Flat Earth Ventures

Flat Earth Ventures
Darrick Branch – retired NFL player and founder of Hawaii Team Sports interview today
Columns
Podcast Expo
My Popo


Transcript:
Today is October 25th, 2005. This is Evan’s Journal coming to you live from Honolulu, Hawaii.

(00:00:08)
First topic of the day is Flat Earth Ventures, a project that Peter Kay is working on. Peter Kay from Titan Key, Your Computer Minute, Tom PodCast, he has a lot of things he’s working on. But Flat Earth Ventures is a really interesting project he just launched recently and came out of the sale of Titan Key, an anti-spam software. Peter Kay talks about the burger model which is create an IP, protect it and then flip it, meaning sell it to another company, get acquired and then just move on.

The person he was selling the Titan Key to though is a very, very well known Indian business leader. His company was doing somewhere like $200 or $250 million which in U.S. terms would be somewhere around two and a half billion dollars worth. The interesting thing about this gentleman is that you know, Tony Blair or that CEO of HP come into India, they have to go through this person first. He’s kind of like almost an ambassador. And he talked to Peter Kay about his business philosophy which is when he approaches a business he thinks about it as a country-wide issue. How many mouths can you feed? How many jobs can you provide? How many people can he help?

And that was kind of the icing on the cake for Peter. Because Peter’s kind of more or less a spiritual guy and was kind of thinking along those lines. So Flat Earth Ventures is Peter’s new company designed to be able to help other younger entrepreneurs and start-ups to be able to do the same type of model and acquisition that Peter was able to do.

The catch is that once you go through it and have a successful exit, you need to join and then help the movement. I guess you would call it or you know this kind of revolution or different way of thinking, and help that move on too, so. Flat Earth Ventures is kind of interesting. You should check him out at flatearthventures.com or just click the link that you see on our site.

(00:02:34)
Today’s interview was with Darrick Branch, a retired NFL player and founder of Hawaii Team Sports. The interview was a bit different than our normal interview because our normal interviews are much more focused around business and business models. Today’s interview went on a little bit of a different path. That doesn’t mean any better or worse than the other interviews, just means it was a bit different. It was interesting to hear about Darrick’s value system, upbringing, attitude and how he applied the learning from his coaches and athletic career into his business.

So, when that’s available check it out, Darrick is doing a lot of great things for Hawaii Team Sports. They’re giving away 200 turkeys through their turkey giveaway for Thanksgiving, working with the Boys and Girls Club, working with a lot of youth organizations, teaching positive things to kids about staying in school, getting a good education, staying away from drugs, alcohol and tobacco things like that. He’s just a good guy. He’s done a lot of good things.

(00:03:46)
Columns. I’m looking at doing a number of columns for various publications in town. Because obviously we have the interviews that we’re doing and we can repurpose that pretty easily into you know print columns. So, that’s what we’re in the process of doing. The first column will be in pacificnews.net and then we’re looking at Hawaii Business Magazine online, that one, I guess we’re waiting for them to launch that still yet. And then there are a couple of other things that we’re looking at doing as a company. So, I’ll keep everyone posted on that, but that should give us some additional coverage and reach to get this message out there.

(00:04:29)
PodCast Expo that’s coming up in November is going to be something else. I’m going to go to the PodCast Academy on the 10th and then go into the Expo on the 11th and 12th. The main focus of that is to get a real good feel on monetization aspect of podcasting, portable media, subscriptions, visual downloads. All the major vendors and a lot of the actual people who are using their technology are going to be there. So that’s going to be a really interesting Expo and I will keep you folks posted on how that goes.

[00:05:04] One thing that’s kind of off track of, not really even that off track, but different in terms of normal business things we talk about. I put down here my Popo. “Popo” in Chinese is your grandma. My Popo is 94 years old and she is absolutely the toughest woman I’ve ever, ever met. She’s 94 years old and up until about maybe a week or two weeks ago, she was playing golf weekly. We went on a trip in ’04 to New York and throughout the east coast and she had no problem walking and keeping up. She was in better shape than I am, not saying that, that’s anything great, but she’s just in incredible shape. She recently went to the doctor. She had hurt her hip or her leg and having a hard time moving. The doctor was just amazed that at 94 she’s even alive. She was kind of upset with that because she wanted the doctor to fix her hip so she can go back and play golf, which he thought was kind of crazy I guess.

But my Popo is just so darn tough. Maybe about a few months she hurt her back, so she had to go through therapy and was using a walker. When I took her home, I asked her if she needed any help getting up the stairs. She told me, no, no, I don’t want any help and proceeded to take her walker to the door, open the door, put the walker on the side, get on all fours, hands and knees and pull herself up the stairs with one hand on the railing, one hand on the steps and then on her knees. I was just amazed. Her tenacity is just unbelievable.

The thing I’m thinking about is what happens after she’s gone. It’s inevitable. People are going to die sometime. What will we have as a remembrance? And that’s kind of where this whole thing all came about. Actually, my Popo’s interview was the first interview that we did and I just wanted to get something archived in terms of her life, get a discussion going with the family so that we’d have something after she was gone.

I guess you could also do video but we just didn’t do it at the time. And there’s just something about the human voice, hearing someone’s voice after they’ve been gone for a while. It’s like when you go away to college or a long trip and you call home and then it’s just those familiar voices. It just does something to you. So, I would recommend for those of you out there that have recording capabilities you should record your family and have it saved for later. My kids know their Popo now, but they will probably forget and they’re young. Later on they can hear about her life and what she’s done.

To finish off this podcast, I’ll play you a couple of clips from that interview.

[00:08:27]

Evan: Where were you born?
Popo: Honolulu.
Evan: I thought you were born in Kaui or something.
Popo: What?
Evan: You were born in Honolulu?
Popo: Yeah.
Evan: What year?
Popo: 1913.
Evan: 1913.
Speaker: When did you go to Kaui? She cannot hear me.
Evan: I turned the levels down a little, because then everyone’s yelling at each other. Damn.
Speaker: She cannot hear, she doesn’t know where the voice is coming from. So better if you just talk to her, I’ll feed you the questions.
Evan: Huh? We’ll switch space, switch.
Speaker: She cannot hear me.
Popo: February 25, 1913. Honolulu and Emiline.
Evan: And how many brothers and sisters do you have?
Popo: 12.
Evan: You are
Popo: Seven sisters and five brothers.
Evan: And which one are you?
Popo: Huh?
Evan: Were are you?
Popo: I’m in the middle.
Evan: Seven sisters and five brothers. How many of them are still alive?
Popo: I’m number five girl.
Evan: Oh. How many of them are still alive?
Popo: How many what?
Evan: Are still alive?
Popo: No. Only four of us alive. Four girls alive. All the rest dead.
Evan: Oh the men are not too strong then, huh?
Popo: Huh?
Evan: The men they don’t last too long huh?
Popo: No.
Evan: Only the ladies. So only one sister passed away.
Popo: And all the sisters lived to 90.
Speaker: Two passed away.
Popo: I went to kindergarten on Fourth Street, one block away from my house. Then I went to Royal School, elementary school to the eighth grade. Then I went to my ____ for four years and I went to University for five years. UH.
Evan: Five years, how come five years?
Popo: Yeah, because we had the fifth year, see. Fifth, five years. We graduate in four and we had one extra year for teaching certificate.
Evan: Oh, and then you taught for how long?
Popo: Huh?
Evan: You taught for how long? How long did you teach for?
Popo: How long I taught?
Evan: Yeah.
Popo: Three years.
Evan: You only taught for three years and then what? Just started having kids.
Popo: Then I got married and —
Evan: So how did you guys meet then?
Popo: I saw him in Chinese school and we were saw in high school. We went to the same high school.
Evan: And then what you just started talking or, you have a really good memory, I got to tell you. I cannot remember anything.
Popo: Blind date. Blind date.
Evan: Your parents set you up or what?
Popo: Huh?
Evan: Your parents set you up? Or what happened?
Popo: No. We had a club and we had, had to go out for a party so we went to a party together.
Evan: Um-hmm.
Popo: And started from then.
Evan: Huh. Then how many years later you guys got married?
Popo: Huh?
Evan: How many years later you got married?
Popo: How many years we got married?
Evan: No, how many years after you met, you got married?
Popo: Eight years.
Evan: And then your first child was when?
Popo: Huh.
Evan: When did you have Uncle Galen?
Popo: Uncle Galen, ten months after we got married.
(Laughter)
Speaker: Not seven?