Category: Life

I was talking to a founder earlier today about networking in the time of COVID-19 and he suggested I write a post about it.

Before the pandemic hit, I was out there every week, attending events, meeting new people and networking all over the US. I even ran a tech-focused group in San Francisco for about 4 years.

When the virus hit, it all suddenly went away. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, continued to talk to people via social media, video calls and emails.

But as the situation continued, I started feeling the itch again, to meet new people, explore new ideas and just network. I tried to go to a few industry-specific meetups that were now happening virtually, but it just didn’t cut it. They were usually centered around a speaker, or got polarized around a common topic, or, worse, they got dominated by someone very loud, with poor listening skills.

So I dropped that, too.

I later discovered Lunchclub. They apparently started out as an in-person networking network (ha!), but COVID-19 had them pivot to online only. The way it works is:

• you sign up, fill in your profile and interests, set your location
• you select time slots that work for you. Make sure to block out the work-calendar, too
• you get matched every week with someone new, based on your interest
• you meet at the agreed-upon time. Or reschedule
• you provide feedback about your match

They have a points system, with which you can have more choice when it comes to meeting certain people from certain areas. You can earn points by inviting other people to the network. Clever.

My experience with them, after 5 meetings, has been mostly positive. Three of the meetings have been extremely relevant, two so and so. But all have been interesting people with cool projects, life stories and ideas to discuss. I surely wasn’t bored on any of the calls, which is not what I can say about some networking events I used to attend in person!

It’s not the best time to be out there networking in-person, so this has been my approach to date. Looking forward to getting back out there without the fear of deadly infections arising from any larger event.

Photo by Antenna on Unsplash

It’s funny that I have to write an article about this, but I recently talked with someone I trust and respect a lot about this topic. He’s been around much longer than I have and has worked with Steve Jobs directly at some point in his life. He’s also consulted with a ton of companies in the Bay Area.

He said that it’s rare to find people that think big and do the work required to implement their ideas. Most people do either one or the other well, and there’s people that don’t do either.

I used to be an ideas only person, well, frankly, because I was lazy. I though I was special just because I existed, so my ideas were great off the bat, so I should have to do any work, let alone hard work to get stuff done. But as I met more and more cool, interesting and successful smart people, I noticed something about them. They all did the hard, grueling work. They stayed up all night to perfect their pitch, the campaign, the proposal, the deck. They didn’t say “it’s good enough”, they pushed for great.

Of course, my lazy nature tried to fight back, but by pushing myself, I saw that if I put in the extra hour, or the extra iteration, I got better and better results. It got me more budgets, raises, promotions, an MBA degree, experience working in competitive markets like London or San Francisco. But even now it’s still hard to do the work, unless I remember why I’m doing it. If it’s meaningful, I’ll put in the hours and deliver my best self.

Something to think about on a Friday evening, as you’re going into the weekend.

Photo by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash

Yeah, it happened.

I managed to get to the great palindromic age of 33.

Some people imagine their lives as adults when they are still kids, how their lives would look like. For me, it wasn’t that. I mostly tried to make it at least 5 years into the future. After all, I couldn’t really imagine much from post-communist Romania, in a quiet corner of north-west Transylvania.

But little did I know.

Without further ado, here it goes:

1. I traveled to over 30 countries. I think this year I was supposed to be up to 33, but then corona happened.
2. I rode a 1700 cc Harley at sunset, near the Golden Gate bridge, in San Francisco.
3. I went snowboarding for over 20 days in a season, up at Tahoe.
4. I lived in London, UK, for 2 years.
5. I moved far, far away from my hometown for college. Like a 12 hour train ride away, or 600km in Romania.
6. I lived in Salt Lake City, UT, for a month just to snowboard and work remotely while at a crypto startup.
7. I moved to San Francisco with about 2 months of runway in the bank and zero safety nets.
8. I got married in a foreign country. After meeting her on a beach, at 3am, on the Romanian seaside.
9. I camped in the mountains and on the beach.
10. I built a website in 2009 and bought my first car with the money from it. Then decided to become a marketer.
11. I graduated from an Executive MBA at 26, an age where most of my colleagues had more business experience than I had life. Also, I didn’t really know how I would eventually pay for it.
12. I commuted by plane from Bucharest to London every month, for 2 years.
13. Swam and snorkeled between continents in Iceland.
14. Saw the northern lights, several times, also in Iceland.
15. Saw the Niagara Falls while in Toronto at a decentralized identity event.
16. Bought an investment property in Ohio.
17. Paid $4,000 rent for a 1 bedroom. Per month.
18. Earned $1.5/hour as my first real job, without a college degree, in 2009.
19. Dropped out of my first college adventure in finance, banking and stock exchange.
20. Finished college as a distance learner, with career switchers and high-school exam second timers. Also graduated at the same time as my wife, even though she’s almost 4 years younger than me.
21. Lost money on the stock market using leveraged instruments and derivatives.
22. Lost money in crypto ICOs
23. Made enough money to pay that $4,000 per month rent in SF.
24. Worked from home for over 10 months before we all had to. It sucked then, still sucks now.
25. I organized tech and entrepreneurship meetups in London and San Francisco. Still organize them in SF, only virtually while we get rid of the virus.
26. Worked in advertising, mining, consulting, food delivery, fintech, AI, crypto and identity, with vending machines, data. I’m actively interested in quantum computing, so who knows what’s next.
27. Owned an Audi A1 at 23, bought with my own money.
28. I surfed in the Pacific Ocean. It’s cold.
29. Got laid off from a controversial gold and silver mining project and left my birth country to pursue tech.
30. Won the Green Card lottery, even though when I first found out about it in 2012, i thought it was a scam. Applied a few years in a row to get it. It’s real.
31. I jumped from a plane, at 30,000 ft, with a parachute.
32. I traveled to Hong Kong in a business class seat with my wife, for fun.
33. I started writing, again and again.

There’s a ton more things I could add here, but I’ll save some for other years. I’m sure there’s plenty more to come.

Happy birthday to me!

Photo by Flora Mipsum on Unsplash

If you’re like me, you’ve been in “shelter in place”, or under some kind of isolation that your government decided for you. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to work from home. Beyond not being able to go out and grab a drink or dinner with friends, hang out with family members that don’t live with you, travel, life is pretty much the same.

What has changed, though, is that managers everywhere are coming to terms with managing remote workforces effectively; because they have to, there’s no other way now. And teams are still performing well, without that in-the-office-have-to-be-next-to-my-team vibe. This accelerates adoption of work-from-home as the new normal. It also opens the world up for one of the two scenarios I predict will follow in the next few years.

The fall of mega-cities

As soon as people figure out that they can work from anywhere in the world, they will start moving out of expensive urban jungles like New York, San Francisco and other areas hit hard by the coronavirus and isolation.

Why would you choose to pay $3-$4,000 per month to rent a small one bedroom apartment in San Francisco? You can buy a mansion in Wyoming for less than $200,000. Or you can rent a resort-style three bedroom with pools and stuff for less than $1,500 in Arizona.

Not only people start moving away and vacating these once profitable rental properties, but the commercial space becomes empty. If you run a 400 people organization in San Francisco, you’re probably paying $10M+ every year to have an office. Now that you have unlocked that capital, you can grow your company further, hire more people, invest in marketing, sales, research and development etc.

Meanwhile, smart people everywhere are moving around. New post-isolation communities are born in places that were traditionally more closed off, and had less influx of people. We’ll replace the office with social clubs and co-working spaces, home offices and other working amenities. But there’s another interesting consequence. You start competing with people within 3-4 hours of your timezone, not just the people in your area and potential relocations. This is exciting for the global marketplace, but will place a lot of people in a new, challenging environment.

There’s going to be a spillover effect into teleconferencing software. People will try to recreate life-like working conditions in VR/AR, so we can work from anywhere.

We will reopen borders, and we will travel again, provided there is a vaccine/immunity test available. But people will have moved out of big cities and into other, traditionally less desirable parts of their countries. This combination of factors will likely change the way we live in the next century.

Open source medicine

If cities are to survive this pandemic and isolation, then we need to change the way we work with medicine around the world. Right now, every country and every state have different rules and limitations when it comes to drugs, cures, medical supplies, research, patents and ability to develop, test and go to market quickly with solutions to health issues.

The world where mega-cities continue to be the main way we live, combined with large scale travel, the old normal we were used to, require a more agile approach to medicine.

Right now, countries and companies are protecting their IP, production assets. Instead of continuing this, we could create a bounty system, where everyone contributes to a pandemic protection mega-fund. It could be bundled into a travel fee, or health tax, if people don’t want to voluntarily contribute to it.

This mega-fund invests in global solutions for future pandemics, vaccine rapid creation, advanced open source medical research that any person, country, city, state or company can tap into. It could share profits from its endeavors, like a superVC, or it could be a not-for-profit. The capitalist in me would opt for the for-profit model. This can work with strong bylaws/checks and balances, like fixed pay-per-use, based on income/net worth. This is to avoid racketeering or price gauging during times of need.

This could give us a rapid-response vehicle better than the WHO, or governments, or big pharma, or even billionaires working on vaccines on their own. It would be global, and it would be open, and it would likely be more effective.

I don’t think we’re going back to the old normal, we’ll have to create a new one, just like people did after the plague, tuberculosis, yellow fever, influenza, cholera and other pandemics. This change will also be an opportunity for generations to shift, wealth to redistribute and new models to emerge for business and society.

Photo by Jesse Gardner on Unsplash