Category: Career in the Collaborative Age

How Being an Angel Investor Requires Developing Some Personal Rules

I am a modest angel investor, still with more than a dozen investments in the past 5 years, and also an active member of a business angel association. Therefore I am always keen to read about the practice and possible alternative paths. In this excellent post ‘A Weird and Wacky Approach To Angel Investing‘, Darmesh Shah reveals an interesting approach with some useful learning points.

Of course Dharmesh Shah is a very rich entrepreneur and therefore Angel Investor, (and write checks much bigger than the ones I can afford), still I find that his approach has got nice points to it. Basically he seeks to minimize time spent, and therefore:

  • He performs absolutely no due diligence but relies on a judgment on the team
  • He does not negotiate deal terms or gets involved in negotiations
  • He does not invest in later rounds as a matter of principle
  • He always sides on the side of the founders
  • He keeps his investments separate from his main company and role

And this seems to have worked for him in his specific conditions, including in terms of returns on investment.

On some aspects I believe he is quite right – there is no way you can do due diligence on an early stage startup apart from judging the team, and it is always better to stick to the side of the founders and the general objectives of the company. However I tend to personally get more involved in a handful of investments, out of interest or friendship, and I do sometimes participate to bridge rounds (however, never to later rounds as the interest as a business angel then gets quite diluted in terms of possible returns).

In general, I observe that becoming a more frequent business angel one has to develop some rules to minimise time spent and I am currently in this process too.

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How Some Companies Now Declare the Conventional Work Week Dead

This article ‘Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on‘ sets the scene for some transformation of the work environment in the wake of the Covid crisis (this was as a reaction to a Salesforce post itself ‘Creating a Best Workplace from Anywhere, for Everyone‘).

The idea is that while most employees will still be encouraged to drop by the office 1 to 3 days per week, they will be given far more flexibility in their work hours and conditions than previously. Some will even be allowed to work fully remotely. “An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks“

Fully office-based employees are now expected to be only a very small percentage of the workforce and even for them, more flexible workhours may well be the norm.

As I have often said in this blog, crisis do accelerate changes and this is definitely one that is due to happen, in particular as we work increasingly globally through videoconference and across time-zones.

The way we relate to our work, how much time it takes in our day, where and when we work, is due a complete overhaul. The 9 to 5 arrangement of the Industrial Age is now obsolete.

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How Our Personal Brand Is Not What We Are Showing Off

In this excellent post ‘Personal Brand 2020 – Document The World (Not Yourself)‘, Mitch Joel makes the point that there is much confusion between personal brand and what we show on social media.

“Your personal brand is the quality of your work, your professional output, and how it has helped another organization (or individual) improve their current business situation (or how they think/operate).” And that’s not quite the same as what we show off or share on social media.

Mitch Joel then makes sure we understand the difference between personal brand and vanity: “Your personal brand is not vanity. It’s your thinking.”

Those that define well their personal brand and communicate accordingly will have clearer way of presenting themselves to the world. Let’s be strategic on this and not share whatever pleases. In the new world as in the previous one, building a personal brand requires thought and discipline.

Your personal brand is not your presence on social media. It is rather what value to bring forth to the world. There is a huge difference, and we all need to understand it.

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How We Should Have a Diversified Portfolio of Gigs

In the interesting book ‘The Gig Economy‘ by  Diane Mulcahy, she describes how we all should develop a diversified portfolio of gigs to succeed in this new economy.

“Diversifying our work reduces our risk, opens up new opportunities, expands our networks, and develops our skills. Diversifying our interests brings balance and variety to our lives and gives us a way to explore our passions, nurture new interests, and satisfy our curiosities.“

Her point is that in this portfolio, we should have profitable gigs and also gigs we don’t do for money – at least for now – and serve as exploration. “They could accomplish personal and professional goals and achieve a balance between money and love, play and work, passion and pragmatism“.

Some of those gigs should be pilots gigs we use as test benches: “Having a portfolio of gigs allows us to create low – risk opportunities to experiment with new ideas and new opportunities. An experimental gig lets us test an opportunity and if we find we don’t like it, we can drop it and try something else. By using gigs to create small pilot tests of opportunities, we create the option to either continue and invest more if it’s successful or stop and move onto something else if it’s not.”

Having a diversified set of interests and activities (gigs) appears to be a key to risk management and success in the new gig economy. What about you? Do you have such a portfolio including some pilot or emerging activities?

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How Instability of Income and Occupation is not New

In the interesting book ‘Hedge‘ by Nicolas Colin, the issue of career in the new Collaborative Age (which he calls ‘Entrepreneurial Age’) is addressed. “The mark of the Entrepreneurial Age is greater instability at every level . It leads to permanent fluctuations in households ’ sources of income . Today’s workers alternate overlapping periods of training , wage – earning , starting a business , looking for a job , working as a freelancer.”

This obviously seems a significant departure from the Industrial Age stable wage-earning model that would require substantial changes in the setup of our social security nets, and in our psychology.

But is that really such a big change compared to the current situation? I observe a lot of my friends that went into more conventional careers being now retrenched or otherwise deemed redundant and who actually feel a bit lost because they were not prepared to this instability. The fact that people are made redundant when they reach 45+, in particular in management roles, is not new, but it is often underestimated or not talked about. However it has always existed due to the pyramidal organisation of the corporation. It has just maybe been accelerated in the later years due to more frequent restructuring, mergers and acquisitions. Thus, although it accelerates, this instability is not new. It is just that we are not psychologically prepared for it by society.

I find from my experience that it is actually all in the psychology. I have started my own consulting company at 40, instead of continuing a conventional career in the management of established companies. It has taken me some years to get used to the ups and downs, adjusting my personal system to have sufficient reserves in case of crisis, and it is now not a problem any more (even with Covid-19!).

Thus, be prepared for instability of income and occupation. But that is not new, and it is just that we need to be more prepared for it psychologically than what is usually recognized.

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How We Need to Have Principles to Protect the Long Term

I like this Seth Godin post about having principles: ‘Principle is inconvenient‘. It reminds us that principles is helping us keeping a longer term and navigating short term temptations. It is all about the short-term vs the long-term.

“A principle is an approach you stick with even if you know it might lead to a short-term outcome you don’t prefer. Especially then. It’s this gap between the short-term and the long-term that makes a principle valuable.”

I also find that principles are a significant help against decision-making fatigue. Strong principles avoid having to use significant resources for taking certain decisions, and this keeps us the right energy to navigate through daily issues.

Be clear on your principles. They are key to the protection of your long-term impetus.

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How Surrounding Yourself With the Right People is Essential to Start Something New

In this interesting post ‘Early Work‘, Paul Graham examines what is holding back people from doing great work. And he identifies that it is mainly “the fear of making something lame“, unremarkable, mediocre.

“Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don’t seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don’t. Most people don’t even reach the stage of making something they’re embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They’re too frightened even to start.”

As Paul Graham mentions there is an increasing institutional support to people starting new things (business angels, incubators…) and this is going in the right direction.

He points out interestingly however that there is another social effect that needs to be overcome: “If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you’ll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.”

The key is thus as always to surround yourself with the right people to instill the right level of confidence and get the right support to go through the ‘lame’ phase.

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How To Address Your ‘Freedom in the Mountain’ Yearning

Escaping from the turbulent city life to rebuild oneself in a remote, quiet corner in the countryside or in the middle of the mountains is a widespread aspiration, as demonstrated by its popularity in works of fiction in books and on the screen. I must confess I do suffer from it and am hoping to follow this wish as soon as possible, and hopefully quite sooner than retirement. Luckily in this post ‘Find Freedom of the Mountain in Everything You Do‘, Leo Babauta explores how to address this longing at your current home. It’s all about your feeling of freedom.

“What we (and many others) crave is not really the mountain, but freedom. Simplicity and space and the liberating feeling of freedom. We think if we simplify and let everything go and get our lives free of the burdens, we’ll feel free. But what I’ve found is that getting rid of everything and living a simple life doesn’t necessarily give you that freedom.”

“A teacher a few years ago gifted me with a liberating idea: find the freedom in your current life, without having to change a thing.” There is more detail in the post about to achieve this state of freedom in your current situation without moving to this remote un-connected location of your dreams.

Although I believe this post only addresses one side of the yearning (the other side being to live at a slower pace, in a less crowded location and without the traffic jams and dense public transportation), it provides quite an interesting insight into this widespread yearning (I do not agree with the term fantasy used by Leo Babauta).

Anyway it is worth remembering that we can do much to increase our sense of freedom where we are right now geographically or otherwise, and that we should focus on developing it.

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How Building Companies Is Still Needed Beyond Freelancer Networks

In today’s collaborative economy, there is a real question in certain service industries of the interest of building corporations instead of just relying on a network of freelancers. This post by Valeria Maltoni ‘Why Build a Company‘ sheds some light on this important question: in fact, only established companies can act in a longer timescale, and this remains a social requirement.

Corporations are of course needed when substantial capital investment is required like in the heavy or light industry of the Industrial Age; but in the services economy where capital investment is minimal, the question remains open and controversial. I know quite a number of organisations that rely mainly on animating freelancers to deliver services. On the other hand, I have build my own service companies as being mainly companies with partners and employees, and if we do use freelancers, it is only sparingly to complement rare competencies.

Valeria Maltoni makes an excellent point about timeframes. “The destiny of our species depends on our ability to survive on different time scales.” And companies have a different scale (years) compared to freelancers (days, months). Their project is to developing something over years and even sometimes generations.

She quotes “Corporations are entities that can transform and dissipate socially useful energy throughout society“. “Building a company is creating the vessel to hold value“, and this value can have many dimensions beyond the financial. In building my companies I certainly take a longer time view to deliver some kind of long standing value to the world.

Even in the Collaborative Age, the core of corporations to develop and keep value on the longer term will remain required. There may be more freelancers and people flowing from project to project, but some longer-term value receptacles must remain.

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How the Gap Created by IT Proficiency Will Increase

In the debate about how future employment will look like, this The Conversation post takes a clear side: ‘Don’t fear a ‘robot apocalypse’ – tomorrow’s digital jobs will be more satisfying and higher-paid‘.

Based on research, the authors have found that “workers in occupations that rank higher in IT intensity earn more than demographically similar peers in other occupations – and that this earnings gap has been growing.” – and that the wage gap is more related to IT intensity than actual study level. Also, the authors have found that “jobs that require greater interaction with technology tended to score higher in quality, particularly in terms of measures like career advancement.”

This paper seems to me quite biased and carry actually the inverse conclusion of its title. One can expect that of course, people will advanced IT skills will be quite well compensated and will have high job satisfaction in a more automated future. But this only serves to prove that the gap between this new elite and the rest of the population will increase. It does not address the fate of the employees which job can be easily automated and delegated to robots, or who do not have the right IT proficiency.

Increasing the IT proficiency across the young generation is certainly a priority. Making sure IA does not upend our society is another that needs to be deeply understood.

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How to Leave a Current Client in the Midst of a Services Project

In this post ‘On quitting a freelance gig‘, Seth Godin tackles the issue of how to leave a current client because the relationship is not satisfying. For me, the principles of this post do not just apply for freelancers, they do also apply to all professional services firms.

The gist of the problem: “Freelancers need to worry about doing the right thing as well as maintaining their reputation. Leaving a project in midstream hurts your reputation, and your promise needs to mean something. But sometimes we express our fear of change by sticking around longer than we need to and longer than we promised to.”

It can happen that there is a client mismatch between what we can offer and our values, and how the client behaves or simply, how his needs evolve. This mismatch can be from the start and not have been identified in earlier business development stages; or it can develop over a longer intervention. In any case, it is important to be able to decide to stop the relationship if it can be damaging.

First, to avoid this situation, there needs to be a thorough assessment of the client culture before taking the job. This is not always easy, so we also generally start with a limited intervention which serves both for us and the client as a discovery. This gives the possibility to part ways without having to terminate a longer contract. Similarly it is important to make sure your contract has a regular meeting clause at each stage of the project, where it can be stopped by any party after having assessed the results so far. And finally should you decide to part ways, it is nice to provide the client with a contact or a reference of someone that can take over.

Leaving a client in the middle of a services project is not the best situation. It needs to be prepared and properly timed. Still sometimes this is unavoidable to escape destructive relationship, and we need to recognize the possibility.

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How to Deal with the Gig Economy

The book by Diane Mulcahy ‘The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want’ provides an oversight of the changes in the modern employment market, and pieces of advice about how to get successful in that game.

Before quoting the main principles of the book, I need to emphasize that it is quite hard to become successful in the gig economy, as it is in any other endeavor. But even more so because the individual performance can be expected to follow a power-law curve as in any complex market, with the top performers pocketing much more than the average performer. It requires a lot of focus and effort, and many will struggle. Nevertheless, here are the principles recommended and developed in the book:

  1. Define Your Personal Vision of Success
  2. Diversify and expand your network
  3. Create Your Own Security net
  4. Connect Without Networking (decide if inbound or outbound marketing is best for you)
  5. Face Personal Fears by Reducing Risk
  6. Take Time Off between Gigs
  7. Be Mindful About Time – focus on what matters
  8. Be Financially Flexible by restructuring your financial life
  9. Think Access , Not Ownership
  10. Save for a Traditional Retirement . . . but Don’t Plan on Having One

As you can see in the above, a lot of advice is actually on changing one’s definition of success and making sure that your financial situation is flexible and resilient (or even considering living with less income on average). It is somewhat defensive at times. I tend to believe that entering the gig economy is a personal choice that needs to correspond to a flexible way of life, and that many people may be overwhelmed by the effort.

I believe we have not yet found the right social model for the gig economy. While I am convinced that in the future there will be more flexibility in the workplace and in terms of career, the economy is not yet mature to allow this to happen with the right social support network.

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