Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Make Sure the Terms Are Clear

Let's rewind a little bit: I ended up completely quitting my full-time job. I started the 6M initiative during my privilege at Super Sprout Labs. Super Sprout Labs was a company started by my future mentor, Mr. Princeton. Mr. Princeton teamed up Mr. Consulting and Mr. LoveCraft and the three of them decided to open up a technology company, although none of them were technical. They ended up opening a company called Super Sprout Labs, originally supposed to be in China. But they started it in Toronto, thinking that it would be profitable from day one due to the SRED initiative in Canada, Reward Research Development. They misunderstood how SRED works and it turned out that they would not be able to claim the money for SRED. SRED requires that you have detailed logs of your research and development and reimburses the money you spend after the fact. It is not something that pays for research and development, as they originally believed. They ended up starting Super Sprout Labs and had two major mandates (1) create a website to sell Mr. Princeton’s products. Basically, he wanted to do recommendation-based selling, something that is quite interesting; (2) to do Common Ground, a piece of software that allows you to meet people with interests similar to yours. I came up with Common Ground and ended up building the interface with an intern in roughly two months. It was a hell of a lot of programming and it taught me that I was really good at programming; I was able to complete this task in a remarkably short time.

I ended up working a lot at Super Sprout Labs where I met a major Asian shark – Mr. Princeton. I knew immediately that he was an amazing leader.  Mr. PrintMan taught me that leadership is the single most important ingredient for any venture in life. Anything and everything you see begins with thought; it takes a leader to make that thought a reality. Action also stems from a leader. So, I met Mr. Princeton and I could tell in our first meeting that he was influential and a very nice person, something that adds to influence and is part of influence. He has the uncanny ability to make you feel as though he's your friend. During this time, I only saw Mr. Princeton twice because he was stationed in Hong Kong. The second time I saw him, the entire company went out for dinner.  I had a good conversation with Mr. Princeton and asked him how he was able to manage so many different companies with different specializations.  He informed me that he held monthly meetings where the heads of all the different divisions would report to him. He would control all those divisions using the accounting.  I knew Mr. Princeton was what I needed to get to the next level in my development. After dinner I asked him for a mentorship, to which he promptly agreed.  It turns out that the CEO of Sprout Labs had been his mentee before.

A lesson I want to point out here is that fools rush in.  I had joined Sprout Labs without asking for equity.  I foolishly wanted the CEO of Sprout Labs to be my mentor and he agreed to be, but never actually took action to help develop me.  I had been bitten by a shark and only realized this after four months of intense 12-hour days.