Business


Business08 Oct 2007 01:13 pm

A little bird was flying along one day heading North. As he flew it started getting colder and colder. Soon it started raining. The rain turned into freezing hail.  His wings froze and he fell out of the sky like a stone. He thought to himself “Oh lordy I’m frozen stiff, I can’t move, I’m falling at 200 miles an hour and when I hit the ground I’m going to shatter like a piece of glass.”.

As he finally lost all hope he hit the ground. But instead of shattering into a billion little birdy bits, he landed in a large and very fresh pile of cow dung. He couldn’t believe his luck. And it was warm too! As the storm raged around him his wings started to thaw and his ice-cream headache disappeared. In fact he started feeling better than he had felt in a long while. He felt so good that he started wiggling about and he even let out a few chirps.

A cold and hungry fox passing by  heard the chirps and quick as a - well, as a  fox - he leapt on the cow-pile and gobbled up the little bird.

The moral of the story is:

1. When things seem really really bad don’t lose hope.

2. Everything that looks like shit and smells like shit isn’t always a bad thing.

3. When things are going well, shut the fuck up!

[My dad gets credit as the source of this story]

Business03 Aug 2007 08:10 am

Marc Andreessen has a great post on the collapse of the Sowood hedge fund recently. Reading this I have a weird sense of deja-vu. LTCM collapsed while I was working at Credit Suisse First Boston in Canary Wharf, London. CSFB lost about $700 million. Around the same time the Russian economy took a dip and they blew another $600 million. There were no layoffs and no pay cuts.

If I ever decide I need the security of a day job I’ll go back to London and work in Canary Wharf. The London banking sector is the most bomb proof industry on the planet. Canary Wharf is also a pretty darn cool place to work.

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