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Change Management Life

From “hungry wolf” to “fat cat” – how culture can promote or hinder growth

I’ve been sitting on this concept since a conversation I had with a friend who visited me in San Francisco last month. She had been traveling since she started studying for her MBA degree at INSEAD and had left a successful career in commercial real estate in Romania.

Both of us have friends who are successful people in their fields in the country and we discussed the concepts of hungry wolves and fat cats, and their relationship to growth – both personal and systemic. I had already written a post about attitudes in the US vs Romania, so this intrigued me to the point where I had to write about it.

Hungry Wolves

A hungry wolf is the metaphor for relentless ambition, the kind that you need to break through glass ceilings, to start great companies, to win impossible races, to build amazing products, and, in general, to improve yourself and the world around you. It’s that inner fire you feel every morning and the drive to go beyond what’s expected of you and over-deliver. It’s that drive to change things for the better, instead of letting them fester. This is the kind of person that pulls communities forward, both economically, politically and socially.

It’s usually associated with under-privileged people, who usually have to fight harder than others to move up in the world. Immigrants, minorities and people from lower income backgrounds tend to be hungry wolves. Sometimes, the environment plays a key role in keeping wolves from turning to fat cats – high cost of living, working culture, social norms, competition can influence this behavior.

Fat Cats

A fat cat is someone who is content with what they have achieved. Generally, people become fat cats when they don’t feel their success is temporary and they stop growing/advancing. They stop and settle, and every day starts to resemble the previous one. There are two main kinds of fat cats: made and born.

The fat cat that made it is, usually, a former hungry wolf that decided it had enough and it’s time to focus on other things, and not fane those inner flames anymore. Maybe it’s early retirement, or desire to pursue a slower life, or they just had enough of the rat race. They stop giving it the extra edge, stop over-delivering and settle to do the bare minimum to keep things going, keep the lights on. You can spot them at work, in your friends groups and in the way the talk about their goals and ambitions. They don’t shine anymore.

The other type of fat cat is the one that was born like this. They usually come from wealthy backgrounds, have had safety nets their whole lives and are the representation of privilege. They don’t have to worry about the future, so they don’t invest time thinking about it too much. They share the same symptoms as the fat cat that made it, but the difference is that the born one might not have had a flame to begin with. They are easy to spot in the wild – spending money that’s not a result of their work, making poor life choices and surrounding themselves with fake friends to run from their own lack of purpose in life.

My Romanian and US experience with fat cats and hungry wolves

It’s 2020 and we’re still in growth mode globally, still let by the US economy, in spite of the crisis super-cycle that historians have identified. The US has had crisis ever 1-2 generations, and every time it has recovered because its culture is built on the hungry wolf concept. Some argue that socialist measures might stifle some of this drive and turn hungry wolves into fat cats, as more safety nets get built into the system. In key places in the US, though, there are some key factors that will delay and even prevent this from happening.

I have been living in San Francisco since 2016, and in cities like this it’s hard to see a majority of people turning into fat cats. The cost of living, its growth, the work culture and competition, the lure of the next biggest thing in startups, growing companies everywhere keep that flame alive. Hell, it even sparks flames in former born fat cats. This type of economy, while taxing for the average individuals – sometimes with burnout, depression, social anxiety, drives growth. It’s a price people pay for their advancement. This perpetual hungry wolf doesn’t think their prosperity can last forever, so it works hard so it has a base to land on if things go South. They create to invest, they prepare for long term prosperity.

On the other hand, I lived in Romania growing up and for a good part of my early adult life. The culture there, while still rewarding and encouraging for hungry wolves, has a very specific local flavor. Parents and other people in social circles that are risk averse repeat a very damaging mantra: “isn’t this enough for you?” (I wish there were a good explanation for this. Here’s my take on it: When you get a mortgage and a car, that’s when people start to say that you made it, and your mom tells you to stop pushing, because you have enough).

This type of culture socially punishes overly ambitious people and helps create an environment where it’s ok to settle for enough. While this can be great to the individual’s immediate quality of life, if prosperity goes away, and the fat cat becomes a skinny cat, then will it have enough drive to turn back into the hungry wolf it needs to be? Or will the former born fat cat have the strength to spark that flame on its own?

But back to the hungry wolf. The trap there is not to overdo the hungry part, and end up bursting from over-eating. It’s ok to be just a little bit hungry sometimes and not terribly hungry all the time. I’ve seen some people call it the long term greedy approach. Seems to work for successful and happy people.

This is the Romanian article (EN translation) that contributed to a few of the ideas this post.

Later edit:

I had a cool exchange on LinkedIn with a friend of mine, Ciprian (Chip) Borodescu (Co-founder & CEO at MorphL), and I wanted to share it with people reading this later here:

Hey Titus, interesting analysis and I think I agree 99% of it.  One thing that I struggle with is the very last thing you wrote: “I’ve seen some people call it the long term greedy approach. Seems to work for successful and happy people.” In my opinion success ≠ happy. I think the fat cat is very happy, don’t you think? (that’s certainly the case for my cat, haha!) Is that cat successful? It depends on the definition of success. Success for some people is external: if they have a great professional career or other people think highly of them, that immediately translates into success. If not, it’s a total disaster. Success for other people comes from inside – their own sustainable definition of success, that’s not attached to the success of a startup, project, deal, etc. Success is found within and they don’t seek validation from outside. Both have a growth mindset, only the latter has a more mature and balanced approach to life. You’re encouraging hungry wolves to find a balance: “a little bit hungry sometimes and not terribly hungry all the time”.  However, this places the balance in the realm of wolves still. How about placing the balance in-between the two? Cats are predators too – which I read as a “growth mindset” 😉

To which I replied: Great point! I think fat cats can be happy and successful too, as long as they are able to stay fat 🙂 for me, the two concepts are.about active and passive approach to life/growth. I like your internal / external lens, and to the definitions in the article, if you take an active approach to either success paths, you’re still a hungry wolf, seeking improvement. A fat cat is happy with where it it is.

Photo by Patrick on Unsplash

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Life

One thing that’s ruining travel around the world

As you could probably tell from my last post, I’m in Thailand. We decided to head to Phuket first and then see Bangkok on our way out of this one week away from the craziness of SF life.

I love traveling because it helps me disconnect, unwind and recharge after giving it all and more to all our ongoing projects. But most of all, I love traveling because it allows me to discover cultures and foods that I can’t easily experience back at home.

We didn’t know what to expect coming to Thailand, so we chose one of the most touristic places in the country thinking it’s a safe bet – beach, weather, islands, elephant sanctuary. It has it all. Sure, it smells like trash in some places, the sewer is terrible, but that’s the result of sloppy city management and an unforgiving weather. The islands and beaches are great though, and the water is a heavenly blue color.

I was talking to Elena about one of our biggest shocks regarding Phuket, and not in a good way. We were surprised to see Central and Eastern Europe has started to creep into Phuket through Russian, Hungarian and Austrian restaurants. I can live with the smoking everywhere, the loudness of some of the tourists, but I get concerned when their habits start to change the local scenery to something too close to home.

From what I could gather, the Thai culture is extremely accommodating and that didn’t play to their advantage with this particular aspect – regarding food. Now there are tons of Thai places that serve local food AND a collection of pierogi, potato salads, Russian salads, all sorts of European soups and sausages – for the traveler who wants to feel at home, literally. I’m not saying Europeans are the only ones who do this, there are Australian chains, a Hooters, McDonald’s, Burger King and other stuff like that, but you didn’t find burgers next to Pad Thai in most restaurants.

I feel like this type of food blend/fusion is slowly eroding local cultures like the one in Phuket and I hope more people write and try to educate travelers to avoid eating what they would have at home and try out the local cuisine.

At the end of our Phuket visit, our question to the world is: why on earth would you travel 9+ hours on a plane and then go and eat potato salad and borsch, or wurst, if you have those at home?

Photo by Alyssa Kowalski on Unsplash

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Life

Thailand visas for Romanians and an airport confusion (2020)

As you can probably imagine, I’m on vacation, yay!

Before we got to Thailand, I have read a lot of confusing stories about getting a visa on arrival in Bangkok, as a Romanian national. So I decided to document our process.

For Romanians, the visa on arrival process is like this:

  • before you land, you fill in the arrival and departure forms on the plane
  • you land and head to the Visa on Arrival area
  • pick up a big form and fill that in with the same data you put in the landing card
  • you exchange 200 bhat (~$7) per person for photos and get Visa photos next to the Visa on Arrival area, where you pay the attendant upfront and they take a quick passport size photo, cash only
  • depending on the season, you might have to pay a tourist visa fee of 2000 bhat (~$70) per person, cash only. There are several exchanges there, so bring cash with you. The rates are ok, don’t be scared. The visa fee is currently waived until April 2020
  • Then with everything in hand, go to the Visa counter and you should be good to go. They will ask you for your address in Thailand, so have that prepared, as well as the return ticket

The other point that got us confused was the two airports in Bangkok, both international. We landed on the Bangkok International BKK Suvarnabhumi. When we did our research, we found great tickets to Phuket from Bangkok International DMK Don Mueang. A quick Google Maps search for the acronym DMK took us to the same BKK airport we were arriving on, so we thought it would be a piece of cake. It wasn’t.

When we tried to find the flight, we couldn’t see the code and had to go to the AirAsia service desk to learn that for over 5 years now, Phuket flights were no longer running from BKK but from DMK. Mind you, we had about 1h and 15mins until takeoff at this point. Even the visa guy smiled at us, but we only understood why when we realized the mistake we had made.

This other international airport is about 40-45 min away by taxi, and it costs about 400-500 bhat (~$15) to get there. Our taxi driver went the extra mile and got us there in time, about 20 mins before the plane was leaving. We ended this adventure with a run, but made it in time. Ah, one more thing to note AirAsia is not super strict when it comest to the 7kg policy, so we took our bags onboard. Security is also way quicker and easier than anything in the US or Europe for domestic flights.

I hope people visiting Thailand will be less confused than we were. First time I ever confused airports!

Photo by Diego Muñoz Suárez on Unsplash

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Space travel for the 21st century

Today is MLK in the US and we went out to meet friends for brunch. One of the topics we talked about was space travel and how this is could shorten our time spent on planes.

While tech is not quite there, there have been promising advancements by SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. These private sector initiatives give me hope that we might achieve low-orbit fast travel by 2100.

I spent 5 days on planes, traveled 53,000 mi on 28 flights in 2019, per my AppInTheAir profile.

I can’t but wonder how much time and jet fuel I could have saved if we had something like this available:

Now to explain this diagram:

  • Science: The concept of the Regional Space Hub relies on the ESA definition of low-Earth orbiting space craft. It assumes that once orbiting altitude is achieved, and the space hub is running at full speed, the point-to-point travel is a matter of finding the docking timings to make the journey most efficient
  • Technical Prerequisites: The three companies I mentioned and a few government programs are hard at work to make scalable, reusable rockets that can get people off the ground and land back safely to refuel and go back up again. DARPA is already working on a Transportation Hub concept, fully run by robots, so that might be a good blueprint for the Regional Space Hubs
  • The journey: I want to visit my parents in Romania. For simplicity, I asked them to meet me in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania. I’m leaving from San Francisco. Currently, I have to use min 2 planes and travel for over 15 hours to get to Bucharest using traditional jets. In the future, I want to get on a rocket at SFO (15-20 minutes with take-off procedures), get to the nearest Regional Space Hub, rely on the orbit speed to get me over Eastern Europe (minutes to switch ships, or stay on the same ship and get new passengers for those with different destinations), where the Romania-bound return rocket would shuttle me down to the Otopeni Airport (10-15 minutes). The whole journey could take me anywhere between 40 minutes and 2 hours, depending if I have to circle the Earth in the Hub waiting for the downstream shuttle.
  • Bonus, this would be more environmentally friendly than traditional airplanes, if NASA’s new fuel research program succeeds in producing better rocket fuel.
  • Per NASA, “It takes the shuttle approximately 8-1/2 minutes to get to orbit. And if you think about it, we’re accelerating a 4-1/2 million pound system from zero miles per hour to its orbital velocity of 17,500 miles per hour in those 8-1/2 minutes. So it’s a heck of a ride for the astronauts. They typically experience about three times the force of gravity during most of the ascent, and once we reach orbit, when the main engines cut off, they go from that three-G acceleration to zero acceleration virtually instantaneously, and that’s when they become weightless on orbit.”

If you would have talked to someone in 1920 about an average person traveling over 53,000 mi in one year for business and pleasure, they would have called you crazy. Let’s see what happens by 2100. I plan to be alive to try it out, once it becomes commercially viable.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Later Edit:

Added the conversation this post sparked on Facebook.

All of them were public, so I took a few screenshots for posterity – the science is not quite there, some cool people are working on this problem already and I have very cool friends on Facebook!

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10 mistakes I have made as a marketing professional

Everyone writes about guides and success stories. Those are easy, and they lend you their positive aura. It’s not just in marketing, it’s in every profession, even more so if you’re an entrepreneur. While fail groups and stories emerge every now and then, it’s the success that shines over and tries to give people an example to follow.

I, for one, believe in the power of mistakes and fails, if taken in correctly and constructively. They teach you what doesn’t work so you can focus on what does work. This is valid for anything you do in life.

I started my marketing career by focusing on wins and on the fails of others. Now it’s time to show some of my own mistakes and learnings.

Not listening

This is an easy one. I didn’t always listen to my peers. I didn’t listen to my target audience, nor my teams all the time. As a result, I had to redo work, adapt campaigns that fell flat and do post-mortems on unsalvageable work.

Assuming I always know best

This one is especially true as you get some wins under your belt, and it’s connected to the listening that I talked about before. Do research, test your campaigns and learn from smaller batches before you launch to full lists of people/with huge budgets. If you ask the right questions, you’ll get guidance from the ones you want to steer towards your goal.

Rushing things out the door

This is a classic. We need everything done yesterday. Marketing has infinite amount of work. Let’s try to get as much as we can out the door as fast as possible. That never leads to anything good. I did that early on in my career and still catch myself wanting to do this even now. Stop, focus, prioritize and do less with more intent, more analysis and more resources.

Choosing an angle that’s too extreme

In a world that’s more and more polarized, it’s easy to fall into the extreme bandwagon. Either too conservative, or too progressive, too radical, or too tame, campaigns and directions that try too hard to be in one camp will eventually cause the other to reject you completely. The risk is huge, because if you are wrong, it’s hard to go back from an extreme claim. Don’t be extreme, you’ll thank me later. But also try to be a little bit bold, so you don’t fall flat.

Not empathizing with the person challenging me

I used to always start a thought process with thinking about “what would I do”. That put me in challenging positions when anther other person’s context was very different from mine, and that led to conflict. Nowadays, I’m trying to think like I were in their shoes – what background they have, how they would interpret things through their cultural and personal lens. Doesn’t always work, but I’m more mindful of it and life had been better as a result.

Being too confrontational about things

This is a tricky one, since some cultures interpret assertiveness as a sign of confidence, others see it as aggressive. It’s pretty similar to the empathy point I made earlier. Think about what people around you do often to get their points across successfully and replicate that. Don’t hold on to your assertive nature if it gets you nowhere. Took me a few years of US to learn that.

Not waiting for math and statistics to confirm my findings

This is another way of saying: Stop jumping to conclusions and wait for all the data to come in. Sometimes, statistics can be skewed the wrong way if not all your audience is correctly represented. Also connected to rushing things out the door. Good things come to those who wait on the math and stats to confirm their findings.

Being inconsistent

This is a personal one more than a business one, but hey, guilty. Less now, more early in my career, but this blog bears witness that I write in bursts – 3-4-5 articles, then silence. Get better at being consistent and you’ll get farther than people like me.

Always trying to respond

I’ll just say here that silence is sometimes the best answer, especially for social media. Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t humor the hecklers. Anything you say can and will be used against you online. Now I hope that made you stop and think for a bit. It helped me a lot.

Taking things too personally

This is my parting thought — don’t fall in love with your campaigns or messages, because when you put them to the test, they might fail. And if you love them, you might not see that right away and might not learn from that mistake/miss, and end up wasting time, money and resources. The job well done is worth falling in love with after it produced the desired outcome, and then some.

Photo by JD Designs on Unsplash

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Guest post on Havingtime.com – How to Deal With the Challenges of Moving to a New Country

I’ve been in San Francisco for over 3 and a half years, but I’ve moved around a lot in the past 10ish years. At some point, I decided to document that journey and show the good and not so good parts of moving around.

Check out my latest post on dealing with the challenges of moving to a new country on Havingtime.com

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

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Romanian IT in San Francisco 2016 – 2018 retrospective (overdue) and some personal notes on events and community management

Ok, so I wrote about the great year we had and it got me thinking. Why not go all the way back in time and document the entire Romania IT in San Francisco history. It’s only been 3 years or so since it started, so it should be pretty easy.

Also, there’s power in retrospectives and I’ll write about that in a separate blog post.

Some background: I arrived in San Francisco in July 2016, took a few months to get a job, adjust and meet people before I got involved with the Romanian IT movement. Before that I ran the Romanian Entrepreneurs in UK group in London for about 2 years with Razvan and Mircea, but that’s a story for another post, too. I was also very focused on numbers and attendee counts at the beginning, and felt pressure to deliver. I don’t anymore and it’s become second nature. Funny to think about how, when I was a kid in 2nd grade (i think), I tried to organize my birthday party and no one showed up because I was too afraid to invite them, and now I’ve been organizing community events for a little more than 6 years.

Enough backstories, here it goes.

July 2016 – December 2016

I wrote my first official blog post in December 2016, as part of the greater Romanian IT community. We were planning to launch in multiple cities in Europe and US, and San Francisco was one of them. I was fresh off the plane and full of energy to start building the community here.

I also hosted the first AI & ML webinar, a 101 session with Ruben and Cosmin, We talked about my work at DigitalGenius, Ruben’s Microsoft experience and Cosmin’s ML engineering knowledge at Clusterr.io. I predicted AI would take off in 2017 and wrote a takeaways blog here pointing to the Medium post linked above. This was our first event in the Facebook group, too.

January 2017

This month was focused more on virtual events, with people attending Open Talk 2.0, an internal Romanian IT call, and two Startup feedback sessions, one for retargeting.biz and another one for pixteller.com.

February 2017

We met for the first time, at Natoma Cabana, with a very interesting, official crowd, more details in the dedicated blog post. Back then, we thought that this would be the format, some speaking/intros and then networking. It was also the first event Mihai and I organized together. See my official attire 🙂

During February, we promoted a Startup feedback session for CoinFlux and another Romanian IT webinar, this time about network security. We also promoted a Repatriot dinner in San Francisco, and a Romanian entrepreneurs and investors tour of Silicon Valley, both organized by Dea Wilson.

Nothing happened in March 2019, I was traveling a lot for work and didn’t get to organize an event until April. We promoted a few Romanian startup exits and recommender systems webinar.

April 2017

It was time for the second meetup for Romanian IT in San Francisco, and we chose another downtown location for our get-together – Thirsty Bear. It was a pretty good turnout and people said that this format would work better for them. I was also fundraising for Hospice of Hope’s Copaceni Tech House, as I was preparing for my marathon run in LA later in the year.

We continued to promote the webinar on recommender systems and a Romanian Investors from Fribourg Capital, Liberty Technology Park and the Principals of KPMG meetup organized by George Roth and his RABN group.

Thanks to Liana from Memo.ai, community members got discounted access to SuperBot 2017, an AI conference in San Francisco.

May – December 2017

In May, we only promoted one Startup feedback session, with Anda, a friend of mine, and her company, Colorimetrix. We also started promoting Spherik’s mentorship program, which I eventually ended up taking part in.

In June, we promoted an Ethereum Deep Dive in Berkeley, two Startup feedback sessions, one with Planable, run by Xenia, another friend, where I was a panelist, and another one with Baro.io.

In July, we met at another RABN meetup, at the JW Marriott in San Francisco, and in August we helped Repatriot promote their survey about Romanians abroad.

In October, we met again in San Francisco, at Thirsty Bear. Great turnout, no pics this time. We also promoted the Repatriot Summit, that took place in Romania, that October.

Towards the end of 2017, as crypto was taking off, I discovered El Rio, the place that was soon to be our home for the next few years. A few Romanians got together there, too, for a Bitcoin meetup, and that’s where Mihai and I got the idea to move our meetups to El Rio.

January – February 2018

It took another Thirsty Bear meetup in February to get us to move to El Rio in March. No pics this time, either, but we had a theme again – Blockchain and AI, two of the hottest topics that year. We also promoted a $200 discount that Dea was offering to our community for the StartupGrind conference.

March 2018

March was a pretty busy month, and we met up again, this time at El Rio. We realized that people didn’t want topics or too much of a structure for these meetups, so we ditched that part and evolved into what the group is today. Took us longer that I want to admit, but hey, we got there.

We also promoted a Romanian IT survey this month and Diaspora Invest, an event for people who wanted to return to Romania after living in San Francisco for a while.

April – June 2018

In April, we focused on promoting the Romanian IT global mentorship program, at its second edition. In May, we promoted the RABN get-together at their annual picnic in the South Bay. We also helped Code for Romania organize their event in June.

July – August 2018

That summer we got involved in an anti graft campaign in Romania, helped promote their signature gathering campaign. We also started recruiting for the 3rd mentorship program through Romanian IT. This is when we held our summer mixer at El Rio, great turnout for July.

September – October 2018

We had our Autumn mixer in September, I was still thinking about the right cadence for these meetups to get maximum attendance. After a great meetup in September, we hiked to Alamere Falls that October, albeit we had quite the drought and didn’t see much water. It was fun nevertheless.

October is summer in SF, so we tried a new venue, Zeitgeist, in one of the sunny Fridays. It was fun, but not for casual chats. We kept El Rio as our primary venue.

We also started promoting Code for Kids in October, for their November event in San Francisco.

November 2018

In November, we helped promote the Code for Kids in San Francisco event, where a few of us showed up to find out what they have been working on. Impressive stuff. In Berkeley, there were more Romanian films being screened, so we helped people learn more about those, too.

We did one more hike before the rainy season – this time in Purisima Creek. Great turnout, 7.6mi range. Last but not least, we organized a little Cards Against Humanity game at my place mid month. Lots of fun!

December 2018

We ended the year with a Romania 100 year old celebration and later that month the final official meetup at El Rio.

Overall, we did 22 events, both virtual and in-person. Lots of people, lots of learning, and lots of gratitude for everyone who is part of our community.

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Romanian IT in San Francisco – 2019 retrospective

Later edit: Thanks Andrei for the extra info I missed!

After I set up the Mailchimp list earlier this month, time to complete 2/2 of my Romanian IT in San Francisco bucket list for this year. It’s been a great 2019 and I think it’s worth going through it month by month and seeing what happened in the local community, our events, hikes and announcements, and how the group has grown to 454 members to date.

January 2019

It was a quiet month, with no official events. We helped the Cassiopeia – Zero Robotics high school team connect with a few Romanians in the Bay Area, as they were visiting the US for a robotics competition. We also announced our first meetup of the year, and a visit from one of the Romanian IT founders.

Oana, and the Find My Mentor team, kick-started the 3rd (or 4th?) edition of their program in mid-January. Find My Mentor is a 3-month mentorship program, designed to connect entrepreneurs and tech professionals with mentors, in order to accelerate their personal and professional growth. It featured 30 mentors, and more than 360 mentorship sessions, in over 20 countries. We had several mentors that participated from the Bay Area, including me and Andrei.

February 2019

We had our 1st meetup of the year, thanks for those who showed up. We had a few people traveling in the Bay Area and we were happy to host them at our usual venue, in the Mission District.

Later that month, a few members decided to celebrate Valentine’s day together in San Francisco, at the Emporium SF – no pics.

UiPath also hosted their first meetup in the Bay Area, in Mountain View, which we helped promote via the group. There were three more events we announced in February – Google’s Cloud conference in April (we got free tickets for the community, thanks Victor), a South Bay Romanian IT meetup organized by Ionut and Adrian, and the European Chamber of Commerce May 9 cruise to celebrate Europe day.

Last but not least, Oana, one of the Romanian IT co-founders, decided we should expand to be Romanian IT in USA. Let’s just say the local community wasn’t very happy about the change, but we had to live with it for 30 days, due to Facebook Groups rules

March 2019

This month, we held the first San Jose meetup at the Three Sisters bar (in San Pedro Square Market) and it had a pretty good turnout. We announced our April meetup for San Francisco. I was away in Utah for a few weeks, so things had to be scheduled around that.

We also promoted

  • The Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce 2019 Spring European Pitch Night, where Romania was to have one startup. I’m not sure if anyone from our community attended.
  • A Don Lothrop meetup about his Romanian projects, organized by the Romanian America Business Networking group

This month we were able to go back to our Romanian IT in San Francisco name. Business as usual.

April 2019

We met again at El Rio, but I didn’t take any pics of that meetup. I’m sure we had a blast and that’s why :). We also met at the Easter picnic, so overall it was a pretty busy month.

We also started planning hikes again, since the rain/snow season was coming to an end. With Easter and elections coming up, there were a few more things to promote:

  • Easter picnic in the South Bay, as usual (see pic, via Oleg)
  • Two projects via Alin Zainescu – Teleleu and Code for Romania HackDay in SF
  • Alina spoke at StemEd SF, where a few community members got together
  • Volunteers for the voting precinct & the polling station location for the May European Parliament voting session
  • A Declic / Mircea Bravo GOTV campaign for the May elections

May 2019

May was all about hiking and elections. We went to Berry Creek Falls (12mi), Stinson Beach/Cataract Falls (~8mi) and we also got together to vote and catch up afterwards in the East Bay.

This month, a lot of the focus was on elections, volunteers and the Code For Romania hack day that was to be held on June 1st.

June 2019

We started off the month with pics and videos from the hack day. I couldn’t make it, but a few of members did. We also connected with RoMADE – Romanian Mobile Apps Developers and Experts, an action financed by the Romanian Government and organized together with Romanian Creative Industries Business Federation. They were in San Jose to explore the business opportunities in Silicon Valley.

We then met for drinks again, at El Rio, and afterwards we headed out to the traditional El Farolito. Good turnout, fun night.

Later that month, a few of us connected with Cristian, one of the Meetin VR founders, who was visiting the Bay Area looking to network and potentially raise capital.

July 2019

This month was all about meetups again, with South Bay members getting their second event, with Adrian and Ionut hosting again in the San Pedro Square Market, Downtown San Jose. There was no SF meetup this month, but we promoted more Romanians doing cool things in tech and also kicked off Presidential elections voter registrations.

I had been organizing meetups by myself for a few months now. It was time for a change.

August 2019

The month kicked off with great news, Andrei joined me as co-host and organizer for the Romanian IT community in San Francisco. It was a few months after Mihai had left town and I had been looking for people to help out with event hosting, moderation and other responsibilities.

In August we organized a hike to Rodeo Beach (4.8mi) and the monthly El Rio meetup, which we had to move to the next-door bar, due to a wedding taking place at El Rio! Still great fun and good turnout.

This was the month where we decided we needed a WhatsApp group, so we can include people who went off Facebook. The group link is on the Facebook page, had to remove it from the blog due to spammers coming in. We also started promoting events for a very busy September.

September 2019

This month, besides elections updates and voter registration, we met and hiked not once, but twice each – Angel Island early in the month (6mi), then Coastal and Fox Trails Loop (6.3mi), plus 2x El Rio meetups.

I think by this time we found that everyone’s sweet spot with hiking is around 6 miles. I tried not to go over that so we don’t exhaust everyone after a full day on the trails. Love the feedback!

We also promoted Alianta‘s event in Washington DC, that was organized in October, the 7th edition of the Romanian Film Festival at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, also in October and more voter registration for the November elections.

Towards the end of the month we met with with Tudor, founder of Floating Dots and Studhub, who was visiting the US to look for new partnerships, and grow their development outsourcing business based in Cluj-Napoca.

October 2019

We took a bit of a break in October, with only one meetup at the end of the month, after the 4 events in September. It was great to see everyone again at El Rio.

We continued to help with the elections volunteer recruitment and posting regular updates for the community, as well as promoting the film festival.

We also met with Bogdan and Alex, the founders of Plant an App – a low code development platform for custom business applications. They’re spending some time in the Bay Area, as their company is part of the 500 Startups program (early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator).

November 2019

November was again very busy, with 4 events, 3 meetups and 1 hack day. 2 of the meetups were all about the Presidential elections, that take place in 2 rounds in Romania, usually.

We met twice in South Bay, where for the first time since I had arrived in the Bay Area, we had another polling station. Both were fun, thanks everyone for coming out to vote and chat afterwards!

This time elections lasted for 3 days outside of Romania and almost 1 million Romanians in the diaspora came out to vote.

In November, Code for Romania hosted their second Hack Day in San Francisco, which I managed to miss, again, due to business travels.

December 2019

We hosted a last meetup in mid-December, wishing everyone happy holidays and promising to see each other in the new year

(It poured, so we had a smaller turnout, and Adelina was our host, since El Rio was taken over by some office party with increasingly drunk people).

This month, we also promoted a Romanian night in the South Bay, and a few more movies in Berkeley. Unfortunately, due to rain and cold weather, I had to cancel the last hike of the year, much to the disappointment of a few of us.

Overall, we had a great year, with 19 events, two elections and the bar is high for 2020. Looking forward to more meetups, hikes and more people getting involved in the community. If you know someone who’s looking for likeminded Romanians to hang out with, Romanian IT in San Francisco is a welcoming group, granted we share the same values.

My commitment for next year is that we’ll do at least 1 event in January 2020, #promise! Happy new year!

Categories
Blockchain

Immutability is the foundation for identity

When I was working actively in the blockchain space, one of the biggest debates for the “non-believers” was around immutability and why it matters, especially in the notorious double-spend problem. If you don’t recognize the problem, it’s hard to see a solution or an advantage.

Chargebacks: If chargebacks are not a problem, “immutability is not an advantage of blockchain, it is simply a feature of blockchain. But it is not solving anything, so why put it up as an advantage?”

Government tax numbers: “For instance, I can say that I have a product which makes sure that the government does not arbitrarily change your tax number. Okay. But is there a big problem of governments changing people’s tax numbers? Not in the slightest! So why mention it as an advantage? It is solving a non-existing problem.”

These challenges seem to be very different. But they are not. Both the chargeback problem and the government tax problem described above are about identity. Let me explain how. Chargebacks are about who took my money for the wrong reasons and how I get it back, within a network. The government tax number is about how the government identifies its tax payers so you can be sure that it recognizes you have paid your dues. Both trust the central “ oracle”, the governor of the network or the country administrators/tax collectors. Both are vulnerable to Sybil attacks and can only work with other networks/countries if there is trust and transparency across networks.

Let’s take a step back and talk about identity. There are three forms of identity as of today:

  1. Non-digital identity – think of your birth certificate, your driver’s license, your old passport and other paper/plastic/metal documents
  2. Digital identity – your SSO service, your user management platform, Facebook account, your biometric data on a new passport, your email address, credit cards
  3. Decentralized identity – similar to the digital identity category, but issued and/or stored outside a centralized database, on individual devices/mediums that the owner controls

While the first two are easier to grasp, the third one is still nascent, with a few use cases emerging now in access management, cryptocurrency wallets, for example. You’d be tempted to say that immutability is only key for the decentralized identity category. And you would be wrong. Our world goes through great lengths to make sure that your non-digital and digital identity is unique and immutable, so that you can’t be one person today and another person the next day. This immutability and the identity consistency that it creates is the foundation of our society. You can create long term relationships only if the other person is who they say they are over time and that statement does not fundamentally change.

This immutability attribute is what makes identity possible, not just decentralized identity, all identity. The difference is that you’re not relying on a 3rd party to keep records of who is who, like in the centralized examples. With decentralized identity, you are relying on immutable records of a person’s (or a bot’s, if you like) collection of credentials and their minimum viable verification proof (MVVP). There’s a lot of materials to read on the topic, especially from the W3C, a standardization body that makes the internet interoperable.

Since I brought up interoperability, immutability is a direct enabler of that as it becomes exponentially easier to operate across networks if you don’t have always verify all the actors all over again from scratch. The costs and time to verify drop significantly.

If you’re a blockchain non-believer, or nay-sayer, try thinking about a time you had to redo something all over again, like prove who you are, because there was no easy way to cross networks reliably. It might not be an obvious problem today, but in the future it will speed up and increase the security of travel, payments, building access, virtually any kind of transaction that occurs between two or more parties that need to be identified.

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Categories
Advertising Strategy

Your marketing is boring and it’s killing the business

It’s almost the end of 2019, and there are still a lot of marketers out there that are too afraid to pour some personality into their strategies. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones who created and made “corporate speak” a category.

It’s those who tweet or post on LinkedIn using language that the board or some lawyers reviewed first, so it ends up sounding like all things to all people, or like nothing at all, failing to commit to a storyline.

Sure, it de-risks the post and the company, but it also reduces the possibility of a standout, and in turn, long term success for the brand. That might make sense for a quarter to quarter focused team, but for those who want to play the 5-10-15 year game, it’s quite damaging.

Brands are a lot like people. They can be interesting or boring, on a sliding scale, with 00s of shades of grey. You know an interesting person when you see them – they stand out using a few simple traits – loud voice, strong facial expressions, specific clothes, specific/expert/passion topics they speak about, clear attitudes, strong beliefs. All those flavors define them and help them show their inner uniqueness. The boring one will be the polar opposite – low voice, no facial expression, traditional, conservative clothing, talks about the weather, their commute or some other mundane topic that’s low risk, equivocal attitudes, weak or no beliefs they hold/show.

Obviously, no one is 100% interesting or 100% boring. Sometimes we are both at the same time, depending on the audience. For example, when I speak about cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence or quantum computing around my wife, she tunes out, and tells me outright that I’m boring her and I should change the topic. When I do it with my Romanian IT group, people listen and engage with me on those topics, and soon 2 hours pass without changing the subject.

Interesting people, like interesting brands, are deeply interesting to their target audience and uninteresting to the rest. It keeps the conversation clean – only the ones who care should engage with you and your brand. The rest are time wasters, better have them focus their time and energy elsewhere.

There’s tons of literature out there about how to best do this as a marketer, so I won’t get into that. The problem is not reading it, but putting it into practice, especially in an organization that is inherently risk averse and there are non-marketing gatekeepers on how the brand should materialize externally.

As marketers, we need to let go of our fear of being too out there, too forward or too bold. That fear is what keeps us from being interesting, same as in our personal lives. Sure, there will be people who don’t like the message. Sure, you will make mistakes along the way, and some may argue that this is a sure way to get fired. Not letting go of the fear is the best way to get fired, and not just from the company, but from the entire industry and practice.

Boring marketers have a special place in the world, and that’s not on any top or podium, but in the “looking for a career change category”.

Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash