go to college. College today is hardly a full time endeavor, and my hippie ways were slowly built up over years of idle afternoons and long summer vacations. It’s hard to listen to someone explain the wonders of kombucha when you have to be at work in 15min.

In theory, hippies are supposed to reject consumerism. But some companies have created brands that really work for hippies. Two examples (out of many) are Moleskine and Nalgene.

Moleskine makes notebooks. Unlike other manufacturers they don’t sell their notebooks in the school supply isle of supermarkets and office stuff stores. They sell their product in book stores and airports, and they claim on the packaging that their notebooks are the same type as some used by Hemingway and Picasso.

Nalgene makes water bottles, another deceptively simple product. Their water bottles are very strong and were originally popular with climbers that supposedly have a problem with dropping and breaking their water bottles while climbing.

These companies have a lot of similarities. They make very high quality products. They use very subtle branding, but are definitely distinct enough to get you noticed by other fans of the brand. Most importantly though these products imply a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle where you travel around the world sketching and writing, and you spend so much of your time dangling from cliffs that dropping and shattering your water bottle is a serious concern. Normal notebooks or water bottles obviously wouldn’t stand a chance.

People love these brands. Fans have uploaded 3,169 photos of their Nalgenes and 74,755 photos of their Moleskines to flikr. There are even 49 photos that have both Moleskines and Nalgenes tagged in them, including a couple of people that decided to draw pictures of their Nalgenes in their Moleskines. (idiots)

Other hippie brands include: Dr. Bronner’s soap, Braggs Amino Acid condiment, Rainbow Sandals, and of course, Apple.

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For each of these successful brands there are a million little companies trying to catch the next wave. Many are founded by hippies that have followed their dreams and opened their own business creating something that was important to them, but a lot of them also tend to be total scams. The scams often take advantage of the hippie enthusiasm for silly pseudo-science.

So about a year ago I was hanging out with some of my hippie friends up in Homer, Alaska and I noticed a very silly bottle of water:

Since then I’ve made it a point to check out the bottled water whenever I pop into a local health food store or co-op.

“Real Water” vs. “Earth Water”…  That’s a tough choice. I guess someone figured out that hippies are especially finicky about their water.

I soon realized that the crazy bottled water market was turning into a serious arms race:

Here are some quotes from my favorites

“H20 Vortex, Activated Water: spin cycle process with ULTRA OXYGEN”

“Borba skin balance water firming contains a revolutionary cultivated bio-vitamin complex along with a scientifically designed blend of nutrients intended to promote the skin’s natural support system, helping to nourish and tone the skin. Borba skin balance water is formulated to work with your body’s chemistry to promote healthy skin. This on-the-go, skin care-infused beverage combines simplicity and nutrition with the goodness of water. It’s water with benefits”

“HiOsilver Oxygen Water: Spring Water TurbOcharged with PURE OXYGEN (TM), 6 times the oxygen (50 ppm) of ordinary water, Glass bottle retains oxygen, Made with spring water, pH 8.4, naturally alkaline, For fresh breath, No sodium”

“New studies at a leading American and European Medical University have found that there is a water that not only fully hydrates, but may also be a pure antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals in your body. That water is Penta. - Penta water is first cleaned using a state of the art purification system that removes all impurities. No other bottled water is as pure! The water then goes through the patented penta process that spins the water at high speed and pressure for 10 hours. This unique process energizes the water to be a pure antioxidant that neutralizes free radicals in your body. And, unlike many antioxidant supplements and beverages that use synthetic additives, Penta has no additives so it is fully absorbed by your body maximizing its antioxidant effects.”

“e-water: A revolution in refreshment! Full Spectrum Electrolytes with fulvic acid.Stimulates metabolism, Increases absorption of key electrolytes, scavenges heavy metals/free radicals, increases enzymatic activity”

“AQUAVYBE’S pure, smooth taste comes from a unique formula that combines natural, bio-energetic minerals from Original Himalayan Crystal Salt (TM), with quantum science, creating super-hydrating, energizing water, with naturally occurring electrolytes.”

“E2 - Electron Energized (TM) water is the most advanced water available today. Through a proprietary process, E2 water is stably enhanced in two very important ways. First it is alkalized and second it is negatively ionized. Most bottled water is acidic which according to many nutritionists is unhealthy. E2 water helps the body become more alkalized  for improved health. Second, Nearly all water is positively ionized because the water molecules have been stripped of valuable electrons. This causes the water molecules to share electrons and clump together. These clumped molecules are not easily absorbed on a cellular level. With E2, the water molecules are negatively ionized. These negatively ionized water molecules contain free electrons and unclump so that they can be absorbed quickly on a cellular level. As an added benefit, the free electrons act as an anti-oxidant to neutralize free radicals. So to truly hydrate on a cellular level, use E2 - Electron Energized (TM) water. You will taste and feel the difference! Oxidation Reduction Potential (OPR) of -50 Guaranteed!”

One water bottle brand is the clear winner of the bullshit war.

AquaHydrate: The Ultimate Hydrating Fluid! Aquahydrate is the purest, health promoting water available anywhere. Some waters are purified, some are alkaline, some have organic trace minerals, some are micro-structured, and some have proper electrolyte balance - AQUAHYDRATE has it all!”

This is like when a little kid, after being asked what he would wish for if a genie appeared, thinks to say “I wish for infinite wishes.”.

I wish for infinite water awesomeness!

Genius.

In defense of my hippie side and hippie friends, I’ve never actually seen anyone buy any of this silly water. Well, except for the Egyptian geometry one. But come on, Egyptian geometry? That’s a pretty cool thing to put in your water.

update: yes I know that people are now boycotting Nalgene in favor of Klean Kanteen on the basis that Nalgenes use toxic plastics and make restraints for animal testing. This is just the next step in a long line of trendy water holders. I remember the bygone eras of Bota Bags and Camelbaks. Like I said, hippies are finicky about their water.

Vietnam completely shuts down for the week of lunar New Year (we usually call it Chinese new year, the Vietnamese call it “Tet”). Everyone gets the week off to go visit their families. All shops close, all commerce stops, the streets are empty. So a friend and I went on a quick trip over to Thailand.

At some point we visited a small city called Chanthaburi in Eastern Thailand near the Cambodian Border. The city is famous for gem trading. The streets are lined with gem shops and are normally filled people haggling and looking through magnifying glasses, except during lunar New Year. Here again, most stuff was closed. Which suited me fine, I was just happy to be away from the noise and chaos of Hanoi.

So what was everybody in Chanthaburi doing instead of trading gems? They were at the local festival, sticking gold stickers on monk statues and watching matches of my new favorite obscure Thai sport: Sepak Takraw.

The game  is basically volleyball, except you can only use your feet, and half the time you’re doing crazy back flips.

So far the story all makes sense right?

Well, except for one thing. All their jerseys have big AIG logos on the front.

AIG, or the American International Group, is a huge American corporate insurance company that also deals in financial services, telecommunications, ports, and aircraft leasing. They’ve been in the news a lot in the last few years over a big fraud scandal in 2005, and as one of the major financial bailouts last summer.

It’s not uncommon to see international brands in developing countries. Coca Cola and Pepsi have managed to get their logo absolutely everywhere. It seems like they must do this by subsidizing or fully sponsoring the manufacture of signs for restaurants and shops, and including free signs and placards with their deliveries. This would be pretty easy for them as Coca Cola and Pepsi have vast networks local bottling and distributing companies that they work with.

And it makes sense that Coca Cola and Pepsi want to build an international brand, especially in emerging markets.

But did a bunch of local Sepak Takraw players in an obscure Thai city end up with AIG logos on their custom team jerseys? I can only imagine two possible explanations:

One explanation is that AIG actually had such a large scale and long term global strategy that they thought it was important to really really get their brand out there into every corner of the earth. I doubt anybody at this local Thai lunar New Year festival had any business purchasing insurance or renting jumbo jets from giant American corporations.

The other explanation is that maybe AIG has been sponsoring major sports teams internationally, as many big global corporations do, and that the local business that prints up the jerseys for the Sepak Takraw teams figured they wouldn’t look legit unless they had some corporate logo action going on – in which case AIG is getting free advertising.

I wish I had thought to ask them about it. Either way it’s pretty silly.

Followup1:  Googling “Sepak Takraw AIG” came up with a bunch of references to AIG: the Asian Indoor Games, which is the big annual tournament for Sepak Takraw. I guess that this suggests a variation on the second theory: the AIG logo was borrowed because their stupid three letter acronym (TLA) has a separate special meaning in this context. Ha!

Followup2: Upon re-reading my post I realize it sounds somewhat condescending and ethnocentric: “These naïve villagers couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of this American brand, how quaint, har har har!”. I should explain that the copying and misuse of brands  is everywhere here and you can’t help but wonder about the stories behind it sometimes. Yesterday I got a ride from someone who’s motorbike seat said Dolce and Gabana all over it. Thailand is a major business center and I’m sure lots of people know what AIG is, but there’s still something a little off about the AIG brand showing up on sepak takraw jerseys.

So it worked.

I finally got a job.

I am the new co-director of a currently non-existent strategic consulting division at a major Vietnamese finance firm. I have a desk, my own phone extension, a new bank account with Military Bank, an extended work visa, and one week to finish a presentation of my initial financial and strategic analysis of 3 publicly traded Vietnamese companies and a plan for how to build this new department.

I got the position thanks to the help of two friends I have here (in addition to taking the time to send the company my resume, put on my suit, and come in to meet the boss). So I got it through networking, although not really the kind I was writing about. Rather it seems to have come about totally independently of most of this running around I’ve been doing. More so just the normal kind of networking where you naturally hang out with people similar to you.

It seems like luck. I happened to meet two American guys my age, with similar tastes, preferences, and tendency towards furious nerdy argument, that live about two blocks from me,  and were just put in charge of hiring some fresh meat for special projects at their finance firm. But I guess getting lucky sooner or later was the plan all along.

So now the three of us are building a plan to create a division that has to overcome a lot of challenges. First and foremost it would have to be able to offer genuine, insightful, useful, and practical advice to Vietnamese corporations. This means that we will have to have better insight into the markets, competitive dynamics, competencies, and potential for these firms than the people running them do. Then the real hard part is going to be convincing the firms to pay us to do it.

It would also have to be accepted within the complexities of interdepartmental firm politics; not taking business or power away from anyone else.

Our only tools are PowerPoint, Google, a Bloomberg terminal, our education, and our wits.

We present our analysis and our plan on Monday. If we succeed the new department we create will be our jobs. We’re bargaining to get our own office space upstairs and we might even bring in our own interns.

For me it’s really the perfect job. It will be my duty to spend all day thinking really hard about strategies I think businesses should peruse, and then to design and present them. It’s like making a cat the chief officer of finding sunny places to nap.

There’s a sad irony to all of this though. This should be triumphant success of my experiment in entrepreneurial travel which I’ve chronicled in this blog.  All this time I’ve been worrying about my suit, my business cards, my resume, and my contacts, running around, trying to find an opportunity like this. Finally I do, and after just two days of working (8 to 6 today) I feel as though everything is already changing.

I feel like my weekdays, amounting to five sevenths of my life, will simply disappear to another universe; a surreal looping indoor universe of wake, commute, work, food, sleep, repeat, occasionally interrupted by menial errands.

I worry that I won’t have the free time or extra energy to devote to my writing, my photography, or my health. I’m really scared that I might not be able to put in all the time I have been into keeping up my relationships with my family, my friends, and my girlfriend. Maybe those were all just the temporary luxuries of unemployment.

I feel like such a baby. Wah wah, I have a job. I can’t keep sleeping until noon, exploring temples all day, and playing on my laptop all night like I have been for months. Poor me. On the one hand I got exactly what I wanted. On the other I feel like I’ve fallen right into the life that I came out here to escape. (the third hand is holding a duck)

I guess it’s all relative. I’m incredibly lucky and thankful to have the opportunities that I’ve had, and it’s certainly not an appropriate time to complain about having a job, especially in finance. And maybe the simple sadness of growing older is seeing your life turn from an imagined spectrum of possibilities to one single path.

I could write more about it but I have to go to sleep. I’m tired and I have work in the morning.

I have a friend who has always been excellent at expressing complex ideas clearly. He has a background in business and politics, loves to argue about history and philosophy, and at the time I knew him he was writing the dissertation for his doctorate in ethnomusicology. A really out there guy, but smart as hell.

When he moved away to Finland (where else?) I inherited from him a book about writing which he highly recommended. The book is called Style: towards clarity and grace, written by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb.

I’ve been carrying it around since then, for about 2 years, meaning to read it.

I finally started and it’s fantastic.

The authors explain their theory on how we experience writing and what sorts of problems cause writing to seem awkward, confusing, and unclear (or as they really like to say, turgid).

They show many subtly different ways of writing similar things and explain why some express the idea more clearly than others. They also suggest different methods for improving your writing.

A funny part of the book is in the introduction where the authors quote many previous authors that have also written about clarity. Ironically, these quotes aren’t clear at all. This shows the real difficulty in actually writing clearly, even when you’re really trying.

“The utterance of a gentleman ought to be deliberate and clear, without being measured… Simplicity should be the firm aim, after one is removed from vulgarity, and let the finer shades of accomplishment be acquired as they can be attained. In no case, however, can one who aims at turgid language, exaggerated sentiments, or pedantic utterances, lay claim to be either a man or a woman of the world. “ – James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838

Orwell couldn’t pull it off either:

“The keynote [of such a style] is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination instead of be examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the –ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un-formation.” – George Orwell from his essay “Politics and the English Language”

Even the authors of this book get caught in some serious sillyness:

“Finally, some of us write badly not because we intend to or because we never learned how, but because occasionally we seem to experience transient episodes of stylistic aphasia.”

What?

For me it was watching Obama’s inauguration speech that really solidified my current excitement about the power of clear communication. He uses all the ideas presented in this book very naturally in his speeches.

The authors start with simple sentence level issues such as expressing actions and conditions in specific verbs, adverbs or adjectives. So instead of saying “The intention of the committee is the improvement of morale.”, it would be clearer to write “The committee intends to improve morale.”. Rather than making strong rules against things like passives and nominalizations, they explain why these structures exist and when they are appropriate to use.

The book then moves on to worrying about where ideas appear within a sentence and how this placement links sentences together. The authors  continue to expand the scope of their concepts until they are discussing where in paragraphs to introduce new ideas and how to build on them, and finally how to structure whole arguments and papers.

The focus is mostly on the writing of complex or technical prose.  So while I started reading the book with the hope that it would help me in writing this blog, I find it’s actually helping much more in my ongoing work revising the business plan for the health communications company that I’m consulting for.

Here is an example sentence from the business plan I’m editing:

“In the near future (within the next 2-3 years), CCRD will continue to mainly source for contracts from programs managed by the GOV and international donors the scope and clienteles, and thus, the market share of CCRD will be expanded as a result of capacity building and increased experiences which will contribute to CCRD’s improved reputation and recognition as an unique health/development strategic communication expertise;  And its gradually entry into new markets, i.e.:”  [followed by a list of markets]

This is my best attempt at fixing it.

“CCRD’s success in expanding capacity and increasing experience have improved its reputation as a dependable source for health and development communication expertise in Vietnam. Because of this CCRD has seen an increase in both its market share, and the scope of its clients.

In the near future (the next 2-3 years), CCRD will continue to mainly source contracts from programs managed by the GoV and international donors, while also beginning to gradually expand into new markets, including: “

The real hard part is going to be when I have to boil 50 pages of that into a clear, convincing, and professional 8 page executive summary.