Man This Guy is Savvy! Poker Savvy!

I ventured off the Peninsula today and made my way into San Francisco to meet up with a good friend of mine, Matt Crystal. I want to start by giving him some overall props. He's a smart dude. He's the CEO of Poker Savvy, an online poker loyalty program. It's not gambling or anything suspect like that, but if you do play poker online, it would be a disservice not to sign up. In addition, Matt's fairly well spoken, which was why I was going to see him in the first place. I thought he'd be a great person to help hone our pitch. Ya know, get it to that place where someone really understands what the hell we're all about - quickly and easily.

Well, we ended up shooting the crap for a while, about more fundamental issues, like growing your business, scaling your development team, off-shoring, hiring practices, etc. The two points he really hammered home were these:

1) Hire good people early
2) Focus

As we moved further into discussion, the point of focusing really began to settle in. As the CEO of your company, you feel the need to be involved in every aspect of product development, operations, and anything else you can get your hands on. This all leads back to his first point. Hire good people - because that allows you to trust them to accomplish their tasks, leaving you freed up to focus on what's really important for you as the CEO.

At the end of our discussion Matt offered to put me in touch with some people who could really give us some perspective about what we're doing. One of them actually started a company that uses a very similar technology to ours, albeit for a different purpose. You really never know who you're going to end up meeting when you get out a bit and network. I swore up and down in business school that networking was BS. Boy was I wrong.