Hannover, Germany

8.20.23

Relational Capital

Ever since I was a little boy, I had a habit of rifling away petty cash in odd places in my room, only to come across it later. While this isn’t the greatest of investing tactics, it was better than spending it. Plus, there is always an odd amount of joy in finding money, even if I knew I had hidden it from myself.

I’m starting to see that I do the same thing with relational capital. Especially in foreign markets.

As I jumped on my first international trip since becoming a father, there was an odd tug that I’d never really felt before. There are few things in life that reliably quicken my heartbeat and put a smile on my face like jumping onto an international flight. The boy from Bedford always wanted to see the world, so whether it was steerage on Ethiopian Airlines for 14 hours from Singapore to Joburg or that first trip across the pond sitting between Alex Barnes and the woman who will forever be known as “the mother in law” who took up most of my seat while belching with a tenor and length that I have never again seen, I just love getting on planes with a passport in hand.

It was a little different this time as I kissed Betsy goodbye. 10 days is not an eternity, but she’ll be 13% older than she was when I left, and there was a tug there that I’d never felt. (This is NOT to say I do not miss Kit as well, but the beauty of marrying an independent woman is that frankly she probably enjoys the peace and quiet for a bit when I’m gone.)

As I jumped on my domestic transfer, I locked eyes with a guy who looked very familiar. Now I was flying from Indy, so that isn’t surprising, but when we both realized who the other was, he broke into that broad smile. Andre Benin somehow became my handler as I took the concept of a data center from a whiteboard conversation to steel and concrete on the banks of Lake Michigan. While my feelings on that project are still raw, given that my brainchild was, in the words of Kipling, “Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”, we still got Indiana’s first major Tier 1 datacenter built.

Outcomes being what they are, I learned a ton and know that I built something special even if I never got any credit or cash for the effort. The Bhagavad Gita reminds us that we are here to do our duty and that we should feel blessed to have meaningful work to do, regardless of the outcome. (It also has some bits about karma that I hope come true for the aforementioned knaves, but I digress.)

My duty has always been to my Indiana home, whether it was the badge on my chest as I screamed in the pits or breathing new life into a facility in Marion, Indiana that employed 4000 people the day I was born before being irrevocably shuttered 20 years ago. If meaningful work to be done is a blessing, then I will live a VERY blessed life in that respect.

As we walked towards our connecting flights together, mine to Berlin, his to Paris, we quickly caught up about the intervening years. In a 20-minute hurried airport walk, we smiled, laughed, and game-planned some potential collaborations in Africa. While we are in very different industries, contacts and geographies matched up.

That’s the kind of dividend that you can’t see coming from relational capital. Honestly, the chances of Andre and I ever doing anything together again from a business side are close to nil, but that isn’t why you have relationships. He is a great guy and we did something important together whether it was an airport connection or a random call in 10 years, either of us would have gladly helped the other.

As I landed in Berlin, I quickly texted Fabio, my travel buddy for a 5-6 week period during the original Conquest in 2014. Fabio and I have talked/texted regularly for almost a decade, and while I haven’t laid eyes on him in 9+ years, he and his wife Marleen have hosted my father multiple times and my mother once as well. There is a picture of them in the Babin, and the picture of us covered in Laotian mud still sits on my inherited “library” desk in my front room.

Fabio and I discuss a bit of this and that, the differences between business culture in Germany and the US, our perceptions of each other’s countries from the media, and we trade reading recommendations back and forth. For all the evils of social media, I’ve got to say that Whatsapp is one helluva upgrade from my father anxiously clapping his watch during the $2/minute calls to England with the Stall family when I was 10.

I’ll be staying with Fabio and his family over the next weekend, and I couldn’t be more excited. Marleen will tell me how when I repeat German phrases that it sounds like “You haff a mouth full of POTATOES” and their two little boys will wonder just what in the world this Yankee is talking about. But I’ll get to see the triplex that Fabio owns, understand what energy prices mean to him and his budget, will get to discuss over a map the differences that I saw on the train as I went from the former East Germany to West, and all the other things that books and media will never be able to personalize like the conversations of a friend.

Kit always says that I like to collect foreign men….which sounds much racier than it really is, but it bears no small amount of truth. Whether it was being able to ask Benny what someone thought about a situation in Brussels, and having a forwarded text response within a couple hours, or asking Vicky about the newest populist candidate in Argentina, and whether or not the inflation rate I read has anything to do with the actual situation on the ground, or my mate Glen talking about the absurdities of being a tradesman in today’s UK, these are real points with real people. I am very blessed to not have to take the media’s word as gospel about large swaths of the world. I have friends who can add color and context to a screaming headline.

The last year I’ve gotten to call on a lot of these relationships in my new role with ReElement. Who would have thought that my screaming at a Purdue/IU game in a Tribeca loft 12 years ago was going to somehow lead me to the White House and achieving my lifelong goal of getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal? Yet that’s what happened when I called Mohamed and said, “There’s someone mining lithium in Mali right across the Faleme River from Senegal…can you look into that?”

I’ve used it before in reference to an ill-fated bike ride without a map in Buenos Aires, but Prisig’s quote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance rings true with relationships as well.  

“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

Were I not so committed to Sulla’s Epitaph, that would probably be a decent thing to etch into my Bedford limestone grave marker.

As the majority of my writing has been letters to my future (and current) children lately, I haven’t been nearly as active in adding to the Conquest. However, something magical happens when I leave the shores of my homeland, my brain starts firing in a different direction, and my fingers start tapping out something beyond cliché drivel.

I hope to have some time to write more over the next 10 days. The decade that has passed since the Conquest has had no shortage of heartache, tragedy, and failure, but looking back, I have seen the pattern emerge. There have also been some great achievements, even if they didn’t all pan out as hoped.

The searching 27-year-old who took off with a backpack and a one-way ticket to Oz, hoping to replicate Dietrich Mateschitz’s feat of finding a multi-billion dollar idea tucked in some obscure Thai village is now a seasoned man. One with responsibilities, as well as the kinds of opportunities that that 27-year-old would have royally horsed up. The scars from battles lost and the wisdom of lessons learned, as well as the patience and polishing of my beloved wife, have set the stage for an exciting next chapter. Turns out that billion-dollar ideas can reside closer to home, whether in a lab in the Forney Building at Purdue or a little office 5 miles from home. Changing the world requires knowing the world, and I’ve been very blessed to have the desire, time, and money to know the world and to make real friendships with people from different walks of life on each inhabited continent.

Looking forward to some reminiscences this week with some of the Conquest’s early cast. Hope I can articulate them in a way that is worth a reader’s time.