The Power of Partners

Sagan Passport is a rocket ship.

I’d love if you checked us out and became a member.

We are doing really great things, and changing lives + businesses (while saving you a ton of money).

I have a secret weapon, that only people who have worked with me know about.

I wouldn’t be able to go half as fast as I do now, without this secret weapon.

This secret weapon’s name is Rene.

Born in Mexico, an engineer by training, MBA, husband, father, and an incredible career entrepreneur.

Rene was my Dad’s business partner for TWENTY FIVE years.

One day around 2017, he became my business partner instead of my Dad’s.

It just kind of happened.

He has now been my partner for the last seven years - across pretty much every business I’ve been involved in since I left the government.

He is currently the CFO of Sagan, and has major leadership roles in every other company I’m involved in.

He can operate, sell, manage… whatever - but most commonly he is a true thought partner, and balances out my personality.

If you’ve ever had a great partner - you know how valuable that is.

Rene and I have been through a lot - and have tons of shared history.

We can still laugh about the “Friday morning payroll sweats” we had when we were running a home improvement company - with terrible working capital dynamics.

I have absolute confidence in him, his competence, and reliability - which lets me run really fast in other directions, knowing that Rene has our collective backs.

One of the things I’m most proud of is my core group of business relationships, among them Rene - that started years ago - and continue to this day. Here are a few of the others:

• Rene - Talk to 10X a week. 7 years working together.

• Bruce (my Dad): Talk to 10X a week. 7 years working together.

• Mike - Talk to 5X a week. 6 years working together.

• Binsi - Talk to 10X a week. 6 years working together.

• Zac - Talk 5X a week. 7 years working together.

There isn’t a company I’m involved in - where these folks don’t bring enormous firepower to the table alongside me, and because of our history together, we have a lot of trust.

So, how do you build your SWAT team like this?

I have no idea!

Here’s how I met my posse:

• Mike was introed to me by a random vendor, and we hit it off when he called me an arrogant young whippersnapper, I told him he was senile.

• I played rugby with Zac’s dad in United Arab Emirates.

• Binsi and I connected on Upwork.

• I’m related to Bruce, and he brought the relationship with Rene.

No rhyme or reason - just kind of happened naturally.

If I could boil down how to develop relationships like this with people you work with - I’d say “Give a shit”.

All of these people know that I care about & respect them, and I know that they care about & respect me.

If you ever joined a meeting with all of us - you’d think “These people hate each other & are trying to pick apart each others’ points”.

That’s half right!

We are just trying to get at the truth, make the idea better, or challenge sloppy thinking.

It’s intellectual combat, with people you respect & admire.

I hope you can be so lucky to build relationships like this - either locally, or with global talent.

These folks (Rene, and the others) make me 10X better - and I am enormously grateful .

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

Passage of the Week - Maria Popova

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.

Despite a steadily swelling human life expectancy, these concerns seem more urgent than ever — and yet they are hardly unique to our age. In fact, they go as far back as the record of human experience and endeavor. It is unsurprising, then, that the best treatment of the subject is also among the oldest: Roman philosopher Seneca’s spectacular 2,000-year-old treatise On the Shortness of Life (public library) — a poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice. (Full Essay Here)