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If you haven’t yet seen my main haiti pics, take a look here first:

http://photos.adrianbye.com/Americas/Haiti-Cap-Haitian-August-2008/5796339_AaKfS

Before I start, I’d like to note that Haiti is not a safe place to visit right now and if you’re considering this to take real care. From the US Government website:

“This Travel Warning is being issued to advise American citizens to defer non-essential travel to Haiti until further notice… U.S. citizens traveling to and residing in Haiti despite this warning are reminded that there is also a chronic danger of violent crime, especially kidnappings. Most kidnappings are criminal in nature, and the kidnappers make no distinctions of nationality, race, gender or age; all are vulnerable. There were 29 reported kidnappings of Americans in 2007. As of the date of this Travel Warning, fourteen Americans were reported kidnapped in 2008. “

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_917.html

The problem is with high gas prices, food prices are being forced up, and the average Haitian is being pushed further down in poverty, which is leading to more rioting and problems. In addition, Haiti currently has no real leader – they are supposed to vote for a new prime minister and for some reason this has been delayed for the past 4 months. In previous times Haiti has been safe and I am sure it will be in future.

With that said, this was by far one of the most fun and interesting trips I’ve ever taken!

Why go?

I’ve wanted to visit northern Haiti for a long time – it’s the area where Christopher Columbus landed, in fact his boat “Santa Maria” sank there right near Cap Haitian. I live in the Dominican Republic and have been here since 2001, so I’m pretty familiar with the island of Hispaniola. I also don’t know how much longer I will be in the Dominican Republic, so I wanted to take advantage of still being here – setting up a trip like this remotely would be much more difficult. This part of Haiti is only a few hours away yet is an entirely different culture – they’ve developed completely differently despite having similar resources on the same island. I also have travelled rather a lot and am not interested in boring trips to Europe, etc. Going someplace that is a little more off the beaten path is appealing to me.

How did I do it?

It wasn’t easy. I don’t know anybody in this part of the country and there was no way I was going alone. Through a teacher in Santiago I was able to get some contacts. He was the right guy to help, he’s been living in the Dominican Republic for over 40 years. He referred me to a policeman on the border who is half Haitian and wanted to make some extra income, along with a couple of students in Haiti who lived in the town. Given the risk of this travel I decided to take a couple of options, inviting both the policeman and one of the Haitian students. This meant if something went wrong with one of the guys I had another option to fall back on. Both were paid, $50/day per guy each, $300 total for the trip. I was also covering all travel costs, food, etc. My total trip costs came to around $1000. I could do it cheaper in future, but this felt like the safest approach.

People speak French in Haiti (about 60% of the population) but in practice that didn’t work. My French isn’t strong anymore, but I just found their accent difficult to understand. Creole, the main language of the country was completely incomprehensible. And while my Spanish is good, nobody in Haiti speaks Spanish. So I had to have someone with me all the time.

I’ve travelled to around 50 countries and lived in 7, including Medellin, Colombia just 5 years after Pablo Escobar was killed. I’ve never had a problem anywhere because I *always* follow one simple rule: I always do what the locals tell me to do. And that’s what happened on this trip which made things work a number of times.

We also had to watch the timing of hurricanes because there are many passing at the moment. I went right after Hurricane Faye and just before Hurricane Gustav. There was also some military disturbances in Cap Haitian a few weeks before when I originally planned to go so we had to wait for that to cool down. Basically, following the news beforehand was critical, along with checking in regularly with the guys on the ground. I decided to keep the trip short, partly due to work commitments, but also to limit my time on the ground. I was there for just 2 nights.

The last thing I did was to make sure I had a fair amount of cash – using credit cards and ATM cards in a country like this isn’t too good as they can be used for fraud. So I had around $1300 in cash on me – which I was surprised to later read that the average annual income in Haiti is $1300.. I was also startled to read that the Haitian government budget is around $900M/year – my friend Tony Hsieh from Zappos manages a $1B/year budget, and that’s just one company!!

On entering Haiti:

Carlos the policemen and I caught the bus from the Haitian border town after crossing over from the DR. Making the crossing was a real hassle with people constantly surrounding me to sell things. The entire area was waterlogged due the hurricane that had passed through a few days before. I’ve always thought the drainage in the DR was bad but we never have this kind of problem.

Once we got on the bus everything was fine.. then about an hour into the trip, I felt something moving around on my feet.. Horrible, it felt like a rat! I couldn’t see anything when I looked down, but then there it was.. A chicken had gotten away from the lady behind me and was sitting on my feet! I jumped up on the seat and asked Carlos what to do – he told me to just push it away. I managed to do that without being pecked. It was rather funny, nobody else in the bus batted an eye.

This lead to a rather interesting conclusion about chickens and animals in general in Haiti. They don’t take chicken meat on the bus, it’s always live chickens that are tied up and they’re treated rather poorly. This happens because they don’t view it as a chicken – to them it’s really just a protein food source which is convenient to travel with since it’s alive and won’t go off.

The road to Cap Haitian was in very good condition – when I asked about it later, apparently it’s just been remade.. they’ve been waiting 20 years for it to be done!! It has cut the travel time down to 2 hours from 5 hours. We had police checks every 10-20 minutes, and they stopped the van and got in each time. When I asked about it, I was told it’s because there have been a lot of robberies and carjacking on the road in the past. Naturally I assumed this was 10 years ago in the past, but when I asked for clarification Carlos told me that just 8 months ago it was very bad! Yikes!!

Once we got to Cap Haitian, we were met by hundreds of people running around, offering taxis and all kinds of other stuff.. Fortunately we met up with Demel and his cousin who was to be our Cap Haitian guides. Demel had an SUV and took us straight to a nice hotel. What a relief!

We went out later that night. One interesting thing that happened was I met a pretty Haitian girl (no, gossip people, nothing happened!! 🙂 ). I was joking around with her and asked to see her cellphone photos which she happened to have opened. She showed me, and as I browsed through them I got a lump in my throat. This was just a random cute girl at a bar, which is the same scene anywhere in the world. But her pictures were all of absolute poverty, cinderblock housing, and no furniture. These were the photos of her life.

The money was a problem. In Haiti they refer to “dollars” which can mean either USD or Haitian Dollars, depending on the context (ie value). They also use Haitian Gourdes which are the primary currency. I got rather confused by it all, but was protected from overspending too badly by having the guys with me. The currency was extremely dirty – so dirty that I didn’t want to put it in my wallet.

The rest of the sightseeing we did was relatively uneventful since I was surrounded by guys and we were in an SUV most of the time. The pictures do a good job of showing what we saw.
When it came time to go home, we managed to get a nice bus which had air conditioning. We had to wait a while before it filled up. At one point a young father (maybe 23) with 2 small daughters wanted to catch the bus. He got in a big fight several times with the driver in front of the small girls over the price – the driver was extremely aggressive and it made me feel really bad, so I just paid for all of them to ride with us (maybe cost $30).

And as soon as we arrived at the border town, Carlos’s mother showed up, furious with him! It turned out because we were late getting back she was going to notify the Haitian police to come looking for us. It seems she was a little protective of her son – but note that these are the kinds of backups that happen when you have solid local guides.

Then the next problem was that the border was closed! But Carlos said “no problem – we’ll go in by the river!”. It seems this is a relatively common occurrence and there was a bunch of Haitians in the dirty waist deep water ready to carry everyone across. Carlos picked out a guy for me and I got on his back with my bag. We almost fell over in the water (which would have cost my camera and cellphone) but a couple of guys came and helped. Could I have walked myself? Yes, but I didn’t want to get all wet, and it was pretty dirty. As from before, I do what the locals tell me to do! Carlos soon followed on the back of another guy, along with his mother and her sister. I would never have considered something like this on my own, but as they say “when in Rome.. “. I’m rather proud to be the likely first Australian ever to get into the Dominican Republic by crossing the river. “Un gringo mojado por cierto!”

There were some Dominican military near the border and they checked over all our paperwork. Since Carlos was a policeman in the town this was relatively easy to work out, and we were soon let back into the DR.

Relief! It was a great feeling to be back in the DR, in a country I understand and language I can speak. And I was very happy to have pulled off this trip successfully.

All in all this was one of the absolute best trips I’ve taken to date just because it was so interesting.
I’d encourage you to visit Haiti, but be *extremely* careful right now. The whole time I was there I only saw one other tourist and he was riding around seemingly unaccompanied in public transport which I thought was a bit careless. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments.

One of the rules of branding is to be the first in the mind. We always tend to remember the first important event – eg the first man on the moon (do you even remember who was second!?!?), the first person to fly across the atlantic, even your first kiss.. right?

Or just think about what people say about how important first impressions are..

So given this, why would Obama accept as his first major appearance as a presidential candidate with McClain to be in front of a group of christians most likely opposed to his views and asking questions which won’t paint him in a positive light?

No wonder there’s some negative publicity coming for Obama since!

Why make an uphill battle when it isn’t necesary?

I just finished reading a fascinating paper about “seasteading“. This is the concept of creating towers of small communities designed live on the sea, a little like oil platforms. The ideas is that once these small communities evolve, if the members of the communities disagree with governmental policies, they can just take their seastead elsewhere, literally overnight. The switching costs for moving societies will be virtually eliminated.

This has come together from a bunch of libertarians, and is funded by Peter Thiel ($500k), who cofounded Paypal, is an early investor in Facebook and is now one of the top fund managers in the US. He’s also someone I have a tremendous amount of respect for.

Those who know me well know that I’m a huge fan of Ayn Rand and believe that Objectivism is a very important philosophy, especially for entrepreneurs. I was impressed to learn that Peter Thiel is also a big fan of Objectivism, and this may be why he is funding Seasteading.

Many libertarians I’ve met believe libertarian principles of society will truly work if they were given the chance. But since that chance never arrives, they never truly know if their system works.

Well, I’ve lived in an almost-libertarian state since 2001 – in the Caribbean, called the Dominican Republic. Here we have a weak police force, rule of law which isn’t very strong, and almost anything goes.

As a result, there are two principles which govern day to day life here:
1. how well connected you are (where your family comes from, who your friends are)
2. how much money you have

Thats it. So if you have a problem with your neighbour playing his music too loud, you can count on the two principles above if you want to sleep in peace. If you get into a car accident and kill someone, those two principles will determine your survival if the family of the deceased comes after you.

It *does* work.. to a degree.. but its scary sometimes and it means you need to stay on your toes. It also means that if you aren’t well connected and you don’t have money, then you are screwed if a bad situation that comes your way. Many would-be expats leave countries like the Dominican Republic after just a few months with lots of horror stories. Not understanding these two simple rules is the reason why.

I am sure Peter Thiel and the founders of seasteading have great intentions with the society they want to build. It will be great for them, since they will have both money, and connections (after they have the fame of building this libertarian society). But for regular people who are living in it as regular citizens and have neither, life on a seastead won’t be much fun.

Libertarians have some really interesting ideals and we should listen to them. But a fully libertarian society like seasteading will not be one that respects the rights of all its citizens, and will not reach the visions of the founders. After 6 years in the Dominican Republic, a place I do enjoy living in, I now know this first hand.

Ebay is on a slippery downward slope and will become irrelevant if they are not careful.  “super CEO” Meg Whitman hasn’t been able to solve their problems and whoever their new CEO is, they haven’t done much of a job either. (I don’t have much respect for Meg, I think she was just coasting on the momentum the original founders got for the company).

Its interesting to contemplate because ebay has been such a standard powerhouse on the internet.  But they may not be in the future.

There was some interesting posts on Digg today, linking to this article on the consumerist “It’s Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay”:

http://consumerist.com/5007790/its-now-completely-impossible-to-sell-a-laptop-on-ebay

Go read it.  Its about how pervasive fraud is now on ebay, making it very difficult to sell things.

And this post on Digg really made me think (excuse the language; I’m posting as it was written):

+287 diggs   by RevJonathan 9 hours ago
Dear Google,
Please make an eBay competitor for fucking fuck’s sake.
Thanks,
View 10 replies to this comment (most popular has 49 diggs)

http://digg.com/business_finance/It_s_Now_Completely_Impossible_To_Sell_A_Laptop_On_Ebay

People trust google more and want google to make a marketplace that actually works.  This whole market is wide open again.

I think this is fairly easily solved by Ebay.  Yeah, I know, I’m a consultant living in the Caribbean and don’t know anything.  Well try this out:  ever heard of the concept of a “distributed trust network“?  No?  Ok, what it means is that trust can be distributed around a network of objects.  It was the basis of Google’s success – before google existed, search engines returned results based around text on the page.  Google looked at links to pages and used those to determine the overall relative importance of a page.  It was a major breakthrough and is now known as “pagerank”.    A site like Linkedin is based on it – I am able to see people 3 degrees of separation away, and know that there is some level of trust since they are friends of friends of friends.  They’re the backbone of friend of a friend sites like myspace, facebook and hi5.  We use the same principle in the real world all the time when we ask a trusted friend for a recommendation.

Distributed trust networks are a foundational concept on the internet.

Ebay never bothered implementing a distributed trust network on its feedback mechanism and its time they did.  Basically this means applying some kind of social networking – “friends trust each other” network for feedback, both for buyers and sellers.  Therefore if a new user comes on to the system and has 100 positive feedbacks, but they are all from overall untrusted people, it has little value.  If a new user joins the system and is immediately trusted by 10 really important people, it will have far more weight.

If Ebay can’t find a way to do this, the entire ebay ecosystem will move over to sites like facebook, where trust is implicitly built in.  We *know* who our friends are.  And maybe our “trusted” friends will include 5 levels deep, so we can get a variety of things to purchase and sell.  And if one of your friends starts selling fradulent things on it, you’ll hear back about it.  Just like in the real world.

And do you want to go adding friends on facebook that are Nigerian and want to buy laptops? (per the above link).  I don’t, nor do I want to introduce them to my friends.

I recently interviewed the founder of Shopit, Matt Hill.  He is tackling this exact market, and may really have something on their hands.

I just spoke with someone who used to work at the FTC and knows a bit about email marketing and the FTC side of things.  I continue to be annoyed that it is legal to resell email addresses.

An example:  you can sign up to my list on the top right corner.  If I include in my (hard to find) privacy policy that I reserve the right to resell your name, you could legally start receiving viagra advertising in your email just for joining my list.

So I asked why that is allowed?  He suggested it was to enable commerce and is MY PROPERTY as the list owner of that data (ie your email addresses).  So I asked him to give me an example of where it is good for consumers for that to happen.  He said it was very good for commerce.  I asked again where its good for consumers.  He started giving me an example of being a camera site and how they might resell their list to someone making some new camera equipment and that it would be good for me to find out about the new product by being emailed a promotion.

I wasn’t impressed.

FTC:  Its time you stepped up and fixed the spam problem permanently.  Stop allowing people to resell email lists.  Email is NOT the same as postal mail lists.  The only reason we don’t get 5000 times more spam is because technology is doing a decent job at blocking it.  Thank god for google mail, they block around 2,000 spam messages daily from getting into my inbox.

In the past month two people have spoken to me about someone being a "genius".  They referred to the (different people ) as being simply better than other people.  They spoke about them almost with a sense of awe.

With all the interviews I do on meetinnovators.com, I am exposed to smart "genius-like" people very frequently (we do one interview per week).  So I've started to get some strong feelings about "geniuses".

"Geniuses" are normal people just like you and me.  They just happened to have hit the things in my post about internet entrepreneurship.  That is, using their natural abilities in their market, filling a market need, passion for the market and focus.  And there's one more thing they have: good strategy.

But, its a tricky balance.  Once that good strategy goes away so does their success.  Strategy is critical. 

An example:  Microsoft's strategy isn't working as well today as it used to.  The stock is far below its levels of 2000.  Fake Steve Jobs has a great summary of why Microsoft is going downhill

But does this mean Bill Gates is or is not now a genius?  No, its just that his strategy isn't on track like it used to be.  Locking users into various platforms worked great in the 80's and 90's, and today it doesn't.  Google doesn't lock users in, ever, and people love it.

It takes a magical balance to get things to work properly.  Once you have it, you have to ride it as much as possible.  But it doesn't last forever.  And even if you get it, you still won't be a genius in my book.  You'll be a smart guy who got it right.

Alan Weiss says you need 3 things to succeed in business:

– be competent in the market

– for there to be a market need

– be passionate about the market

I think these three things are critical.  When I talk with entrepreneurs who are having problems, invariably one or two of these are missing.  And when I look at the things I’ve done that haven’t worked, its due to the same reason.

I’ll add one more thing:  you need to have absolute focus on what you’re doing.  As an example, google generally has focus, Yahoo does not.  Bill Gross from Idealab didn’t have focus; he spawned lots of fascinating business models, including what would become the revenue model for Google and yahoo, but didn’t focus on it, so he couldn’t take advantage of it.

I’m skeptical of guys who are running unfocused business models.  So even though I hear great things, I’m very curious to see if Ken Chan and Next Internet can really deliver.  I suspect they will end up overworked and stressed and have a lot of businesses which end up not being as great as they hoped.  Ken is effectively running an incubator with 6-8 companies simultaneously.  Ken is a nice guy and I talk to him quite often.  So I definitely look forward to being proven wrong!

The problem is that new value only surfaces for a short time.  Several entrepreneurs are likely working on the same problem at the same time.  If you don’t have the right combination of competence/market need/passion/focus, one of the other guys will overtake you, you can’t do it with a team of employees, no matter how well they are compensated.  The entrenpreneurs spark is critical.

I just got an email sent by a company I never heard of before called “shoplet.com”.  And it was sent to an email address I never have used *anywhere* before except with Amazon.com.  They have my first name, last name and email address (that I only registered with Amazon).

So is Amazon selling their customer list to third parties now?  Or did Shoplet.com obtain this through other means?

Given that I highly doubt Amazon would sell their list, I suspect shoplet got it via other means.  I hope they get caught.

UPDATE:  Amazon wrote back and it turns out they share email addresses with companies when you buy through Amazon marketplace.  I bought some tape or something via shoplet from Amazon.  Apparently this is against Amazon’s terms and conditions and is being investigated.  Here’s the specific part from Amazon’s T&C (their customer service response was very thorough, btw):

“Contact between parties must be courteous and limited to transaction

details.  Facilitating inappropriate or unsolicited contact is a

violation of our Community Rules.”

I just finished reading the book "Killing Pablo" by Mark Bowden.  Its the story of the hunt to take down Pablo Escobar, the Colombian druglord who was listed as the #10 most wealthy person in the world by Forbes magazine.  The book is an exciting read.

I was a bit astounded by the amount of violence described in the book however. Medellin was a really, really, really violent place.  It was almost a war zone.  Pablo Escobar had a Colombian presidential candidate killed, among thousands of others.

Yet, I lived in Medellin 5 years after Pablo Escobar was killed, in 1998 for almost a year!  And I lived to talk about it.  🙂

I'd finished my time at AIESEC International and didn't really want to return to Michigan State University to finish 2 subjects remaning for my undergrad degree.  I talked with the chair of my department and he offered for me to finish up in a Colombian university since I had spent some time there already.  So I enrolled at EAFIT university in Medellin and took some classes.

Reading the book and learning about just how much violence there was made me rethink if what I had done – I had no idea things had been so incredibly bad.  Brutal killings were happening on the streets of Medellin virtually daily in 1993.

While I like to travel to offbeat places, when I lived in Medellin I felt it was very safe.  The overall level of violence in the country had gone down dramatically.  People were travelling between major cities through 12 hour rides in buses, which meant that kidnapping was not happening.  And there was no violence in Medellin itself.  My rule of thumb is to always do what the locals tell me, even if its counter intuitive or things feel safe.  So I just hung out with the local people all the time, stayed in the cities, and didn't visit the Red Zones, which are dangerous parts of the country to the north, near Panama.  I actually met some Canadians who travelled all through the red zones by bus and said it was great fun travelling there and they had no problems at all.  I thought they were crazy for taking that kind of risk, the locals would never have done it.  I don't know any stats on the risk of travelling through the red zones, but my guess is that if you travelled through there on 100 trips, 99 times you would be safe, but one time you would be kidnapped.

I talked with my father about it yesterday (I'm at home in Tasmania for christmas right now) and it turned out he was pretty concerned that I had lived there.  He was worried that he'd get the cut off finger in the mail and have to pay a large kidnap ransom to get me out.

But it really just didn't feel unsafe.  At the time if you stayed in a large city like Medellin and didn't go out into the surrounding countryside, you were perfectly fine.  There wasn't bombings and there weren't people being killed.  Of all the thousands of people I met when I was there, I met one girl who's mother was a mayor in a surrounding area of Bogota and was killed as a result.  I didn't meet anyone else directly affected.  I would never have stayed there if I'd been seeing any kind of violence in the city.  There just wasn't anything any different to any other city.  I'm even hearing about carjackings in Sydney, Australia now, because people can't steal cars as much with good self-locking systems. 

Before I moved to the Dominican Republic I was considering moving back to Colombia instead since I knew the country well.  But people there told me how it was then (2001) unsafe to travel by bus between cities due to so much kidnapping and the only safe way to travel was by plane.  That was a pretty big sign for me that violence was on the increase and I decided not to go back to Colombia.  I also wanted to be closer to the USA for business travel.

I really enjoyed my time in Colombia, the colombians are some of the most hospitible people in the world.  If you get the opportunity to visit the country, I would recommend it.  Don't spend time in Bogota, its cold and not very interesting. Go to Pereira, Medellin and Cartagena, they are all very fun cities to visit.  Just make sure you ask the locals about the security situation and follow their advice to the letter.

So the local situation in Medellin is variable.  But if you go there at the right time, it will be safe to live there.  Just be careful and do what the locals tell you.

Gracias a mis amigos colombianos!