Stats Vs. Soul

The above Facebook status update by my friend Alan Warms caught my eye yesterday.

Rodriguez has been an MVP, will likely hit 800 Home Runs, has 5 tools and a great glove, great run production, speed and career stats. Even at his advancing age, he has pretty good speed. Jeter? He has one thing: Soul. Great heart. Rodriguez broke his contract and wanted to leave the Yankees as Alan wrote, and was welcomed back with open arms and a huge contract. Why? because when the GMs and Arbitrators line those stats up on a sheet, Arod is at the top of the charts. Jeter? No MVPs, no batting championships or home run crowns. The arbitrator might not look on him kindly if it ever came to that. Oh, those 5 World Series Titles? A career Yankee? One of the "core4"? Playoff clutch player? Leaving it all on the field or bloodied in the stands? You can't bet on that for future run production as Jeter ages. This is where the Yankees have gone wrong and, frankly, where much of the business world has gone wrong.



Baseball is a team sport. Fantasy baseball is a statistics game. On a team, in a grueling 162 game season and long playoffs, heart wins more games than home runs. It does not make the highlight reel but it does impact your team/business in a real way. It is not an accident that Clemens, a pitcher with a great fastball and great career stats, won his World Series on Jeter's team. Same for Arod, Sabathia and others. Soul wins games, produces clutch hits and rallies the team to 9th inning comebacks. That is Jeter and it is why he is the most valuable player in baseball. No crises, flashy stats, public marital spats or dramatic run-ins with agents. Just steady as she goes with a feisty competitive soul, loyalty and team spirit.

When I look at an entrepreneur or a business, I am looking for Jeter, not Arod. Building a start up or any business is grueling like a 162 game season and worse. You need a lot of heart to push through tough situations and you need to step up in clutch negotiations and critical product and partner decisions and make the tough call to bring home the run. Your job as an entrepreneur is to make the people around you better, not win the MVP. You want to hire people who are better than you (You can bring Arod onto the team), who leverage your heart and win championship after championship. The flashy VP of Sales may be paid more in the short term but when you win, your equity pays off better and it should be obvious who is the soul of your start up. The business world has gotten too focused on stats and not on what matters, which is soul. When baseball players say that they understand that baseball is a business and hence accept the financial decisions that come with it, they are right. Baseball's business like other business is now, all stats and no soul, and that is what's wrong. I want entrepreneurs and businesses with deep Jeter souls who make everyone better and just win team championships.

Kids...Go Horse Around Under The Table

When I was a kid, I remember going with my parents to a fancy home of the old-school "C family" in the center of Israel. We sat down for lunch at their dining room table, which was a slab of see-through glass on a wood swerving maze base. At one point in the meal, my parents began looking for my younger brother, then 3 years old. They could not find him around the house and then with Mr. C at the head of the table, they looked down through the glass to see my brother smiling and waving at them through the glass. Mr. C was apoplectic and my parents chuckled apologetically. The glass maze table was no place to horse around.

Well, all that is about to change. My sister, who was at the same meal and is now a mother of 7 herself, got tired of telling her kids to stop playing in, around and under the table. In the spirit of "if you can't beat em, join em," she designed these super fun table covers where kids can legitimately horse around under the table. The not-see-through design means your kids will not be smiling up at you like my brother did but it should provide hours of fun for your kids to make mischief and have fun in their own table-house. No more makeshift tent making that drags the table with it, it is all built into the Table Fables product that my sis designed and is now marketed by Nordstrom. You can get the dollhouse version or the school bus one. So if you have kids or you miss those days where you also smiled at your parents from under the table, you can buy them at Nordstrom.com (where it is a featured toys product right now) and start having fun right away.

Limassol, The Internet Capitol of Israel

Here is a trivia question for you: Which city in our region has the highest concentration of Israeli internet people? If you answered Tel Aviv, you would be wrong. Tel Aviv may have the most but certainly not the highest concentration. The correct answer is Limassol, Cyprus, a short half hour flight from Tel Aviv where by my rough count there must be over 1,000 Israelis working in the internet sector.

More importantly, the Israelis working in Limassol have critical skills that Israel's fledgling internet industry needs. They have expertise in scaling internet companies and in marketing because the companies they work for have reached scale. Most of the internet industry in beautiful Limassol focuses on forex trading, porn (companies like Coolvision) and internet gambling, not exactly your Jewish mother's joy and pride. However, these businesses hit scale and the best employees that your entrepreneurial internet business can find come out of these businesses, such as Playtech, 888, Easyforex and others. Israelis are global leaders in online forex and gambling and they have been great training grounds for many internet entrepreneurs and employees.

The question is what can we do to bring this business and these highly skilled people back to Israel. We need their skills locally to jump start great internet entrepreneurial ventures. They are in Cyprus for both tax and regulatory (EU licensing) reasons but it is Israel that is losing out from this. So we need a plan to attract them back. Thoughts?

Great Hi Tech Businesses Like Conduit Also Create a Better Society

For years, I have been involved (but not enough) in a social justice organization called B'maagalei Tzedek. Bmaagalei Zedek is an organization that looks out for those who Israeli society has lost sight of, the invisible people we run into every day. One of the causes that Bmaagalei Zedek has been fighting for is the rights of contract workers or, in Hebrew, עובדי קבלן. We see these workers every day. They are office cleaners, unarmed security guards, and other hourly workers who we run into in our offices and at cafes but we do not really see them or their plights. They are the working poor and are, often, poorly treated by the agencies that hire them and rent them out. These agencies look to reduce the costs of these laborers by not offering benefits and driving down salaries through frequent switching of workers. These are hardworking people, who often work two and three jobs just to finish the month and do not get government handouts or monthly stipends.

On Thursday, I received a call from Ronen Shilo, CEO of Conduit, one of our portfolio companies. The call made me both happy and proud. Ronen announced that earlier that day Conduit had decided to hire the three cleaning people who clean the Conduit office every day and to throw out the agency. By hiring the cleaners directly, Conduit significantly increased their take-home salary and gave them social benefits like every engineer. Conduit also granted these former contract workers stock options! Net cost to the Company? nearly zero. Value to the Company's soul, values and employees? Priceless! They deserve these stock options because the cleaners are responsible for the work environment that lets Conduit employees be so productive and help make Conduit a successful company.

The cleaners were elated, holding back tears of joy when they were formally hired by Conduit. They each hold down a few jobs and this will give them time with their family. Conduit was simply doing the right thing for everyone, yet so few, if any, other companies do this. The people behind Conduit have created an environment at Conduit that values hard work, teamwork, ingenuity and impeccable ethics. Those ethics and values increase the value of the company, our investment and society.

I would like to call on all high tech companies to follow Conduit's example. I know that small start-ups do not have the resources to manage this but any company that can afford a CFO or a VP of HR, should have the management bandwidth to put the cleaning people on the payroll. That is true of large companies and large start ups. The cleaners and other contract workers' salaries are barely noticeable next to the 30,000+ NIS engineer's salary and it makes a real difference in their lives and ours. Let us issue a clarion call to unbond these contract workers from their "agents" and better our society as well. ציון במשפט תיפדה ושביה בצדקה.