77. "Pata Pata" is the name of a dance
we do down Johannesburg way.
Good morning
You can request a copy of all your data you have submitted to facebook.
I am not looking forward to it, but it is a record of what is available and what you have put out there.
There is a lot. Too much.
Anyway I got married in the eyes of the wider community, and our first dance was to the amazing Miriam Makeba.
It was a most amazing day. The event was where my past surfaced with a speech from my best friend and I included graphs in my speech.
The takeaway is that sometimes, a 1000 words can simply be an image. My wife is brilliant and is a shining light who spends 13% of our time listening to me moan about the state of our society.
Back to business.
Enjoy the read.
Nish
Financial resilience
If I was in government, I would have resilience as a theme.
My lack of faith in state organisations to handle affairs is rooted in the idea that they are human. I am not going to rely on the government to look after me/my finances in retirement and the now.
I need to build a framework of resilience to ensure our family will be ok. Simply having money deals with money problems, and frees up choices and time.
I have no debts. Leveraging finance can be useful if it generates returns later on.
The Mauritian government has raided bank reserves and has created a sovereign wealth fund managed mostly by the Bank of Mauritius.
This is all well and good. I can tell you right now what is in my portfolio, but we are leaning in too heavily in Mauritius and subject to Mauritian economic problems.
Notice the difference.
If going down this route, Mauritius needs to make their investments resilient with some sort of ratio with outside investments, with a small percentage of earnings going back to the Bank of Mauritius.
More worryingly is the risk of abuse of power of the fund due to the concentration in the Mauritian economy.
The art of listening
“We have two ears and one mouth, therefore we should listen twice as much as we speak.”
Zeno
Listening is a skill. Something I need to work on.
Technology
Two decades of my life have been spent protecting an ever growing amount of people from online threats. I remember turning up to interview at 3 houses joined together, battling for working space with the chief operating officer, a brilliant South African who had fought against Apartheid and was a master of disruptive practices (he now advises and chairs a number startups at various stages of funding). I joined at a time where the company was starting to scale, and America was our newest market.
We built something, something which protected people, the more customers would sign on board, the more we looked after them, we built out other technologies which customers would buy. The leadership was inspirational being led by two founders who were on their second and third businesses. My colleagues were an international group of superstars many of whom became friends (fuck you Brexit).
Software as a service allows for quick adoption and quick scaling.
There is no doubting that Elon Musk has changed industries, but he is clearly an outlier and an a manipulative arsehole.
Would I work for an arsehole?
Old Nish - Hell yes - let’s see what I am made of
Current Nish - Depends on the mission.
About me
This is where I put annoying descriptors, but simply I like looking at problems, fixing them, and asking questions. Outside of this I love film, music and books. I can be found on twitter and instagram and linkedin.
Thanks for reading Becoming sustainable! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. I also give away books which I might have bought twice.
Edited on the fly.