Chaos and Coherence in Business

My old company was acquired by Ant Financial a few months ago. I’d known for some time, of course, but only recently caught up with my old boss to celebrate. I told him about the business adventures I’d been on after my Judo experiment. He told me about the journey that led to the acquisition, and what he’d been up to ever since. (He was effectively retired for about a year before the acquisition; it was not like things were very different for him, materially speaking.) But he was — as always — up to interesting business adventures. We took some time to reflect on our journey together.

Those of you who have been reading Commoncog for a few years know that I cut my teeth building a Point of Sales company in Vietnam and Singapore from late 2014 to the end of 2017. I helped my old boss bootstrap it from nothing to S$4.5 million in annual revenue. I explained how we did this in Fundraising Without Investors — an essay I waited years to write because the strategy that we discovered together was still in play after I’d left the company. It was also an essay that I left behind the Commoncog paywall, for obvious reasons: I didn’t want the story to spread