Gambling.Now!

Great post on Google’s hiring practice, here is a little intro.

Google’s hiring process has been talked about online by many folks and the experience of being a member of Team Google is varied from a great freakin thing to just a bad experience.   While the interview below is fiction, I did have a strange call with Google HR myself in 2005 which I only remember as odd.

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Not very often there is a great piece on why you should know math, but development corporate nails it this The cost of Financial Illiteracy.  I’ve met so many people you can add, let alone read a financial statement

Community, context and interaction.

marketing slides

Our stories as marketers continues to be a theme of late, whether it’s understanding how YOUR history and biases impact your stories and now from Seth, how your EXECUTION is central to the story/brand experience. Below is an excerpt which asserts lack of a story can impact consistency of the brand:

But what if you haven’t figured out a story yet?

Then the work is random. Then the story is confused or bland or indifferent and it doesn’t spread.

On the other hand, if you decide what the story is, you can do work that matches the story. Your decisions will match the story. The story will become true because you’re living it.

Does Starbucks tell a different story from McDonald’s? Of course they do. But look how the work they do matches those stories… from the benefits they offer employees to the decisions they make about packaging or locations. more…

WP-o-Matic – not a good idea during a maintenance window.

visit http://www.spatiallyrelevant.org

While a fairly good piece on China over @ VentureBlog, I take issue on no disclosure of the blog potential in the following:

… But the most interesting discussions, to my mind, were with the leading private investors in China. (Because my meetings with these private investors took place as part of a study trip, there was no expectation that I would blog about the content of our conversations — thus, I have decided to exclude the names of the specific investors so as not to violate any confidences they may have reasonable expected.) These investors gave a surprisingly candid view of venture capital throughout the country — the good, the bad and the ugly.

We have a person, who by all my accounts is a fairly good venture guy – but the lack of sourcing and full disclosure, if credible sources, raises issues. I clearly believe all intentions are well, but I remember international grad school trips and most involve mid-level leaders and govt officials – while interesting folk – not necessarily credible sources or leaders. So the opportunity to maintain integrity is fairly straight forward – fictionalize and abstract the message in total. So I’ll have to just accept the post as a cat’s opinion. So I will provide a fully unqualified set of random thoughts on investing in China.

China Investments

A great deal of energy and investment dollars are migrating to the emerging BRIC economies, with a focus on China. It’s just math – a bunch of people, modernization and free trade, not a very complex formula. There will clearly be great opportunity over time for the majority investors. Over time, these, I suspect, are longer term investments than forecasted.

Markets v. Malls

I have often thought about the delta in why certain landscapes favor commerce over others. I think it may be a simple concept – infrastructure (highways, trains…). Conceptually transactional economies require transit. Port based development and key population centers are spiky examples of the investment. While there may be brand consuming elites living in urban evirons, a less developed reality drapes the majority of the landscape. Uneven development however delivers explosive growth and opportunity. There’s definitely a downside risk on many levels.

Small markets with Explosive growth remain small markets for a while. As an evolving and straining culture attempts to find a path forward in China – it could be volatile for investors with a sprinkle of xenophobic legal systems thrown in.

Happy Foreign Investing!

This blog will be morphing over the coming weeks to speak to the gambling in private equity, technology and the general market watching.  You can keep in touch on the blog, but can also track our activity on twitter @ http://twitter.com/gamblvest