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Personal Health and Fitness as a Business

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve been up and down in weight a lot in the last 5 years. The lower limit was 96kgs at some point, the upper one was 115kgs. If the start would’ve been 115kgs and the end, today, 96kgs, I’d be happy. But it wasn’t like this.

In November 2012 I was 97. In May 2013, 109kgs. In January 2014, 96kgs. In July 2014, 112kgs. And it continued with the ups and downs until now, when I’m 112kgs. Again. Not good.

So I’m trying a new approach: I’m looking at my personal health and fitness as I look at a business. Because I’m good enough at business, I should be able to put together a more coherent effort if I think in terms of budgets, resources and expected results.

First step:

Defined my targets. Both in terms of KPIs and expected time to execute on them. Obviously, I have the ideal version and the “I’m ok with” version. The ideal is 90kgs in 12 months. The “I’m ok with” version is 100kgs in 12 months. Everything while building a process that keeps my in shape for the longer term. I’ve lost 20kgs in 6 months previously. It wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t a marathon, but a sprint, unfortunately.

Second step:

I set the time I allocate to this effort. While I usually go full throttle in every business I start, this time I can’t really do the same. If you want to become a nutrition specialist or a trainer, I can understand your 8-10-12 hours/day focus. I want something else in life, so I need to be able to do everything around my health/fitness in up to 2 hours a day the most (on average). Including cooking and exercise.

Third step:

I look at all the things I don’t know about health and I don’t want to spend time learning. And I looked for people to help me with it. I want my focus to be on executing, for the moment, not on learning new skills. This is why I looked for a personal trainer and a nutritionist. Luck would have it that I found both in one person (at least for the moment). The next specialist might be a cook. I hate cooking. Yeah, I do. Though, for the moment, I’ll do it. Maybe I’ll enjoy it, at some point. Last week was full of bland food, though. Just saying.

Fourth step:

I established a budget for the next 12 months. I made it big enough so that I can test lots of things if I want to, but I didn’t make it too big so that I become less resourceful. When you have too much money, as a business, you end up throwing money at problems instead of actually looking for a long term process as a solution. I’d probably do the same thing now if I put more money to it (I still think about hiring a cook full time). Still, there’s enough money in the budget to make it a good investment. And, when it pays off, it will be the best investment I’ll ever make.

Fifth step:

Stopped falling victim to the “shiny object syndrome”. It’s surprising that I can usually control this when it comes to business, but I’ve never been able to do it in my personal life (with some exceptions). As such, I will keep at the personal trainer/nutritionist route for the next 6 months, at least. While all those other diets (slow carb, low carb, keto and so on) work for others, they didn’t work for me. Yes, I lost kilograms (a lot), but I didn’t manage to create a habit out of it so I put them back.

Sixth step:

I’ll take one step at a time towards getting good habits. Right now I’m working on going to the gym every day 4 times a week, no excuses, while also cooking my own food. I didn’t really cook my own food for the last 15 years, so it’s not gonna be easy. But I need to because every time I tried to create a habit out of eating better I quit because it took too long to get healthy food.

Don’t think I cook 10 courses meals. Just simple things like eggs, salads, different ways to cook meat (I started to enjoy steamed hake a lot). I also look at things I can change in my diet based on my different locations during the day. I try to make it as simple as possible, so I have a small number of choices to choose from. In time, I’ll add more, but I want to have a basic baseline I know I can come back to every time when things get hectic.

Conclusion:

That was my thinking at the beginning of June. I executed the plan and now I have a gym in Cork I go to 4 times a week, a personal trainer that’s also a nutritionist, and I’ve started to cook fish and vegetables.

One thing: nobody actually tells you how the kitchen looks like after “cooking”. Fuck me, the first time I tried I used like 12 plates, 5 bowls, 3 steamer pans, 1 oven… What. The. Hell?

I’m now about 2 weeks in the program and it’s still difficult. I cut down the time to cook food to about 1-1:30h/day. I can go through preparing everything for my meals in just 30 minutes for the entire day, if I use simpler ingredients – like replace the protein from meat with low fat cottage cheese or an egg white omelet. Exercise is also a little bit more difficult, so I need just a hair more convincing that I want to put myself through “torture”. Overall, though, I’m feeling excited, I want to put in the time, I want to move forward.

This is it. I’ll probably update you from time to time to how my new “business” works, so stick around.

——-

The photo is a skating ring in New York. Even though it was really cold, people found the time to have fun and, yes, exercise. I should pay more attention.

The eerie silence of Facebook: Unfollow all

By Bobby Voicu

facebook unfollowed all accounts

I don’t have that many friends on my personal account on Facebook (I’m not talking about the page). Still, they are about 100-ish. People that write updates, that put links, photos and the likes. But I don’t see any of those. Yes, the screenshot above is how my personal account looks like. Sometimes there’s an ad there.

In September – October last year I unfollowed everyone on Facebook.

The reason? Well, every 2-3 minutes I would take the phone, open it using TouchID and press the leftmost icon on the third row from the top. Yeah, that was Facebook’s app icon. Then I’d pull the screen down to refresh. And lose myself for the next several minutes. It didn’t matter if I was talking to anybody: my parents, my girlfriend, my sister or, even worse, my niece. I just got lost in a black hole, all of a sudden.

At some point, though, this was happening so often that nothing would’ve changed on Facebook. I still did it. It was time to stop.

So I unfollowed everyone, as I was saying. I moved the app’s icon to another folder on the phone (I still need Facebook for access to business accounts, this is why I can’t delete my account, though I thought about it for a little while). Then I changed the icon in position 1 on row 3 with the Weather app icon.

And YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT :)

For the next week or so I could tell you exactly what the weather would be for the next 10 days. Yeah, you asked me and I was the weatherman. Because my habit was still there: pick up the phone, unlock it by TouchID and then open the app in that specific position on the screen. And it took several seconds for my brain to understand that I already know what the weather will be like.

So, yes, social media plays games with our brains.

Almost a year in, I don’t open Facebook that often and, even more important, I don’t pick up my phone as often as well.

I also love that when I meet with my friends I don’t really know what they’ve been up to so we need to talk about it and I’m genuinely surprised most of the times. I still talk on messenger with many of them, so I know the most important going-ons in the lives, but I don’t see random pics, I don’t see random links.

Another side effect is that I don’t write that many personal things on Facebook anymore. I do, from time to time, but my time in the app dropped dramatically. I still get some notifications, I use Facebook Pages a lot, so I still got on Facebook. I just have a much more clutter-free life.

Were my friends unhappy with this move on my side? Some. There are some that will find out now? Yes. Will it change the way I use the app? No. I enjoy my new found freedom :)

—————

Photo: my Facebook account at the beginning of a Sunday morning.

The delusion of investor supported startups

By Bobby Voicu

I was reading a Reddit thread the other day. A guy was doing an AMA about his startup and had this to say about it:

As a result of this, we are now a pretty rare breed of business as we started with no finance, no VC Funding etc etc, we did it the hard way and are building it the ground up. We use our profits to grow and have no outside help.

Most of the businesses people build are not VC funded or started with huge financing. Most of the businesses are started with some savings and a lot of time put into growing it. I looked for some information on it and I found the infographic here, that gives you a better image of how people finance their own entrepreneurial endeavors.

I didn’t want to point fingers to this guy, though. He’s not the only one that thinks that most entrepreneurial initiatives are heavily funded by outside investors (especially semi-pro and professional investors, like angels and VCs). There are lots of people that think this (at least in the circles I move and read of). And I think we’re a little deluded. And I say “we’re” because I think I’m also heavily biased toward invested startups, as well. After all, MavenHut raised several rounds and this is how it got to be successful.

What’s wrong with the invested startup delusion?

It’s bad thinking that you can’t really start anything if you don’t have outside investment. That all you need is an idea and someone to put $50k-$100k-$500k-$1M in and you’re set, you’re gonna change the world. Because you should focus on doing something and improving your product. Instead, the wanna-be entrepreneur will waste time running after potential investors, “networking” the hell out of all the events in their immediate (and not so immediate) area and, in general, being annoying. Really, have you ever had a guy that never raised a dollar in his life explain to you how to raise money from VCs? Even if you’ve done this several times in the last years? It really gets on your nerves at some point.

Being annoying aside, even more important is that you deprive yourself of a lot of experiences that will generate the great ideas that will help you get a good company off the ground.

And I talk from my own experience: I started doing “business” online in 2005 with no savings or money whatsoever. I was lucky my sister allowed me to stay in a room in her apartment for a while, but that’s all I had going for me. I looked for work on what is now Upwork, this helped me understand SEO, that helped me understand WordPress, that started me on blogging, that led to a car blog that I wanted to monetize through a racing game that went nowhere. All this took about 6 years. By the beginning of 2012, I started a new project, a platform for 1 vs 1 single player games, with 2 guys that I worked with at the second version of the racing game I told you about. The project would later become Solitaire Arena and MavenHut. Without a doubt, the final result changed my life a lot for the better.

My entire online experience came from starting “something” online without any kind of financing. Yes, MavenHut was eventually financed by a VC and I’m happy for it. I still think starting an investor supported startup should be the natural evolution of your experience with entrepreneurship, not the start of it.

The next time you hear someone saying they just need a “small” investment and they’ll change the world, slap them across the head and send them to ask for investment from their close friends and family (the talked about FFF, the third being fools). If they can’t convince someone that knows them and should trust them, why do they lose time trying to convince someone they don’t know?

Finally, I know this won’t change, people will still dream about the VC fairy instead of just doing something with the resources they have. But if I get to convince at least 1 person to start anything, my job’s done ;)

Oh, and a plug for my Curated Reading List, where I often add articles about bootstrapped businesses. Subscribe and see for yourself.

P.S.: my sister got handsomely remunerated for the “investment” she’s put in more 10 years ago when she gave me and my cat the smallest room in her apartment. The cat didn’t care about rules, he got the entire apartment as hunting ground the next day. I didn’t :)

Food for Thought: Over Invested, Less Objective

By Bobby Voicu

“Because of the amount of money I’d spent, I felt incredibly invested in making sure the car was always perfect. It made me realize that most rich assholes are just too protective of their stuff.”

I’ve found this quote on the okdork blog, in this article. While Noah Kagan talks about buying a $70,000 Jaguar F-Type (which in Ireland is about €140,000), I think we feel the same about anything that we invest a lot in – either money or time.

What happens when we invest too much in something, relatively to what we can afford? We become overprotective. We stop being objective, all of a sudden. We overvalue the thing even more. It also becomes a defining part of us. And I don’t think it’s good.

It happens when you invest money in a business, as well. The business you invested the most money in gets the most of your time, even if it might not be the best business you invested in.

It happens when you invest time in relationships: it’s gonna be a lot more difficult to see the problems with your childhood friends or your long term relationship.

Food for thought: when is it too much for you? Financially and time wise?

RebelBio mentoring in Cork, Ireland

By Bobby Voicu

For the next 3-4 months I’ll mostly be in Cork, Ireland, where I’m mentoring the teams for RebelBio, a BioTech accelerator that SOSV has created here about 4 years ago. SOSV is, as some of you may know, the investor in MavenHut and our partner there since 2012.

I will actually act as an “entrepreneur in residence”/”I understand what you’re going through” person here for the newly minted entrepreneurs, while I’m also trying to understand BioTech and what it means in terms of investment and entrepreneurship.

Of course, BioTech means life changing things, as well: solving humanity’s problems like cancer, food shortages, food poisoning, just to give you an idea of some of the things these teams are working on. The thing is, though, I will never be a scientist, but I can be an investor, a mentor, an adviser or, why not, at some point in time, a co-founder of a BioTech company. And I want to understand what it means. This is why I’m not necessarily focusing my attention on the science part. It’s highly unlikely I’ll be ever in a position to do something directly in this area :)

The teams are now in the pre-accelerator period (when they learn more about the business side of things), before going to the product creation side of things (R&D, lab time, basically). I’ll update you on what they as time goes by and I get a grip of what the hell they’re creating :D

So, for the next several months, I’ll also write about Cork a little bit. A small city compared to Bucharest and a completely different lifestyle for me. I mean, in 10 minutes I’m out of the city, while in Bucharest, some days, I’d still be trying to get out of the side street I’m coming from, trying to get to my destination. Actually, for the first time in the last 20 years, I will not have a car at hand (mine or somebody else’s). Which is really weird :)

Sun and rain in Cork City, Ireland

A post shared by Bobby Voicu (@bobbyvoicu) on

Update: Because I was asked: Cristi is now managing MavenHut. I’m still part of the board of the company, but since I’m more and more interested in investing, I’ve cut my time operationally as much as possible.

Entrepreneurial Europe vs. Asia and US

By Bobby Voicu

Asia’s response to Uber’s global ambitions—unlike Europe’s—was primarily entrepreneurial.

from The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

I think this is the difference between Europe and Asia (in this case) and USA: we, Europeans, put much more focus on help from legislation and institutions, instead of being more entrepreneurial. Also, because of the legislation, the bureaucracy and the friction they generate in Europe, we are more likely not to try to solve something the entrepreneurial way.

Combine this with a culture that sees failure as a black mark etched forever on somebody’s reputation and you have a perfect storm: less risks, less entrepreneurs.

But, I have to agree, at least you get a perception of a better work/life balance in Europe than in the US or Asia. Which feels true to me :)

Multiplier Skills and Specific Skills

By Bobby Voicu

road-sign-798175_1280

“I will never be able to sell something. I am the artist, I create things, I don’t sell them to the buyers at a fair. Sales people should sell, not me!”. This is what my fiance was telling me the other day, when she came back from a fair where she sold some of the art she creates. I told her something on the lines of “you should be one of the best sales persons for your own art”, thinking that every buyer wants to engage with the artists they like.

Tell someone to start learning how to sell and you’ll get frowns and “Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a sales person!” type of responses. Especially if they are a creative person or, God forbid, a coder! This doesn’t change the truth: selling is a skill you should understand and practice.

Selling is, also, a multiplier skill. The multiplier skills take all the specific skills that you have and they make the total bigger and better. I define “specific skill” as a skill that you need to do your job. Drawing is specific for an illustration artist, programming for a coder, accounting for an accountant, you get it.

I got the idea of multiplier skills from Derek Sivers’ Ideas are just a multiplier of execution article (go read it!).

Here is a pyramid of values for specific skills (by “bankability”) and multiplier skills:

AWFUL Multiplier Skills = -1
WEAK Multiplier Skills = 1
SO-SO Multiplier Skills = 5
GOOD Multiplier Skills = 10
GREAT Multiplier Skills = 15
BRILLIANT Multiplier Skills = 20
——– ———
AWFUL Specific Skills = $1
WEAK Specific Skills = $5
SO-SO Specific Skills = $10
GOOD Specific Skills = $50
GREAT Specific Skills = $100
BRILLIANT Spec. Skills = $200

Multiply the two and you get a number showing how successful you are or you can be.

If you are a great coder ($100) with weak multiplier skills (1), you will often see worse programmers being paid a lot better – like a so-so programmer ($10) with great multiplier skills (15).

The same if you are a weak designer with brilliant multiplier skills, you might see yourself getting a lot more for your efforts than your more talented counterparts.

This means that above a specific amount of specific skill (being GOOD), it might be better for you to use 1-2 hours per week to develop multiplier skills instead of trying to become great or brilliant. Of course, there are specific situations when you need a brilliant someone. If you are in that specific situation, the article is not for you. Or maybe it is, you arrogant POS! :)

What are some multiplier skills?

The first multiplier skill I became aware of was writing. I am not thinking of becoming a published author. I am thinking of being able to express your ideas clearly in written form. Writing avoids unnecessary time loss and subsequent misunderstandings. Think about it: writing a two phrases email that explains what you need beats the hell out of 5 paragraphs ones.

Selling, the multiplier skill I talked about at the beginning of the article, is another one.  You sell something from the moment you are born. By crying, you sell your need for food. You sell a movie to get a date later in life. You have to sell yourself to be hired. You have to sell a product you create if you are a founder of a company (everybody sells, not only the CEO). If you are a creative person, an artist, you still need to sell what you’re creating. You need to convince your partner, kids, friends, audience, public, readers to listen to your ideas and act on them.

Public speaking is not easy to do. It is also another multiplier skill. Most of the adult people I know would need to be better at addressing groups of people. It’s not only for the entrepreneurs, CEOs or business people. As long as your job means talking to 2 or more people at the same time, it would be a lot easier if you have some public speaking skills and you don’t melt once more than 2 pairs of eyes are focused on you.

These are three multiplier skills I can think of right now. I am sure you can mention some more in the comments below.

Books I Read in the Last 3 Months

By Bobby Voicu

stack-of-books-1001655_1280

This was initially a small list, part of this article. It got longer, so I created a new article, specifically for it.

Following are some of the books I’ve read in the last 3-4 months or so.

Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan
– a “noir like” SciFi detective book

What I Talk About When I talk About Running – Haruki Murakami
– great book on writing and creative process and, obviously, running.

The Rosie Project – Graeme Simsion
– a great, funny, book on the underlinings of relationships. There’s another book, The Rosie Effect, a sequel, that I hated and stopped reading at 30%

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
– the play continuing the 7 HP books. Interesting, but not as good as the books. I wanted to go and see the play, but it’s fully booked until June 2017, at least – I stopped looking for tickets afterwards. On viagogo, the good seats go for about $3000 for both acts. I am not that much of a fan!

FlashPoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe – George Friedman
– written in 2012, reading it may feel creepy, because it sees the migrant crisis, the structural issues of EU 2 years before being obvious and it makes you think what else might come true?

The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 – Lionel Shriver
– a post-apocalyptic book on what would happen if the US economy goes to shit. The book is quite static, but the ideas behind it are interesting.

The Simple Path to Wealth – JL Collins
– a financial blogger’s book. His blog is one of the blogs I would recommend to anybody trying to reach financial independence. His Stock series is something I recommend to anybody trying to get the basics of stocks, obviously.

American Gods – Neil Gaiman
– a book everybody recommends when talking about Fantasy must read. It’s interesting, but I didn’t like it that much, though it makes you take an fascinating trip through the US.

Uncharted – The Fourth Labyrinth
– yeap, I really like the Uncharted gaming series, so I also read the book. It’s similar to the games, so go and read it if you liked them.

Anything You Want – Derek Sivers
– I love his blog, so it was obviously I would buy his book. Great book on entrepreneurship and business building. He’s built his business without VC funding, so have that in mind when reading it.

The Truth – Neil Strauss
– I didn’t like it. The guy that wrote The Game is back with a book about his discovery of a real relationship. But I think that this was just a reason to try everything possible about sex (from swinging to open relationships). It’s fascinating this way, but I just feel like all he wants is to brag. It might be different for you. The Game was a lot more interesting, talking more about social patterns and behaviours.

Disrupted: My Misdventure in Startup Bubble – Dan Lyons
– the guy that used to be Fake Steve Jobs and is now a writer for the Silicon Valley TV Series tells the story of his life in a startup. HubSpot, specifically. He exaggerates the bad things and he ignores the good ones, I think. It’s interesting to see how people outside the startup ecosystem see this world, though.

Total Recall: My Unbelievable Life Story – Arnold Schwarzenegger
– a surprisingly good book on business, motivation and life. Great, great, great read. Couldn’t recommend it enough.

In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond – Robert Kaplan
– a good book on Romania and the neighbouring countries, from late 70s to today, written by an outsider. It gives you a good understanding of the geopolitics of the last 30-40 years in this part of the world.

The link above are Amazon affiliate links, so you are supporting my reading habit with it. Just so you know. Also, since I read mostly Kindle books, these are the versions I link to. You can find hardcover/paper books there, as well.

Experimenting

By Bobby Voicu

flash-113310_1280 (1)

I’ve always read a lot since I was about 5 and I learned how to read. The thing is, building MavenHut took a lot of time and I’ve stopped reading as much as I used to. So I decided recently to read more.

Reading books gives me a lot of ideas. And the worst thing I can do is not do anything with them. So I need to start experimenting those ideas somehow. I don’t know how, yet, so this is an issue. But now I understand my need. I suppose the solution will appear at the right time.

By the way, I am not talking about business books. While they do give me great ideas, some of the best ideas come from fiction. Especially SciFi.

In case you’re wondering, I am writing an article now on the books I’ve read recently. So you might want to come back in several days.

English as an efficiency tool

By Bobby Voicu

english-as-an-efficiency-tool

I’m writing a longer article right now for the blog and I kept asking myself why I write in English and not in Romanian, my native language. It would be a lot easier to express ideas, after all, right?

Well, it might be easier, but I think that English forces me to be more efficient when I communicate. If you don’t think it’s efficient, think what it would be like in Romanian :)

The truth is that I don’t have such an extensive vocabulary in English. It forces me to express ideas in simpler words. I need to use less words, as well. It is a pain in the ass (watch that language, mister!), but I feel it’s easier for me to communicate ideas this way.

Of course, there is also the arrogance of believing that a global audience has nothing better to do than reading what I write. But that’s not me, no, no! I am just doing this as an exercise in efficiency.