Part 2 of a series of wild stories about building companies where trust is scarce. Part 1 covered Russia. This one covers a country that shall remain nameless for reasons that will become clear.
A man I was about to go into business with pulled me aside to explain how he was going to cheat me. He said it calmly, without any visible discomfort, the way you’d explain a change to a dinner reservation.
He’d participated in a startup bootcamp I ran in Austin. He was from a former Soviet country I’m going to leave nameless, because dealing with him felt like a scene from The Godfather and I’d rather not put him on the internet. We got to talking, the conversations were good, and we agreed that we should partner up and run a version of what he experienced in Austin back home. The U.S. Embassy was eager for stuff like this, he said, and he could get it going. He was the local partner. I brought the program design and the facilitation. We had a budget we’d both signed off on. It wasn’t big money, maybe $30k all in. The next step was submitting the proposal to the embassy.
Before we sent it off, he pulled me aside. The budget we’d agreed to wasn’t the budget he planned to submit. The number he’d quote the embassy would be three times larger, and the extra would be routed to him. Some of it would come out of what was supposed to be mine. So he’d make far more than we’d agreed, I’d make far less, and the embassy would be handed a figure that had nothing to do with either of us.
I tightened up while he talked. It felt like walking back to your hotel in an unfamiliar city late at night, the kind of walk where you keep checking over your shoulder. And it was over $30k. Not life-changing money, but not trivial either, and not enough for that kind of stress. Doing great work is hard enough. Doing great work while you’re wondering if the person you’re doing it with is going to stab you in the back is never worth it.
I walked.
What stayed with me was how ordinary it was to him. He wasn’t a villain enjoying a scheme. In his world this was simply how deals got done, and the foreigner is the easiest person at the table to work an angle on. He could see I was uncomfortable. It didn’t offend him. He just moved on to the next thing.
Takeaway: One of the most valuable skills in business is recognizing when not to do business.
In part three of this series, I’ll tell the story of how the son of a South American military leader took me on a joyride.