I was talking to my mom the other day about what I’m doing out here, and she thought of a really clever, if not particularly flattering way of describing it. In her words I’m essentially a “Business-Groupie”. Thanks mom.

Actually this is pretty accurate. Basically what I’ve been doing so far is going to businessy events and butting in, hoping to absorb some of the success of those around me through pure osmosis.

I think a nicer analogy would be looking for love. A good strategy when you’re single (analogy: unemployed) is simply to go out to places where you think you might find single people of the gender you desire (business opportunities) and basically make a nuisance of yourself until you find someone you’re compatible with. Once that happens, all the people you didn’t really click with (companies that never emailed you back) don’t really matter any more.

Until then I’m reminded of a Smiths lyric:

“There’s a club, if you’d like to go, you could meet somebody who really loves you. So you go, and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry, and you want to die.

You shut your mouth. How can you say, I go about things the wrong way? I am Human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.”

Or in my case: I am human and I need a job.

Please indulge me while my analogy machine plops out another stinker: This is also a lot like the cliche of a pretty girl from the country going to Hollywood and hoping to be “discovered” and become a famous actress.

Until you get discovered, you need a day job. Something easy you can do in the off hours of being discovered so you don’t run out of money. I realize now that I too need a day job, or at least an internship.

Also, you have to think about what you’ll do here in the off chance that you don’t get discovered. In Hollywood I guess (to continue the cliche) that would be going into porn. I think the local equivalent might be teaching English. It’s easy, it pays well, and you’re basically just selling yourself. No great personal achievement. Still, always an option.

Either way, until what I’m trying to do works out, I’m essentially just on the worlds lamest vacation. While the other tourists spend their time biking through the mountains, kayaking across picturesque bays, touring ancient ruins, and getting really drunk… I go to business conferences and hand out my card to people at coffee shops. Woo!

Earlier this week I attended something called SME week. The name is a bit misleading, I trekked all the way across the city on Monday to the national convention center only to find a bunch of people setting up booths. It was actually a single tuesday of talks regarding the development of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Vietnam.

I sat through 11 hours of lectures and presentations from various state officials, bank executives, and foreign research teams regarding what Vietnam needs to do to improve the business environment for SMEs. The gist of the talks is that small businesses have been largely ignored so far in economic development efforts despite accounting for a large percentage of total businesses, employment, and GDP. What they really need is better access to capital, a more organized relationship with supporting and complementary industries, and a streamlined universal online registration process to replace the absurdly complex and inconsistent bureaucracy they have to deal with now.

One particularly Vietnamese moment was one when one speaker made the an analogy between business and family. He explained that in Vietnam the government is like the parents, big businesses are the older brothers, and small businesses are the younger siblings. The younger siblings are naive and vunreble, but the parents are busy and somewhat out of touch, so they need to ask to the older brothers to take care of their younger siblings and help them out. In a culture where family roles are very important this was a fantastic analogy, and one that would probably just bewilder people in the US.

It was interesting to hear how officially, through various decrees and memorandums, the Vietnamese government is creating a business utopia. Then, speaking privately to others at the conference to learn how all this big talk is very slow to trickle it’s way down through the bureaucracy. For example, there are these new websites that describe all the steps necessary to go through the various permitting and registration of creating a new venture. Apparently though, once you show up at the government office everything is completely different. There are also laws that dictate the maximum prices of various registration and services like notarization, but in reality these laws are ignored and prices tend to be invented on the spot with a heavy premium charged for timeliness.

Still, it’s progress that the government at least knows exactly what it should be doing. Eventually,  the older generation which still regards business as an evil that needs constant government control will retire. In it’s place will be a younger generation of leaders that has whipped been up into a pro-business frenzy. When that happens all of these referendums, memorandums, and decrees will probably just snap right into place.

Some of the highlights for me were:

Having a pair of super high tech wireless headphones that broadcasted real time English translations of what everybody was saying. I really didn’t want to give them back at the end, but I guess they wouldn’t exactly have worked outside of the conference.

The organizers, in an attempt to magnify the sense of busy business, decided to have two other confrences in the building simultaneously. One of which was a water technology conference in which my friend with the arsenic filtration company was running a booth. So I got to skip out and hang out with him for a while. The other was a security equipment conference in which every booth was covered in video survaliance cameras and complex locks, walking through it was very weird.

Free food was provided. The first such session of which was a modest free cup of tea and some watermelon. Because it was still early in the morning all the confrence attendees, including many students from local universities, were still there. The result was total and complete anarchy as people trampled and pushed each other to get their free tea and watermelon. By the end of the 20 min break the floor was covered in spilled tea and crushed watermelon. Another very Vietnamese experience. I learned my lesson and snuck out a few min early to get first crack at the lunch. The funny thing about the lunch was how the few westerners in attendce made a point to really enjoy the Vietnamese food, while the Vietnamese loaded up on plates of ham and white bread. Go figure.

By the time the time the buffet dinner was put out almost nobody was still around, so I really got to indulge:

Last but not least, the powerpoint slide from hell:

One thing about Vietnam that took me a while to realize is how excellently dressed everybody is. Not in the Italian or French way of being particularly fashionable or interesting. Just that even the motobike drivers are always wearing perfectly clean, non-wrinkled dress pants, dress shoes, and a collared shirt. Almost everybody here is always dressed up. Besides kids and construction workers the only people that you tend to see dressed sloppily are the backpackers in their cargo shorts and tiger beer T-shirts.

So if I want anybody to take me seriously in this country I’m going to have to dress nicely. Two problems. One, I don’t really have any nice clothing with me. That’s easily taken care of as there is clothing for sale everywhere here. Two, and this one is the real problem, I don’t really have any idea how to dress up. I’ve never really had a job that’s required it. I don’t even know how to properly tie my own tie. The few times I’ve had to back at home I’ve quickly discovered that almost nobody else my age does either.

So I’ve decided to make a quest of it. First I went online and started reading all about suits, shirts, ties and shoes. First I found a couple of articles that reinforced what I was doing, like this one http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119992386358079373.html?mod=blog which basically says that young people in business today think it’s ok to dress like shit and the older guard hates them for it.

After reading a bit I decided to have a suit tailored. A lot of asking around led me to one tailor in particular that came highly recommended. I spent a day trying to find her place, it was gone. I went back online, emailed my friend, got her phone number, called her up. It turns out she is booked out and busy until mid December. I decided that I’ll just buy two suits, one lighter weight (cheaper) one to hold me over, and then a nice dark heavy one later. Earlier this week I went to the first tailor. I just got a call from the other one that she’s available so I figured what the hell, might as well go to her now too.

This is risky though, for example: As a guy, going to get my haircut is always really quite stressful. They always put a lot of pressure on you to know what kind of a haircut you want, which I never do. Then how long you want your sideburns, if you want the back squared off or rounded off, if you want the edges blended or tapered or layered or set on fucking fire.  Then they make you feel like the only person in the entire world who doesn’t want ‘product’ in their hair.  Luckily there’s that moment when you return to the real world remember that it’s ok not to wear hair gel.

I figure going to the tailor is a more hardcore version of getting a haircut. So I’ve made damn sure I know what kind of cuffs and lapels and buttons and stitches and fabrics and cuts I want. Because if I didn’t know, I doubt my Vietnamese tailor is going to know how to perfectly give me that ‘hip young professional California start-up casual aspiring venture capitalist’ look either.  So I went online, found a bunch of blogs on men’s fashion, and started collecting pictures of suits and pieces of suits and people in suits that I liked. Here are some highlights:

I’ll post an update when I’ve gotten my suits and we’ll see how they work out.

Some good links on suit theory:

- http://offthecuffdc.blogspot.com/2008/10/capital-investments-or-dressing-for.html

- http://www.askmen.com/fashion/keywords/mens-suit.html

I was at an event the other night and something very interesting happened. Actually, it wasn’t very interesting at the time, but upon further reflection I’ve learned a lot from it.

It was an Italian Food Festival and I was just hanging out, being social, and destroying small mountains of food. I ended up these meeting two married expat couples, one Lithuanian and one Danish, each in their late 20s. I spent the rest of the night hanging out with the guys while their wives chatted.

The Lithuanian guy was in Hanoi running a factory. His company made a special kind of water filter that filtered arsenic, which is apparently a natural problem with the ground water in Vietnam. The company was commercializing a technology developed together by a Vietnamese university and a Japanese University where he had studied. In many ways this company was very similar, although much farther along, to the materials company I helped found and was working with in California. We casually spoke for a long time about the market for water filtration, the different kinds of capital that can fund this kind of a company, and the difficulties of doing business in a place like Vietnam. We also just spoke of other trivial nonsense like which swimming pool was the best in Hanoi and discussed trading some of our downloads with each other.

The Danish guy was working for a company that was equally interesting to me. He was helping to develop file transfer protocols for a company here in hanoi that remotely edits real estate photography. It was his job to basically facilitate the transfer of gigabytes worth of digital images from all over the world to his company and then back. He was actually tackling the same issues that I had to deal with, although on a smaller scale, in my art licensing company when artists transferred very large scans and raw digital images to us. Again, we spoke about his business, and other miscellaneous mutual interests.

Then I noticed someone I recognized. She noticed me too and came over to say hello. She was a very pretty french girl my age working for some sort of international organization whom I had sat next to at the American Chamber of Commerce Investment Outlook lecture event thing the previous week.

She laughingly asked how my business was going, and I admitted that nothing has really developed and I’m still just getting used to being in Hanoi. She then introduced me to a french guy she was hanging out with. I said something awkward about how I like french people, and got an awkward look in response. Then he asked who I was working for here in Hanoi. The girl answered for me: “nobody”. They both kind of chuckled at this and wandered off.

God I was embarrassed. Then I realized that I was actually wearing the identical outfit that had made me feel so out of place at the event and felt even worse. The evening was sort of winding down so I excused myself to my new friends and headed back to my hotel to sulk.

Only now that I’ve had a few days to think about it have I realized how great I was actually doing. I had, without any great effort on my part, struck up the beginnings of a friendship with two people who both worked for the exact sorts of companies I was interested in. I had done it just by being myself and speaking only form my true knowledge and experience in a comfortable social setting. The Lithuanian guy had even invited me to come see his factory. Unfortunately I didn’t think to get the email of the Danish guy.

So what’s the lesson? When you set out to do something and fail it’s dramatic, like a dead cat falling out of the sky and straight into your tomato soup and splashing it all over your white shirt. Doing something successfully though is usually pretty casual, unless your an olympic pole vaulter or something, because it just tends to work out the way you imagined it would.

My first two travel business experiences out here have somewhat unspectacular. On Monday I went to an Investment Outlook for 2009 Lecture given by a Vietnamese government official and hosted in a fancy hotel by the American Chamber of Commerce. The gist of the talk was that because of the economic downturn it was predicted that there was going to be a lot less foreign direct investment coming into the country as in the previous years. The guests were various people working in major corporations in Hanoi, some investors, attorneys, and a journalist for NPR.

Mostly the event was just an excuse for people to put on their suit, trade business cards, and have a fancy lunch. I failed on all three accounts. I showed up in jeans and a collared shirt, only had 3 of my new business cards in my wallet, and had already eaten a big meal before I came. As if that wasn’t bad enough my conversations with people were pretty awkward and I spilled some food on myself after shooing away the hostess that tried to put my napkin on my lap for me. Sigh. Luckily I think everybody else was too distracted by their economic apocalypse to notice. Next time I’ll come better prepared.

I also had some coffee (Vietnamese coffee is fantastic by the way) with another expat, the first I’ve met from the states. He wants my help in lining up some local manufacturing for his friends companies. More updates to come on that if it ends up going anywhere.

Small run manufacturing would be a fun project to do while traveling through Southeast Asia. It’s very easy in a place like this to bring a design for a product to a manufacturer like a factory, tailor, or woodworker and have an initial run of under 100 produced. I’m not talking about making your own solar powered laptop or anything requiring serious engineering. Let’s say you had an idea for a dress or a backpack. You could come over here with some plans/diagrams/schematics, find the local district of people who make similar stuff, and have a few made. After a bit of back and forth, and maybe spending a few hundred dollars, you would probably end up with something pretty similar to what you imagined. Then if you had any sort of connections with retailers or distributors you could send them a few samples to see if they wanted to place an order. You could even invent your own brand for the project.

In reality the life cycle of new retail products is a lot more complex and involves going to a lot of trade shows. Perhaps though, if you could target the right niche, you could bypass all of that.

For example California is filled with hemp stores selling stuff made of hemp. I bet if you designed a sweet little messenger style laptop bag, maybe with a cool lock on the top, had it made out of hemp, and put a panda bear or something on the side of it you’d be in business. Or what if you made people elaborate custom Halloween costumes. All you would need is their measurements and pictures of what they wanted to look like. I would want an old western style suit like the one Daniel Day Lewis wore in There Will be Blood. Also, because you’re actually on the ground here you can ensure that your stuff isn’t being made in sweatshops.

The temptation for me personally is to go through all of my pictures from burning man and other hippie festivals to look for really cool custom clothing that people made and try to get some similar stuff whipped up. Of course this is a huge ethical conflict; these people very thoughtfully chose to express themselves by wearing stuff that wasn’t pumped out of a factory in Asia. It’s seems wrong to steal their ideas and do something in the exact opposite spirit as what they intended. But cool hippie clothes made of colorful Vietnamese silk sold on San Francisco would easily make somebody a lot of money.

The ethical middle ground would probably be to approach people, tell them about your idea, and ask them to make a few designs for you. Or you could just use the uncreative cop-out of giving 10% of the money you make to a charity for blind buddhist orphans.

Another interesting project would be to bring western things to new markets. I went bowling the other day here in Hanoi. I thought I was in for a wild experience, bowling in Vietnam, crazy. I was wrong. It was a perfectly normal American style bowling alley, complete with those stupid animations when you make a strike or a gutter ball. It was half full of a few groups of Vietnamese kids, a couple of older guys that you could tell hung out there a lot, and a few Europeans. All the bowling equipment was American, they charged about $2 a game, they severed beer and soft drinks, and they even had a little arcade with videogames and air hockey on the side.

What struck me about this is how funny it is that some American bowling equipment company one day randomly getting a sale from Vietnam. My guess is that a Vietnamese entrepreneur traveled somewhere, saw a bowling alley, and figured he would build one back in Hanoi. And why not? They have ipods in the stores here for way more than they would be in the US. Someone is probably just ordering them retail and reselling them at a markup. It makes you wonder about all the other things that there might be a market for here. I’m tempted to tell my friend Bryan to come here and setup a paintball park. Somehow though I can imagine that being politically awkward.

I realized that there is a key assumption implicit in my whole entrepreneurial travel theory that I haven’t explored yet. Not only does it have to be possible to travel in a way that allows you to work. It also has to be true that you can show up somewhere and hope to join a company out of the blue.

I have met several other recent graduates working in Hanoi in international organizations (rather than just as English teachers). So far though, all of them went through a rigorous application and selection process to end up in some sort of one to two year special program. They didn’t just sort of show up and ask around. (Which is basically what I’m doing)

As I see it there are essentially two ways to get entry level jobs. One way is you have develop some sort of particular and instantly applicable skill that you can prove you have, such as studying accounting and passing the CPA exam. Then if a company decides they need an accountant, and you qualify as an accountant, and you can go straight in and get to work.

The alternative, which I guess is the path that most people follow, is to send out your resume, put on a tie, and hope that through an eventual combination of effort and luck some company decides that they need another person around and it might as well be you. Then they actually take the time to teach you to do something useful. A lot of what you do will probably be proprietary to that company, but enough will probably be general enough in the industry that you can get your next job just by showing that you’ve worked in the field for some years already.

The sticky issue is that there are tons of people trying to go that second route. So many that most big companies, in an effort to be fair and to choose the best applicants, have some sort of complex application and selection process already in place. It’s rather silly to just fire off an email to a company saying who you are and asking if they have any openings. Part of the problem is there isn’t really any one in particular who it’s appropriate to send it to.

It’s probably no good to quantitatively compare the two methods. My guess is that it’s a question of standard deviation. Anyone with enough math and patience to study accounting can pass the CPA exam and land a good job. The success of just putting yourself out there is going to depend a lot on your personality, your ability to impress, the kind of social circles you float around in, and simply luck. A friend of mine got offered a job on the spot after chatting with an IBM executive at a party.

Maybe the key to this is that entrepreneurial travel isn’t about finding a ‘job’ in the traditional sense. It’s more about consulting or helping to put deals together or working in a much more temporary capacity. Of course that type of work goes back to the first of having some sort of a universal skill you can apply anywhere you go. My idea of not really being able to do anything in particular, and hoping to get paid for short periods of specialized work might simply not add up. We’ll see.

Disclaimer: This might just be a convoluted and insane self justification for not getting a real job.

My goal is simple. I want to see if it’s possible to travel in a new way.

I plan to take my very Californian mishmash of business and computer skills and see if I can use them to work while traveling around the world. This blog will be a record of my attempt. Because if I can do it, there’s about 10,000 coffee shops in San Fransisco, New York, Seattle, and Boston overflowing with people that can do it too.

So here’s the big Picture:

Normally when you travel, you take a few weeks off, buy a lonely planet guidebook, and head somewhere with a buddy to eat exotic food, drink a lot of beer with other travelers, and take pictures of yourself standing in front of famous old stuff. Then you come home, pick up your mail, water your plants, give your friends some trinkets, make sit through your slideshow of the photos of you standing in front of famous old stuff, and go back to your normal life.

Of course, there are options for deeper and more long term sorts of experiences. You can arrange to stay with a local family, study abroad, volunteer, or work. Those are all great things to do. Eventually though you reach a point when you want to start building something resembling a career. Unless your life dream is to be a bartender the kind of work most people do while traveling isn’t really worth putting on your resume.

Meanwhile….

In the last 15 years the costal cities of the US have been infested with coffee shops overflowing with young hipsters putting together spotless business plans for the next facebook/iphone/web3.0 killer app. Everyone seems to have a website, a blog, a following on twitter, a brand new laptop, a fancy camera, a clever business card, and a pithy elevator pitch for whatever their current project is. An army of webdesigners, bloggers, photographers, and business students all plugged into the cutting edge of consumer culture and waiting for their chance to present their dream to some poor venture capitalist that’s already heard 15 other versions of the same idea. They’ll be lucky to get a job at the apple store and a decent internship.

Because of how concentrated they are it’s easy to become cynical and forget what an amazing skill set that these people have developed. They have learned to create the shiny happy hip face of new businesses. They’ve also developed a highly sophisticated intuitive sense of consumer culture. They know what kind of products and marketing are cool and instill trust and excitement in the consumer and what sends up warning flags.

Their problem is that on their own they (we) tend not to be very good at profitably making a product or service of real value that some big company isn’t already doing a pretty good job at providing.

The rest of the world on the other hand, faces the opposite problem. They already know how to make or do whatever it is they make or do. But they often don’t understand how to get their product to consumers outside if their local markets.

What if, armed with this skillset of business and internet knowledge, these coffee shop hoards could travel around the world and help connect local companies into the global economy?

Stay tuned to find out.