AppsJack Business Services Share
Big Fish Grill, Kirkland, WA
- Attendees:
- Samuel Rodriguez
- Eric Veal
- David Bleiweiss (first time)
- Bruce Follansbee
- Dominic Wong
- Chad Oda (first time)
- Fred de Boer (first time)
- Andrew Sengul
- TJ Elston
Welcome David, Chad and Fred to the group. Please greet and welcome them!
No, we do not believe that FinTech will make us richer but there are a collection of tools and practices within this category that are essential for a productive business. "You get what you measure" and you have to measure well. So finance is a very key enabling process to businesses but without the proper values, vision, strategy, products, value proposition, sales, delivery and care for customer service, finance won't help you at all.
Main ideas covered:
- Good quote. From TJ, a line from the movie Aviator about Howard Hughes with Leonardo DiCaprio:
- Mrs. Hepburn: We don't care about money here.
- Howard Hughes: That's because you have it.
- The purpose of finance. Money is about measuring/weighing/sizing value(s) and not just about money. Many things can get boiled down to an "apples to apples" model where money is the factor but many guesses need to be made in the model to put a monetary value to certain intangible values. Finance is a measurement system that seeks to equate all things into a single system and common language to make businesses, transactions and discussions easier and more fluid.
- Balance required and you can't only look at money, profit and greed anymore. Approaches like Triple Bottom Line, Balanced Scorecard and AQPC look to balance out our measurements by breaking them into a set of categories. Portfolio management, weighting and balancing matters.
- AppsJack is about the Management of Things (MoT). New idea: not just the internet of things but the Management of Things. IoT proliferates irresponsibly and wastefully. MoT seeks to balance and distribute technologies to places and industries and applications that need it the most.
- Focus first, diversity second. We agreed that businesses need to find focus, a value proposition, clarity, value, a product and some success first before they can get into the realm of diversification. Diversity is a good thing but it can be misapplied.
- Cool and new Financial Technologies. Andrew shared about KDB and David shared about a new system called Aladdin from Blackstone that he uses that produces very amazing models.
