Tag: Money

Forever the ball rolls

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The machine in the San Jose airport will forever spark rich feelings of joy.

When I was a child, I watched for hours as the balls rolled, spun, twisted, and jumped, pinging the bells and conking on the wooden blocks. Seven balls – nine in the box, but always with two of them fallen to the bottom, having missed the jump or, more likely, the bounce-pass. For hours and hours, I would watch these balls. And never would I see a ball miss.

I remember the rhythm; the conk-CAH-cohnk of the green one that spins.

A while ago I considered the idea of buying up old dormant brands, then relaunching them for a new generation. But here’s the kicker: focus on the same people, not the same product. Instead of Hush Puppies shoes for a new generation of young folk, it’s Hush Puppies slippers for older people. The name was always the pitch: barking dogs meant aching feet, and the 1958 shoes promised to hush them. The slippers keep that promise at 75. It’s not Lunchables for a new generation of school kids; it’s Lunchables for yuppies.

We’re wrong when we say that old habits die hard. In reality, they don’t die. They simply go dormant, waiting for the trigger to reignite those same neurons.

But the same sound, the same rhythm, the same habits of mind: the same rolling ball machine still scratches that same itch.

The airport has moved the machine to a new location. They’ve rotated it so I now watch from the other side. Still, the sounds and the rhythm are the same. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, like an old warm coat passed down from a parent that still smells like them even after it’s washed. I found it in an old box in the back of a closet. How nice it is to feel the spark return to my eyes.

The Coupon Book

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make more money by giving some away, then charging for what stays scarce.

I’m at the second all-inclusive resort of my life. So why do I feel nickel-and-dimed?

(My family comes together for one of these every summer now, which is a lovely experience. I’m having a great time with great people. This feeling is not a particularly negative impact on my experience; I’m simply enjoying the process of analyzing it.) 

It started at check-in, when the concierge handed me a coupon book. He flagged one asterisk: the $50-off coupon for the resort store needs a purchase of at least $100. I laughed and noted I wouldn’t wouldn’t be using that one.

A coupon book. At an all-inclusive. The whole premise of the place is that I already paid, so nothing else carries a price. A coupon is a price dressed up in a faux discount. The coupon book is a store smuggled into a building labeled “no stores allowed”. 

* * *

Once I noticed the first coupon, I couldn’t stop. $50 off a single spa treatment, which made me wonder what a spa treatment costs. I found the menu advertised in the bar and scoffed: treatments start at $229. I can get an excellent massage in the US for half that, and that’s paying US labor prices, not whatever a masseuse earns in central america. 

This is couponing the Bed Bath & Beyond way: float the sticker high, then hand back a slice, so the discount feels like a gift instead of a markup you sidestepped. It’s comparison control, the price game I keep coming back to. Anchor the number at $229 and $50 off reads as generous. Nobody mentions the seller number that should orient their side of the price: their marginal cost of providing the service. 

And the asterisk gives that number away. The same way Chipotle running a 2-for-1 tells you a burrito nets more than 50%, this resort’s $50 off of $100 in the gift shop tells me the same. They’re not discounting into a loss on purpose. If they can afford to give it back, they were charging too much to begin with.

* * *

The second move is the paid upgrade, and it bothers me more, because it breaks the frame on purpose. (At this resort, that’s the “Star Class” upgrade: your room and food become slightly nicer, and you can book Star Class-exclusive dinner tables.) The whole reason to buy an all-inclusive is to delete the transaction. No prices on the menu, no small voice doing math at dinner. If I wanted the experience of paying for something nice, I would have booked a place where I pay for something nice. The upgrade sells me back the exact friction I paid to be rid of.

* * *

So why build it this way? Why sell “everything included,” then spend the week selling more?

My best guess: once everyone holds the same all-inclusive wristband, everyone wants the same scarce things. The 7pm table at the good restaurant. The shaded poolside chairs. Put a few hundred people on identical footing and they start competing, and anywhere people compete over something scarce, there’s money in tilting the field.

So the resort sells you a basic entry ticket. Then it sells weapons to both sides: the upgrade that jumps the dinner queue, the tier that reserves your chair before dawn. What you’re buying, on top of the vacation, is a position in a contest they built.

* * *

I don’t write any of this with a clenched jaw. I came here to stop running the numbers, and on a vacation the only points worth counting are relaxation, enjoyment, and connection. I’m racking those up, surrounded by people I love. I just can’t switch off the part of me that wants to see the machine.

And the machine is simpler than it looks. If something is free, someone finds the version of it that isn’t, and sells you that. If free, then freemium. Even here? Especially here.

You’re Excellent at Friendship

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To learn what you’re good at, ask other people. Even better, see what people pay you for.

Earlier today, I told a friend he’s excellent at friendship. He was surprised. He’d never thought of himself that way. He asked how I knew.

Here’s how: we’d just been talking about his bachelor party, a roomful of strong, eccentric personalities, every one a distinct weirdo, many of whom would never otherwise share a room. He gets along beautifully with all of them. Holding that many particular people close at once takes real skill. That skill is friendship. He has it without knowing.

This not-knowing is common. The people who are good at a thing are often the last to know it, because unmeasured skills are tough to compare. We can check the scored ones, though even there the ego cooks the books: somehow every poker player says they’re at the 75th percentile. The scoreless skills, friendship among them, keep no count we can read. So we stay blind to our placing within them.

Take the word “driven.” I have found the people who call themselves driven to be, more often than not, the lazy ones, using the word as a permit: “I’m usually such a hard worker, so I’ve earned a little time off.” The genuinely hard worker, meanwhile, tends to grind precisely because they’re convinced they’re too lazy. Their self-image points the opposite way from the truth. The person who repeatedly calls themselves happy is trying to convince someone, either themselves or others.

So most of us don’t know what we’re good at. We learn from outside, from what others reflect back, because the trait is relative and others judge it better than we do. The blindness runs deeper than skill: we can’t see our own traits, and those same traits decide both what we’re good at and what’s good for us.

This distinction gets even tougher when adding internal emotions: I’ve been turning this over today because two companies interviewed me. One piqued my interest immediately. The other, once I learned the details, is the better fit. It’s almost exactly what I’ve already done, less of a stretch. (“I’ve done all these pieces, just not in this precise combination”, I told them.) Being more drawn to the first isn’t evidence that it’s the better place for me. Being drawn to something is how marketing wins. My interest is one ingredient. When running the ikigai exercise, “what do I love?” is one question out of four. Love is helpful. It isn’t the whole answer. Yes, everyone needs passion. But passion can’t buy food. 

Here, what I’m good at aligns with what’s good for me, but they’re disconnected from what I’m drawn to. 

The thing you’re drawn to and the label you claim are stories about who you are, and the story is selling something. Identity has a downside we rarely count.

When choosing between passion and survival; when choosing between love or life, it is the martyr who chooses love. We reward the martyr with fame and acclaim. Pity they cannot spend it.

A Sales Problem, Not a Marketing Problem

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The goal of the game is to make money. You make money by selling. You sell with a playbook, not a bigger funnel.

A person I met yesterday is looking for marketing help. I think he’s wrong. 

He’d paid someone $25,000 to post constantly and drive traffic to his site. He was dissatisfied, given the large outlay (his whole company only makes a few hundred thousand dollars a year). I looked at his website. He doesn’t have a marketing problem. He has a sales problem.

What is marketing, and what is sales?

Marketing is not an intrinsic good.

To a company, money is an intrinsic good. One could reasonably argue that revenue and costs are therefore intrinsic. Even culture – which is incredibly impactful – is only instrumental, since for this particular game, the goal is money. Marketing is also instrumental: what you actually want is to sell.

Take sales and marketing to their logical extreme: 

  • A pure salesperson with no marketing is a traveling salesman knocking on doors. It’s slow and expensive, but it works. 
  • All marketing and no sales is the reverse: every eyeball on earth is on your company, but you have no way to take their money.

So what does a good salesperson actually do? Not just put the product in front of people. For something complex, like a SaaS tool, they’re handling objections, talking through integrations, working out which pain points it solves. They’re getting to the right person: is it the college IT guy, the professor, or the dean? The fundraiser, or the head of the university? Sometimes that means bouncing through a few people to get there.

Sales is also theatrical: taking someone on a journey that ends at the solution to their problems.

Sales is the funnel: wide at the top, narrowing as people move down, with customers at the bottom. People drop out at any stage; the good fits make it down, the bad fits fall away.

Marketing is different. Marketing sits above the funnel and feeds it: catching attention, nudging people toward interest.

And marketing is often much more wishy-washy (I say this as someone who’s worked in it most of my life). It’s about how we want to be perceived, how we want to relate. 

Removing people from the equation: 

  • Marketing is the ads you see on another site.
  • Sales is the checkout flow on the site. 

A sales process is a repeatable playbook for getting someone to buy. It covers:

  • Which personas actually buy
  • What they find convincing
  • What they fear, and how you assuage it
  • The pricing

A salesperson also runs field research: selling in the wild, then coming back with data.

Back to my guy

Let’s say he sells IT software to universities, through what look like channel partners, and that has gotten him to reliable revenue. If you’re a go-getter CEO who was active at your own school, with a big-enough family wired into a few other alumni networks, you can probably close three or four deals on warm intros alone.

So you think: I just need more people in the funnel, then I’ll close them. But if your process is a handful of local channel partners (one runs hackathons, another chess clubs, another debate), more volume does nothing when your hackathon guy doesn’t know how to sell. He can’t expand his close past the set of folks who he understands. Enthusiasm can take you from 0 to 1, but you need a reliable process to go from 1 to N. 

An ideal playbook, once you’ve stood up the sales team, looks like:

  • How to filter for the people worth talking to
  • Which stakeholders to reach
  • The objections you’ll hit
  • How to overcome them
  • Then the soft stuff: rapport, persuasion, all the convincing

So now, my question: 

  • What happens when I tell this guy that he doesn’t need a marketer; he needs a salesperson? 
  • Will he hire me to stand up his sales team? 
  • I bet I could do it. I’m hungry for exactly this sort of role with exactly this sort of impact. The product is one I’m interested in. I’ve done all the pieces that this role has (sales, travel, small-team hustle, bushwhacking in a novel area, coaching); this role is just combining them in a new way. 

I’ve already marketed to him. The question: Can I close the sale? 

Games Played

I saw a play today about the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of Hollywood. I did not expect the play to increase my sympathy toward the investigator’s position. But it did. 

Before the play, my perception of the investigation can be summed up as “it was a witch-hunt”. 

After the play, my new conclusion: Yes, it was a witch hunt. But – as made clear by the Korean War – there actually was witchcraft (Communism), and there actually were witches (people who wanted to replace the US constitutional government with communism). But these people (the Hollywood actors) were not the witches. 

Keep Your Joy Closed?

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Oh, Julian! 

After seeing my favorite Broadway show I have ever seen (Oh, Mary!, starring Maya Rudolph), I was unusually open to the world. Filled with joy and sharing it with the world.

Walking toward the subway, a man in Times Square hands me a flier for his music. I take it and keep walking. He catches up and says, “you won’t shake a black man’s hand?” I shake his hand and keep going. He says, “what’s the hurry?” I say, “I gotta catch the train.” He says, “wait, I gotta sign it.”

Another guy says, “keep walking, it’s a scam.”

The flier-hander retorts: “what’s a scam? A scam is my dick in your mouth!”

I give back the flier and keep walking. I ask the guy who warned me, “what’s the scam?”

“He asks you for money and acts intimidating.”

This wasn’t a random encounter. It’s a scripted hustle running a reciprocity ladder: 

  • The “free” flier creates obligation. 
  • The handshake escalates it. 
  • “I gotta sign it” – him writing my name – makes it mine. 
  • Then the ask plus some menace closes it. 

I don’t think the lesson is to keep my joy closed. What a sad, sad world that would be. 

The last time I had my joy open in Midtown Manhattan, someone punched me in the chest. 

I think the lesson is something closer to: be fast, funny, or fight. I shook his hand; we would have escalated further. I’m pretty speedy: would simply sprinting have been my move? 

The scam and the sadness: that’s the toll for living in the greatest city in the world. 

Oh, New York!

A Conservatory-Trained Beggar

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The goal of the game is to survive. You survive by earning a living. You earn a living by choosing the corner, not perfecting the song.

His sign reads “food for my baby and / my family can you help / me with a job / God bless you”, and hot damn can this guy play violin.

The last time I saw a violinist of such emotional expression, I located her on instagram, spotted she was recently married, and messaged her anyway to ask her out. She did not respond. 

This guy stations on Broadway between 88th st and 89th st, outside the shuttered retail store beside the Wells Fargo. He plucks. He strums. He fingers. He twangs. He draws a crowd.

The crowd contains a woman sitting on her walker, her caretaker, a woman of about 60 who offers me a tissue when she hears me sniffle, and Yours Truly. Not a bad crowd for a horrendous location.

Five children pass with their two adults. They stop. The male adult says “this is Mozart”.

When passing through Lisbon, I met a local trumpeter. He asked where I live. I told him New York. He loves New York. He can earn $800 or $900 per day in 3 or 4 hours of play, he told me. He played on the east side of Central Park, by the fountain where the summer sailboats swim.

This violinist, in 15 minutes, made maybe $5. $20 per hour is not the rate you’re looking for, my guy. You want a spot with greater throughput.

Just as musical skill does not determine a musician’s popularity, musicality does not determine a busker’s success.

A busker sells music. And like any retail in New York, location matters. But his store is even more tailored.

His sign asks for a job. He doesn’t need a job. He needs to make this one work.

He plays a few classical pieces, then a jewish one. He might know he’s on the Upper West Side (a Jewish hub). I wonder if he knows something I don’t know. I don’t think he does. But how would I know? 

I thanked him for decorating my space via a $3 venmo donation. I had just spent $3 on 18 ounces of blackberries. The least I can do is contribute an equivalent amount of thanks to him.

Hold up: he’s now looping. I’ve heard this song before. From him, like 10 minutes ago.

Are these his only songs? His only moneymakers? Does he loop the same 10-minute concert? That would be very New York of him. My first time living in New York, I donated to a guitarist in Central Park when he played a song of emotional resonance to me. I only realized when I returned the following day that he plays that same set on loop because my song has emotional resonance for everyone.

Most of the donations come from passers-by, not from the crowd. The crowd helps: without us, fewer would stop and listen. But this guy is good enough that he would grab attention even if I weren’t here.

Around 15 minutes in, the battery on his backing track died.

Location and preparation: not his strengths. Violin: absolutely.

I once spitballed with a friend the idea of A/B testing homeless beggar signs. What works, where, for whom.

The problem with that business, aside from the ethical qualms: an unreliable workforce. Data collection and reliable money collection: not good.

I wonder how much I could make as a beggar in NYC. If I cosplayed and A/B tested. What is a beggar but an emotional street performer? This violinist creates beauty. The beggar creates pity. A clown creates joy. French beggars prostrate themselves. American ones open doors to Dunkin Donuts in hopes of capitalizing on the reciprocity. 

I bet I’d enjoy A/B testing different begging in NYC. And by “begging”, I include street performing in general. Be a psychic one day, a debater another, a jokester a third.

The performer’s baby watches videos on a cell phone. Its mother (presumably his wife) swipes. The king’s kids just call him dad.

After the performance, the audience member with the tissue introduces herself as Vicky. Vicky tells me if she were eating the blackberries I was eating, she would have spilled them all over herself. I offer her a clamshell of blackberries. She declines. I tell her about my favorite fruit vendor, where they’re only $1 per 6oz clamshell. Vicky tells me the performer is conservatory-trained, from Venezuela. Everyone around her becomes successful, she says. She tells me the violinist used to play a block south. Now he’s here. Vicky asks for my information and I tell her about my trumpeter friend. I approach the performer to scan his Venmo. Vicky tells the violinist I have something to say. I ask him, through a translator: how did he choose this place? He tells me he lives in the Bronx. I say this street: how did you choose this street? He says by walking (which I interpret as arbitrary). I tell him that my buddy the trumpeter used to play at that location in Central Park and made $800 in 3-4 hours. Vicky says she’ll miss him.

I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. I’d like to. But if I don’t, is that better?

The $20 Locker

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Even when this city smacks me, I still see its beauty. 

I love New York’s reasonableness. 

Today I visited a Yankees game. The metal detector dinged on me when I passed. The bag inspector told me I can’t take a laptop inside. He summoned his teammate. His teammate pointed me to a business across the street. He said, “There’s lockers right across the street. They’re not affiliated with us but people use them all the time. When you come back, tell the security and they’ll let you skip the line.” I asked his name. He said Anthony.

The security guards moved the barriers as I shortcutted back through the zigzagging line. I sped across the street. Inside, the worker charged me $20 and ushered me to the back where the lockers live. I placed my laptop inside, pocketed the key, and told him “okay” when he said the locker rental ends 30 minutes after the game. I asked him his name. His coworker said “Ahmed”. He repeated “Ahmed.”

I spent $25 on the Yankees ticket. On one hand, $20 is expensive. On the other hand, the policies are reasonable at every step of the way. Can policy easily distinguish between a laptop and a recording device? Perhaps not. Is this policy public on their website? Yes. Did I check? No, but I could have and that’s my fault. Is there a reasonable solution to this problem? Yes, and it’s not $100 when it very well could be.

When I returned, I told the security guards that I had visited the lockers and Anthony told me to skip the line. My ticket buzzed in, and I retrieved my limited-edition Yankees soccer jersey. For which I paid an additional $10 over the cost of normal tickets. Not because I care about the jersey, but because my father was in town, and he’s always wanted to visit Yankee Stadium. 

Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy the ingredients. 

Rules for Wagering

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To win, follow the rules.

Last night, a new friend challenged me to the video game Pong for $100 a game. He’s a brash guy: aggressive, cocksure; the sort of guy who makes new friends by testing their boundaries. I asked if he knew Pong. He declined to answer. I declined the bet. 

I offered ping-pong instead, also $100 a game. We’d just played doubles on the same team. I’d seen his game. I suspected I could beat him.

Today, I called him a gambler. He corrected me: he doesn’t gamble, he wagers. Gambling is about uncertainty, luck, and chance. Wagering is about wagers (bets). Ironically, this guy’s given name literally means “randomness.”

I don’t enjoy gambling, either. I’ve liked craps once or twice, playing with someone else’s money, but I haven’t enjoyed gambling since a plastic slot machine at 10 years old. I like playing, and I like winning. I don’t gamble because it’s a losing proposition.

Wagering, though, I do frequently. My rules:

Julian’s rules for wagering

1. Don’t wager more than you’re willing to lose. Self-explanatory.

2. Clearly indicate the stakes and the rules. Most wagers fail on miscommunication. Better clear than confused. State the rules and win conditions up front. Repeat the score and the running tally, frequently. Walk over to the other side of the table if the music is too loud for him to hear you call the score. 

3. Get paid. Many wagers fail not from a loss but from a loss of receipt. If you don’t get the money, did you really win?

4. Quit at any time. A different friend doubled the stakes every time he lost, unwilling to stop until he got even. Motivating, sure. But it misreads the value of quitting while you’re behind: the alternative is quitting when you’re further behind.

5. Control your emotions. Anger can make you a better ping-pong player. It can also make you blind to the meta-games. And the meta-games are usually where the money is.

6. You don’t have to earn it back the same way you lost it. When you lose money one way, it’s tempting to win it back the same way. But funds are fungible. If you lose at ping-pong but win at poker, you can stop playing ping-pong. Lean into your comparative advantages: specialize and trade.

Games Played:

I flew out of Chicago Midway today. The metal detector beeped. The agent told me this meant I’d been “randomly selected” for extra screening. I asked if that meant the body scanner. She said yes. I told her I’d opt out. She told me to take off my shoes and run them through, then asked if I’d go through the scanner now. I said no (did she really think removing my shoes would change my opinion?). She summoned a male agent. He asked me to point out my property. I said, “My partner has it.” (She’d known the game was on the second I got flagged. She was capping my downside to enable me to play.)  “All of it?” he asked. Yes. He walked me to a separate lane. I asked how long he’d been a TSA agent. “Since there’s been a TSA.” He started the spiel: “Any sensitive areas, any painful areas?” And then, hot damn, was this guy thorough. As he ran his hands up and down my midriff, Partner made a cupping motion on one of her breasts, seemingly indicating what the agent was soon to do to me.

After the free massage, I returned to Partner with a new glow.

He offered me $4k for 15 minutes of play. 

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I said no. To win the bet, win the games. To keep the winnings, stop while he can still pay.

I’m not skilled enough at ping pong to play for $2k per game. Yet tonight I played ping-pong for $2k per game.

Here’s how:

He asked, “Ping pong?”

I said, “Sure. $100 per game?”

His eyes lit up. “Sure.”

We agreed: game to 21, 5 serves per person, serves must be cross-court.

I won the first game. We played again. I won. A third time: I won.

He said, “Double?”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

He said, “$200 per game.”

I said, “I’m up $300. You want to play for $200 per game?”

He said yes.

I won.

He said, “$500? I need to clear this out.”

We shook hands.

I won.

“$1,000?”

I won.

“$2,000?”

I won.

So now I’m up $4,000. And the biggest danger in this spot is the guy not paying. Because I’d pay a $4,000 debt if I had one. I only make bets I’ll cover. So if he doesn’t pay his debt, he was free-rolling me the whole time. (“Free-rolling” is when you have the ability to win but no ability to lose. If he would collect upon a victory but not pay upon a loss, he’s free-rolling me for the bet.)

I also 1) don’t want him to feel shitty, and 2) don’t want him to stiff me.

So when he says he wants to play for $4k, I know he’s steaming. I know he’s fuming. He’s physically pacing at the base of the ping pong table like Chris Rock on stage. And I don’t know if he’s someone who will actually pay his debt. If he is, we can play for more later. If he isn’t, I don’t want to gamble anymore.

The game is no longer ping pong. The game is: will this guy pay off an $8k debt? If not, I’m taking my ping-pong ball and going home. 

Life Advice for the Laid Off

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To win, see the silver lining. To see the silver lining, get rained on.

Back in college, my roommate set me up on a date with the woman who is now his wife. She texted me earlier today asking for advice. Her husband was laid off in one of those massive rounds you’re hearing about. Here’s what I said:

  • People are rarely laid off from their perfect-fit, dream job. This could be a great opportunity to find something you care about more. Getting laid off is often something very stressful, but also something people are very happy about in retrospect.
    • Another friend lost his job last year. After months of tough (and often disheartening) searching, he found a job that aligns with what he studied in college. His previous job delivered a paycheck. His new job fits his values. It’s no coincidence that those people wanted him: they share values and interests, and we want to be around people with whom we share values and interests.
  • List your values, stack-ranking them. How important is it to you to stay in the house you’re in? More or less important than the industry you work in? Reasonable people might have different preferences. Only by knowing your values can you decide in accordance with them.
  • Venn diagrams are your friend. For him, the intersection could be philosophy, theater, physical awareness, and getting along with everyone. It might be a specific niche, but someone will pay you for it. Are you willing to travel for it? That’s why you need your stack-ranked values.
  • Don’t be the best: be the only. Don’t seek a job where you’re the best; find a job where you’re the only. If you lack competition, people will reward you for solving their specific need.
  • Our economy is currently in a big ol’ unpredictable cluster. (One of my favorite financial newsletters wrote about this the other day.) Consider what bets you’re willing to make. I’m taking out long-term, fixed-interest-rate debt on an income-producing asset. I could definitely be wrong (and I don’t have the license to give financial advice), but it’s a bet I believe in.
  • If you want help structuring your freelance work, give holler anytime. (I’ve helped a few freelancers make meaningfully more money without changing the work itself: just the structures around it: pricing, packaging, billing, contract drafting, and the like.) 

Half of advice is the advice itself. The other half is listening. The third half is being there for someone: kind, present, and caring. And the fourth half is knowing when to stop. 

Games Played

A recurring ledger of games observed in the wild

  • The Global Entry agent at O’Hare Airport hands you a laminated card to carry through baggage claim, then to hand to another agent upon exit. How can this possibly be the best system we’ve developed?
  • Groceries in Chicago are like $80 where the same amount would have been like 20€ (~$25) in France. And you have to use the app to clip the annoying little digital coupon. This digital coupon bullshit is so annoying that it would motivate me to shop at a different grocery store entirely.
  • I have always believed that laundry is best done naked so one can wash all of one’s clothing. When following this strategy at a guest house in a foreign city, one should recognize beforehand that one will be locked in one’s room for the duration. And may God have pity on you if the laundry machine breaks.