I’ve always said that doing a job that has no sense of real purpose would have me disinterested in a day (or less!). No matter the sum of money it would earn me, doing work that’s ultimately a zero-sum game, that doesn’t create value, that doesn’t create something more from something less, to me,. that kind of work is totally uninspiring.
Yet never in my wildest dreams did I expect that the company i started almost 10 years ago would have such a profound impact on peoples’ lives. This below is just one email from one of the millions of users on PeoplePerHour.com that happened to come my way, addressed to Yannick our CMO. It just put a big smile on my face and reminded me that, all the success aside, what we do actually MATTERS.
Hey Yannick,
Thank you a lot for your prompt response. I know everyone has a unique story to share and I’m nothing more, but another human on his journey on this planet (existential stuff, I know), but I do firmly believe that my take on freelancing is quite different.
I’ve started out freelancing since I was 16 and I’ve build my whole entire career online (even dropped out of college) … my skillset and everything I’ve learned is from experience .. Today, I even help businesses at times as a consultant .. not to mention that I’m a content creator and writer.
That being said, I’m also planning to write up a few tips/tricks/guides/thought pieces/etc. to contribute to your blog and to help both clients and freelancers on the platform, but currently I can’t allocate the time to do so. I will definitely contact you/Kelly in the future with such ideas and ready-to-go articles.
What’s more, here in Bulgaria people aren’t aware of the amazing opportunities that freelancing presents both individuals and companies. Part of my vision for the next few years is helping Bulgarians be more aware of what online freelancing truly is.
I’m sorry for the over-sharing long message, I just wanted to state that I’m a freelancer at heart and I push towards the dream that the gig-economy is the future.
I also want to express my deepest gratitude towards you and the whole team at PPH, as joining the platform was a completely transformative experience for me. I stopped being the random low-paid worker I was on other platforms and instead became the professional I always striven to be.
I love the fact that PPH takes care not only of the clients, but of the freelancers as well. On other platforms, I’ve had the experience of being a worker bee among thousand worker bees. Here I feel like a professional, who offers their services to clients that also have a respect towards the work you provide them with. Here I feel surrounded by professionals, whether established or up-and-coming. I love the community and I love the positive-ness of the blog as well. Constantly featuring stories to motivate us and having this platform that helps you become your better professional self, while presenting you with new career opportunities is truly an amazing thing.
Again, sorry for the long message and thank you for the prompt answer.
I wish you the best in your future as well and know that by being part of PPH you are not only helping thousand of individuals around the world in different ways, but also helping shape the future of what a ‘career’ means.
Thank you and have a great week ahead,
Ivan D. Ivanov
Thanks to my wonderful team for making this a reality – this is because of our collective effort and hard work. Be proud! Together we’ve put a small dent on the universe. And it will only keep getting bigger.
This week I completed an investment in Rebagg – a company based out of New York that buys and resells luxury handbags.
I see increasingly more investment opportunities and consistently I find the way that sits with me the best in terms of evaluating them is along three very simple heuristics. I truly believe that in consumer internet today (other tech sectors like Enterprise or Bio, Cleantech etc are a different game altogether) you can only compete in one of three ways fundamentally. That’s it – by the process of elimination almost.
You can compete on
Most startup founders knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘we are good at all 3’ but the reality – and the evidence out there – is that you can onloy really win in one, at least at the start,
Put simpler, you either
Of these the third is my least favourable or investable. People who believe they have a sustainable advantage in acquiring traffic over others are like fund managers who delusion themselves that they can bid the index in the long term. They can’t. Trading – be it in stocks or keywords – is an arbitrage play, and like any arbitrage play, the margin trends to zero in the long term.
Of course if you’re Oprah or Kim Kardashian maybe you have a scalable unique customer acquisition channel. But otherwise you’re just kidding yourself that you can buy keywords or Instagram/ Facebook likes better – consistently – than anyone else. You can’t. One could argue that SEO is more defensible if you just happened to be one of those brands that got in early and got indexed well by Google with a stronghold that’s harder to break, but even then you run the risk of your business being shattered one day because of a change in Googles algorithm as we’ve seen happen many a time.
To the second heuristic, i believe that fulfilment i.e. speedy, reliable delivery of whatever it is your buying (be it a tangible product or a service), with great customer support at your fingertips, is important. However, with e-commerce at least, its now near impossible to compete with Amazon on that front. If you’re selling a non-differentiated homogenous SKU and think you can deliver better fulfilment than Amazon you’re deluding yourself. Amazon has been investing billions in building the most sophisticated logistics distribution infrastructure in the world for over two decades. The best you can do is be on it.
Of course not all consumer internet businesses are e-commerce businesses; arguably Uber transitioned from being a prime ‘Inventory fit’ in the above to now being both an Inventory AND Fulfilment play … but only after amassing unique inventory that no one else did (at least as efficiently as them) and put it a click away from the consumer. Now, of course, it also boasts a huge distribution network that its smartly using to go into other inventory categories like food with UberEats (although there the inventory is homogeneous.. the food you get on Uber Eats is not differentiated, it’s the same stuff you can get yourself in the high street or by calling the restaurant themselves so clearly it’s a fulfilment play)
I had an interesting debate this weekend with a friend of mine who’s also in tech which triggered this thought: will software in itself be worthless in the future?
The paradox is that software is finding its way into everything in our lives – from how we order food, a taxi, to how we run a business and increasingly recreation, gaming, education… virtually nothing is left untouched by software. And as hardware becomes more pervasive it literally will be distributed everywhere, from our attire to our kitchen appliances, the couch we sit on, the toys we play with and so on.
Yet the cost of writing software is also dropping exponentially, or seen conversely, the ease of writing software is increasing exponentially. The cost of building a simple website in 1995 was easily in the tens of thousands, would have taken months and would require deep technical knowledge. Today anyone can build a website for free on sites like Wix.com, or WordPress, or even from scratch with minimal coding. Or if you’re lazy you can hire someone for a few hours on PeoplePerHour.com and be done with it within hours.
Moore’s Law, one can argue, applies to software too. But whereas for hardware what powers that is advancement in microprocessor technology, in software it’s mainly the open source phenomenon.
Coders are willing to work on projects for free, for the greater good of the community. Equally the sheer number of coders is increasing exponentially as writing software becomes easier and easier and penetrates into our earlier education system. Kids now can write programs that were a challenge to software engineers in the 90s. That trend will only grow.
Microsoft which arguably was the first software company has been battling with this for decades as has its founder Bill Gates who’s always been very vocal about coders writing software for free. Yet the business model of selling pure software has been undermined largely by that trend. Operating systems, word processors and spreadsheets are now accessible for free (Linux, Google docs is just one example of each). Microsoft in the end had to adapt its business model – arguably the most powerful business model in the world to date – to survive and launched Microsoft 365.
That’s scary: even the most powerful business model in the world, that created the worlds richest man (or vice versa arguably:) was eventually undermined and had to adapt.
Equally, compilers that translate code to a functioning program have – and will carry on – becoming more sophisticated. Its quite imaginable that soon we will be able to input English language which gets translated into the end product by the magic black box in-between. The need to be able to code in zeros and ones (Assembly Language) has already become virtually extinct. The first coders had to write in zeros and ones; now there’s a myriad of ‘higher level languages’. The cap for that trend is simple written language – the first language we learn as kids. So if one can explain what is needed to be done by the program, the compiler will do the rest.
Seen differently, we’ve gone from a world where companies had to go to specialist to write their software – the Accentures & IBMs of this world – and spent hundreds of millions on bespoke systems that enables their business to function. Now, they can rent Software as a Service (SAAS) at a click and tailor it to their needs with very little coding needed.
I just came back from week long trip to Dubai where I got to spent a good amount of time with my 3-year-old niece. The more time I spent with her the more the realisation dawned on me that kids really exhibit the raw traits of great leaders better than most adults! Here’s why
Spend time with any kid and you’ll be drowned with a series of Whys. Why are you here, why are you leaving, why are your trunks wet? Then you say “because I got in the pool” which in turn is followed by ‘Why?”.
Kids start with Why. And so do great Leaders, as Simon Sinek so eloquently argues in his book by that name: Start with Why.
Why are we building what we are building? Why does doing what we do even matter? Why are we doing things this way? True that was a good way to do it yesterday but Why is it still relevant today? Why have we made these decision? Or – more importantly – why have we not?
If you keep asking why firstly you will eventually – with a few more wrinkles under your eyes – foster a culture of always ALWAYS challenging the status quo. This is a must for any company that wants to stay relevant. You cannot afford to take anything for granted in business.
Secondly, you will instil a sense of purpose within your organisation. People will understand why things are happening, why they’re happening in the way they are happening, why their sweat and hard work matters, and therefore why they should get out of bed tomorrow and come back to work.
This holds true for customers as well. Tell a customer what he is getting and – unless it falls in the rare category of being a total giveaway – they will consider it sceptically at first. But tell them WHY that thing will change their life, or that of others, and you’ve got them hooked. Their purchase now has a purpose, not just a utility.
Kids don’t do well with matter-of-fact talk as I found out the hard way. Dry factual statements don’t engage them. Stories do
It really is the same in business. Present your team, shareholders or customers with a matter of fact statement and they will at best give you a nod. Dress it up in a story and you may put a smile on their face. You win people with stories.
Which is why great leaders are great story tellers. They are anecdotal, witty, humorous, and engaging. Think Winston Churchill. They get the message across to you via mesmerising story telling.
Perhaps the best known example of this is Steve Job’s Stanford commemoration speech where he famously opens up by saying “today I want to tell you three stories from my life… that’s it, no big deal, just three stories”
That speech was literally three personal stories, but within them a wealth of wisdom dressed up in such a way that it made the messages unforgettable. Had he just recited his words of advice like he famous ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’ in a straight matter of fact way it would not have resonated the same.
Ask a kid to share their candy with you, give you a hug, come play with you… unless you hit them in a good moment or bribe them with something their instinctive reaction is to say NO. Not ‘No because…’; just ‘No’
Running a company is quite the same. People will keep asking for more no matter what you give them. No customer is eternally happy. Give them a discount, they’ll keep coming back for more. Until you say NO. Give your employees some perks, a salary rise, a pat on the back… they’ll keep coming for more. Until you say No.
The groomed ‘MBA way’ is to be transparent with them, engage in dialogue, present them with your limitations, with your annual budget, you may even transparently share your P&L and show your razor thin margins expecting naively that they will just know better than to ask given how transparent you’ve been. Wrong. They will keep asking. Until you just say No.
Not that long ago I made this mistake. After I overheard whispers in my company PeoplePerHour such as ‘but if we are doing well why aren’t we getting salary rises or why are we sensitive to costs’.. I thought I’d address the issue the civilzed way. I spent hours explaining to my people, team by team, drawing charts on whiteboards showing transparently how our costs are rising in comparison to our revenues. I explained that the ‘delta’ (a terms that’s now become anecdotal in the company’) needs to be widening for a healthy business. That’s it plain and simple. An undisputed statement of fact – not a story.
Total waste of time. None of that stuck. And given that not everything can always be packed in story telling, sometimes its just commanding to simply say NO.
When you try to bribe a kid with candy they will look at you judgingly with piercing eyes, as if thinking “what’s this guy up to…”. They are too shrewd to fall straight in the trap.
The logical decision would be to take the ‘candy’ if it’s up for grabs. Customers would certainly do that without blinking once! So would your employees and your shareholders. Do you think they’d be like “hmm wait why is this guy offering us a dividend, sounds fishy”. Not a chance.
Lacking the tools to make a fully formed logical ‘analysis’ of a situation or follow the empirical evidence forces kids to use their intuition, or instinct. They operate ‘from the gut’ as Jack Welch used to famously swear by, much more than most adults do. It’s refreshing and almost always gets a better result.
Conversely having an over developed logical brain can be a handicap both in life and in business. Its like having a tool that’s too sharp for its own good. You tend to over-analyse, over-think things and get stuck in indecision. Indecision is – in the end – much more expensive than even the wrong decision. Have you ever seen a kid be indecisive?
There’s good reason why instinct matters. Firstly it’s the thing that differentiates us from a machine. Logic is limiting by definition, whilst intuition and its derivative – imagination – is boundless. Einstein put it perfectly: “Logic takes you from A to B, but imagination takes you everywhere”. Man can no longer compete with computers in processing logical sequential thoughts. But we do better in scattered imaginative thinking.
Secondly, our limbic brain – the part of the brain that’s responsible for all our feelings such as trust, loyalty and intuition -– is actually more developed than the rest of our brain, and forms first at the core of the human brain. It’s the part of our brain that controls all emotions but can’t for example process language, numbers or logic. But its what tells us if something ‘feels right’. Decisions made with the limbic brain tend to be faster higher-quality decisions but our logical brain tells us to ignore them. Simon Sinek in Start with Why calls this the ‘overthinking’ syndrome and explains
“The more time spent thinking about the answer, the bigger the risk that it may be the wrong one. Our limbic brains are smart and often know the right thing to do. It is our inability to verbalise the reasons that may cause us to doubt ourselves or trust the empirical evidence when our gut tells us not to”
Very simply the reason gut or instinctive decisions feel right is because the part of the brain that controls them controls our feelings too.
Being indecisive and fearful one could argue are both different expressions of the ‘overthink’ syndrome. But not quite. Kids demonstrate this too: sometimes you’ll see a kid go for it after evaluating the odds, whilst adults won’t.
If logic is our brain’s desire to process information in order to make a decision, fear is HOW MUCH information we need in order to be comfortable with it. To feel safe. A high threshold on both is a double handicap.
Jeff Bezos recently said in another amazing memo to his employees “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow”
So true.
Speed matters in business (and in life), so if you multiply all the decisions that are taken daily across an organisation by that extra 20%, it could easily be the difference between success and failure. ‘High velocity decision making’ as Bezos puts it is crucial in remaining nimble or ‘Day1’ as he likes to call it.
In other words, seen in context with intuition: trust your initial gut as a first port of call, your limbic brain is telling something for a reason. But if you must deploy logic and analysis, make sure it doesn’t become paralysis.
Or hire a three-year-old!
Yesterday I completed my first startup investment of the year in a company called VillageLuxe.
Founded in New York City by a dear friend of mine Julia Gudish Krieger, VillageLuxe operates in the sharing economy and aims to be ‘the Airbnb for high-end fashion’, as Forbes magazine put it in a recent article. Very simply VillageLuxe allows you to rent out your closet to utilise ‘spare capacity’ much like Airbnb does with your apartment; and conversely as a renter to open you up to a whole new world of possibilities without having to fork out the full purchase price.
Aside of the obvious reason of operating in the sharing economy for which I feel very passionately about having ran PeoplePerHour for a good decade now, I invested in VillageLuxe for the following reasons:
Last but not least – maybe i can rent some stuff myself and become a little more fashionable 🙂
Julia – wishing you every success, I know you’ll do great and look forward to the journey ahead!
2016 for me was, if I had to pick one word to describe it, a year of ‘regrouping’.
I had only moved properly back to London end of 2015 from New York. In the year that ensued I regrouped with old friends whom I had partially lost touch with – people with whom I go back over a decade, spent more time with my family and my ‘auxiliary family’ – my beloved colleague PPH-ers.
The year reminded me of the importance of having long-lasting relationships in life, people with whom you’ve gone through life-transforming experiences like university or school years, the army, trips or expeditions, or building a startup together. The tough times more than any others are the ones that build long lasting bonds between people. No amount of ambition and the success it fuels is worth sacrificing that.
Even though I first moved to London approaching 15 years now, it’s only in this last year, my second spell upon my return, that I got to appreciate how much London is home for me. More than ever I’m in love with its contradictions. Fast-paced yet balanced and civilized; old-school in so many ways yet modern, cool and funky; deeply traditional yet cosmopolitan and international like no other city I’ve experienced; demanding and tiring at times yet forgiving, warm and communal at others; close-knit in its social circles yet easy to meet people and make new friends.
Apart from regrouping the things that I’m grateful for in 2016 are having made new friends, build relationships that I’ve learnt from and hopefully contributed to, travelled extensively, grown my company and team, rented a studio so I can devote more time to my art which is my passion, and setting the foundation for what seems a great 2017.
By far the highlight of my year was being appointed Godfather to my beautiful little niece (my brother’s daughter) whom my sister and I baptized this summer, and more recently being asked to be Godfather to one of my best friends’ unborn child. No honour can be grander or more gratifying to be bestowed with the trust and responsibility that comes with being a Godparent to someone’s child. I feel blessed and privileged to be in that position twice already.
The best trips I’ve had in the year include visiting one of my old friends in Mumbai, India, my family in Dubai and later Cyprus for Christmas, spending time in the beautiful South of France this summer and falling in love with the breathtaking Cap-Ferrat. My trips to the U.S. have become less frequent, yet I visited New York twice including spending my birthday there in May. I spent time in Marbella in Spain, Berlin, St Tropez, the beautiful Greek islands, the gorgeous old town of Nafplio in Greece, skied in the Trois Vallees where my year began in 2016 and ended. The symmetry itself rounded up the year perfectly.
On the business front, with the exception of a short-lived hit triggered by Brexit, PeoplePerHour has continued to grow strong and unabated. We’ve made drastic improvements to the product and the customer experience and that’s thanks to the hard work and dedication of our team. Team PPH – you rock!
I consider myself really lucky to be surrounded by some amazing people. Truly blessed. Friends, family, colleagues and even just acquaintances. I’m lucky to have a wide network of brilliant people from different walks of life but also different cities and cultures. I can count friends in New York, London, Athens, Cyprus, Dubai, Miami, L.A, San Francisco, Austin, all the way to India (If I’ve left any out I apologise:))
Yet I don’t know that many people who – despite their successes- are truly truly content. I find that most people are always on a never ending quest. Quest for more of whatever it is they crave. One of life’s paradoxes is in fact that the more we get the more we want, and the more we want the more discontented we become. There’s a fine line between ambition and greed, and an equally fine line between complacency and contentment.
I don’t believe in complacency. I believe that no matter how much anyone has achieved they cannot rest their laurels. There’s always more to do, more to learn and more to give. No success should be taken for granted – we can all lose what we have much faster than it took us to acquire it.
I do however believe in contentment. One needs to be truly at peace with what they have in order to be happy. We need to remind ourselves of the good in our life and live in the moment in order to really take it all in and appreciate it. Cliche as it may sound most people I know do not live in the moment. They are always in anticipation of what comes next. They are too busy planning, worrying or sharing the moment with others on social media instead of BEING in it.
2016 has been the first year for me when I’ve really achieved contentment (or at least more so than previously). For me it comes with a number of things. Appreciating the ‘now’ is a crucial starting point. But it’s also about having a purpose and doing good things for you and those around you. It’s about being selfless, giving, being generous and altruistic and just seeing the bigger picture. Its about showing heart!
We’ve all heard this phrase before: ‘life is a marathon not a race’. Yet how many of us put it in practice?
Ironically we’ve been nurtured to worship and admire endurance. From the preachings of Jesus Christ who endured so much in his life for the good of Mankind, culminating in enduring the weight of the very cross he was crucified on; to persecuted mythical heroes we grew up in awe of, from Hercules to Tarzan, to more modern characters like Rocky Balboa who beat the odds by never giving up. We revere not their success but their endurance… we envy not the result but the courage they show in ‘going the distance’ as the soundtrack of Rocky – by that very name and not coincidentally – reminds us, climaxing our emotions seeing a guy refusing to give up despite the beating he was taking, enduring till the end even if he lost. Or did he? As the expression goes ‘he may have lost the battle but won the war’.
Tenacity, grit, persistence are the things that make one endure through tough situations. Time and time again we see those being more instrumental to the long term success in any given situation that the mighty powers of whatever one deploys in the short term: talent, wit, intelligence… I call those ‘situational masteries’. You can master a situation with traits like charm… the ability to outwit someone, talk the talk; you may even hit some home runs with situational mastery. People do after all become overnight hits- sometimes. They do in casinos too! But that’s neither a strategy for success not a safe haven for ones’ hopes or ambitions. It’s dependent as much on luck as on anything else; or in there being just the right mix and fit between the ‘situation’ and the tricks possessed to master it in this notion of ‘situational mastery’.
Building endurance is, on the other hand, a strategy. It’s a sustainable, dependable and more predictable – or a more backable – route to success. I’d much rather train for a marathon than the 100m sprint (although admittedly I have done neither). By the nature of having a longer path from the start point to the end you have just much better odds of finding a way to win; to muster the energy and stamina needed to keep going. I’d much rather bet on a team committed to building something – anything – for the longer term. Be it a business, climbing a mountain, building a family.
Warren Buffet put it perfectly when asked how is it possible that he beat every other investor with the least sophisticated of strategies, purely by sticking to fundamentals. He said: “because no one wants to get rich slowly”
