Now that I’m officially done, I can hand out my personal “Teacher of the Year” award/blog entry. More officially, I found out a couple weeks ago that Professor Sussman has won the class selected Teacher of the Year award, nominated and voted upon by my friends and classmates. I think he was the perfect choice, because he blended a raucous storytelling personality with meticulous lectures and case discussions, and strong expectations of excellence from his students. Although, I’ll admit to not having taking classes from all of the nominees (which, by sheer number, might not actually have been possible).
In winter quarter of this year, I took Professor Sussman’s Real Estate Investments course. He calls this course a barometer of the real estate industry, as he’s seen enrollments rise and fall with the fortunes of the industry. He was surprised at the high turnout, and full wait-list, during the housing and credit crunch. I’m thinking his reputation brings students in regardless, and also that student interest is probably a trailing indicator.
I took the course because I didn’t want to leave Anderson without taking at least one of what I’ve been referring to as “the big three”. I can’t remember if this phrase is more widely used and I picked it up from somewhere, but I think it’s fairly commonly regarded that there’s a trio of professors at UCLA Anderson who are particularly challenging and relevant. The other two are Professor Garmaise who teaches Venture Capital & Private Equity, and Professor Cockrum who teaches Managing & Financing the Emerging Enterprise.
I had thought, entering into UCLA, that venture capital might be a viable route for a guy like me.. I like to think I’m technically oriented, and I have had more than a passing interest in finance as it relates to technology. Similar to the thought that patent law might be an open avenue to a guy like me were I to get a law degree, I thought VC would be the best intersection of my choices in education. I learned fairly early though that a more logical path to venture capital would be to rise within my particular industry to a business development executive level, and cut over, than it would be to switch now and slog it out with the fresh faces at the starting line.
So, that meant I was less likely to want to take Professor Garmaise’s class. While Professor Cockrum’s course would have been an ideal fit with my entrepreneurial aspirations, Professor Sussman’s real estate class dovetailed nicely with my grandparents’ history in real estate investment. I’ve had some limited exposure to high-density multi-family development, land, and apartment buildings through them, and so I have always viewed real estate as an opportunity. My grandfather swore by it, illustrating in his way the power of leverage. He’d say, something like
You buy a house for $100,000. (His timeframe of reference is clearly a few years earlier than mine, although he also did this for simplicity of math.) You put down 20%, or $20,000. A year later, it’s worth $120,000, up 20%. But not for you, you put down $20,000, and now you sell, and you have $40,000. You doubled your money. Now, you buy a bigger house, for $200,000. (rinse, repeat)
He came to the US in the 1970s, and employed this process himself successfully. Sadly, I’ve also known examples of people who fell on their swords pursuing just such a strategy. It turns out that cash flow considerations are just as important, and even my grandfather admitted to sleepless nights where he’d calculate how much interest expense he was accruing as the clock ticked.
I think after having taken the course, that my grandfather lived a little closer to the edge than he had to. He always risked his own capital, and he used bank financing exclusively. If anything, “Cases in Real Estate Investment” was about seeing opportunities in real estate through the lens of finance. Syndicating a deal to use other people’s money, structuring it to allocate tax ramifications and liability issues efficiently, using various forms of financing, and providing risk-adjusted returns to each category of investor. In retrospect, I’m very curious to see how those principles might have applied to some of the deals they did. Looking to the future, I’m very enthusiastic about trying out these concepts myself, and have been trolling the MLS for suitable starter properties for months now. I think it’s a testament to efficiency in teaching that I actually feel like I have the building blocks to jump into the fray, after only ten lectures.
Professor Sussman covered everything from single family homes (assigned reading and writeup before class even started), apartment buildings, land, shopping malls, commercial development, legal entities for syndications, lease negotiations, insurance companies, due diligence, and a raft of other topics in ten short weeks. The class was punctuated with a regular heartbeat of case writeups (at least two a week, of which roughly one a week needed to be turned in as a group or individual assignment), group teleconferences, and reading. It’s no joke, and the workload is heavy. Prof Sussman has no tolerance for people who don’t put in the work to keep up, and can have an exasperated, caustic sense of sarcastic humor waiting for those who lose focus during lecture, or (gasp) come to class late. He has a sixth sense about people not paying attention, and eyes on the back and sides of his head. Apparently he’s also well versed in how laptop network card lights blink when students are browsing the web. Really, he wants his students to learn, seemingly to the point of a combination of desperation and exasperation, and he knows he has so little time to teach all the topics in his syllabus.
The class culminates in a final group presentation of a particular, live, real estate opportunity. Each group researches, produces a thick binder of due diligence (including permits pulled from the city, comparable listings, loan documents, financial projections, renovation recommendations and quotes) and a slide deck to back up a “go or no go” decision on the property. While our particular choice, a 24-unit apartment building in West LA, turned out to be a no-go, this was a fascinating project, and I think a better capstone to the FEMBA experience than GAP itself.
No, I don’t sing.. Unless it’s along to a radio in the car, by myself, with the windows rolled up. And not at stoplights or in bumper-to-bumper traffic. You get the idea.
But that said, music has always been a constant- helping me to remember the past, reminding me of specific moments whenever I hear particular songs on the radio. Here are a few songs that trigger specific moments in time for me, in rough chronological order: Theme from Robotech: It was televised at 3pm on weekdays, and elementary school let out at 2:50pm. I power-walked home, and sometimes jogged or ran to get home just after these opening notes.
Shades of Gray: My dad liked to say that there were no absolute truths, whereas I liked to say (and still do), that, “right is right.” He’d play this song for me and tell me to listen to its meaning. He and I at least shared this appreciation of how a song could convey a meaning far better than we could by ourselves.
We’d sit in his restaurant in the Broadway Plaza in downtown, on those red pleather booth benches, with a double-tape deck boom box on the formica table between us, splicing songs together into mix tapes, after hours on a Saturday. And afterward we’d silk-screen a few more “Pit Stop Take-out” Hanes Beefy-T shirts, with the black checkered flag logos. Slip Slidin’ Away: This song, in a single phrase, demonstrates better than any I’ve known how a song can convey a meaning in such a compact, economic way. The phrase, “He came a long way, just to explain. He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping, then he turned around and headed home again.” For me, this is my dad and me in two sentences.
Glory Days: I remember that white film on our lips when we’d finished the last of our hill climbs, hoofing it dog-tired back to our cars up near San Vicente and 26th St. I remember our coach’s limping, twisted gait, and him waving at us from his red Jeep Cherokee. I remember the “sickly, sweet smell of Pierce in the fall”, its perpetually 99 degree temperatures, like the twisted humor of some weather god. I remember hanging out with the team on weekends, engorging ourselves on Sizzler or Hamburger Hamlet, and staying up until the earlier hours of the morning playing cards, chatting, sharing. It was the period in my life during which I had the most friends. Always The Last To Know: I played this for a girl who broke up with me. I shouldn’t have believed my coach when he told me three years earlier that he was introducing me to the girl I would marry, and in retrospect, I most certainly should not have been the last to know.
America: This one is 4th of July in Lake Arrowhead, walking towards the shore with a small boombox tuned to KOLA 99.9 FM to provide the musical accompaniment to the fireworks. Neil belting out America while we floated on the lake with our makeshift anchor (whatever heavy stuff we could find lashed onto 30 feet of repurposed waterskiing line. We could see the little buoy-like contraption sticking up from the lake where we were, which, I was told, was part of the piping system they used to use to draw Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water from the lake. now it’s just Arrowhead Brand Mountain Spring Water, and it comes from unnamed, various, mountain spring sources throughout the US and Canada.
Private Eyes: This song is like the MacGuffin of the as-yet-unscripted movie version of my life. The first go’round, this song is about years of Magic Mountain season passes, my uncanny ability to pick the seat that wouldn’t get soaked on Roaring Rapids, riding The Viper a day after getting whiplashed in my first car accident, and hearing my buddy sing this, as played on the loudspeakers outside a Magic Mountain recording studio (something he hadn’t quite consented to).
The second go’round, this song represents the name of my wife’s office! And no, I had nothing to do with it- my brother-in-law came up with the name, Private Eyes Optometry, which has been more popular with patients than I would have guessed.
Brown Eyed Girl: This is my girl, hand on her hip, impish smile playing lightly across her lips. Freckles dancing on her cheeks and nose in the sunlight. Ever since the first time her image came to my mind that way while the song was playing, it’s been her song. At least in my head. Your Song: Except Your Song was her song first. I did manage to sing this one with her in the room. Once. She told me later that she liked my singing voice, and it was then that I learned that love can conquer tone-deafness. Unless she was just being nice.
Buy Me A Rose: Because in the end, it’s not about three car garages and her own credit cards.
Darren is now at Dreamland Preschool, along with Jacqueline. He hasn’t been there long, and thus hasn’t yet learned the Korean word for “butt”, or most of their songs. However, he does seem to be enjoying himself, and has started scribbling his name, which is progress.
I’m not sure what possessed him to do what he did here, but the expression on her face is priceless.
My sister-in-law Van graduated from the PhD program at Michigan State University. which ranks in the top-10 nationally (currently #9). She also has a DVM (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine) from the same school, but now she’ll finally be returning to California after several years away for study.
In fact, it turns out that our visit to Michigan to celebrate her commencement ended up being the first time all of her siblings and parents were together in the same place since Kevin’s wedding in Korea in 2003.
Having been warned by good friend who spent unfortunate weeks of his life in Detroit, we instead drove straight from the airport to Lansing, MI, where the celebrations would be held. We stayed at the Baymont Inn & Suites in Dewitt, about 7 miles away, in a fairly quiet area bordering a small pond, with an amazingly warm indoor pool and jacuzzi.
The following day, we went to the graduation ceremony, at 7pm in the special events center. Strangely, they grouped all the departments together (must have been more than 50), for all Master’s and Doctoral candidates. As Van put it, “the MBAs were the rowdiest.” Unfortunately, it was tough to see Van down there in the “Advanced Degrees” ceremony, although not as difficult as the photo through my viewfinder makes it seem:
I think the worst part, though, was that this grouping meant that the sheer number of doctoral candidates precluded each of them from having their few seconds in the sun, on the stage. Van was hooded where she stood in the photo, by her advisor. I filmed it, but 3x optical zoom doesn’t do it justice, and there was no sound for that portion. After having worked that long and hard for a fairly prestigious degree, I think I might’ve felt gypped in her place, possibly even disrespected, by that ceremony.
Still, she took it better than I would’ve. And the kids didn’t notice at all. Jacqueline had lots of fun, exploring Van’s large backyard. Vanessa made a garland for her that turned out really nicely, although it didn’t last very long:
When I started writing about FEMBA almost three years ago now, I told myself I’d do my best not to go radio-silent towards the end, and at the very least talk about this thing, this thing I’d circled in red pen between years two and three of the program: The Global Access Program.
I think it’s safe to say I dreaded it from the start: friends, workmates, classmates all laughed when I said that this was the one major stumbling block to my decision to attend UCLA again, and most told me they were looking forward to GAP. That the prospect of international travel, working with a startup (probably a technology based startup) in another country, and helping them to develop a comprehensive business plan, all of this sounded terribly exciting.
It’s been over and done with now for about four months. Since that time, I debated long and hard about what to say about this experience, and I think I’m going to go minimalist: I can’t think of better teammates to have gone through the process with, and I’ll be happy if I never have to go through anything similar, ever again.
One of my groupmates put it best when he said, “the ratio of learning to effort is the lowest of anything I’ve done here.” Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t learning, because there is quite a bit of it, what it really means is that the work involved to get it is far in excess of every other experience at the school. I can’t really put into terms how far in excess this is, but if you insert your favorite metaphor for comparing really large objects to really small ones here, you should have some indication of what I’m not saying here.
Interestingly, you don’t see the same kind of enthusiasm wafting from recent GAP survivors, and “survivors” is how we’re referred to by our subsequent professors, and how we refer to each other for the most part. But what I have, at least, is a set of suggestions for those who will follow:
Pick your team wisely. Really. This is the single most important task you’ll probably have in the entire FEMBA experience. Don’t just go along with your study group from your core classes, and don’t just implode your study group without a plan. Make a list of the people you want, and talk to them early. Talk about what your real goals are, whether they be high achievement, work-life balance and survival, or whatever it happens to be. Make sure you’re on the same page. Consider the possibility that students say one thing, and maybe think another. Go back to your shared experiences, and figure out what they’re really about. As Randy Pausch said about understanding men, “just ignore everything they
say and only pay attention to what they do.” Figure out what you’re really about- maybe it isn’t what you’d tell people. Compatibility is key.
Pick your project for the most boring, established company you can find. Preferably one that has been manufacturing a widget successfully in their home country for years, and wants to see if they can’t export their widget to neighboring countries or the United States. This is the second most important thing you can do to enhance your odds of survival. The alternative could be working with a company that constantly changes its focus and product roadmap to chase the sexy. Oh, and they could also run out of money before the 6 month GAP project is up.
Understand how you’re going to be graded, if that’s a component of your goals for the project: there are basically two main deliverables, the business plan itself, and the presentation. These are graded by committee, including your own advisor and a “paired” advisor who also has significant input. You need to impress both with the volume of your primary research. This is a category where weight is just as important as quality. Detailed surveys with lots of related industry respondents at trade shows might be a more value-added way to spend time than chasing down senior executives.
Develop a skeleton of the business plan and the presentation on Day One. Put everything you subsequently do into it immediately, and think about everything you might do in the context of whether or not it’s going to add value to these two products. Do only those things that will directly add bang to the products. Don’t wait until the interim deadlines to update a musty business plan, because in the meantime, you might be pursuing information you won’t be able to use in the end.
Figure there’s basically two possibilities here: One, the company isn’t viable for US entry unless certain conditions are met, some of which might be ridiculously hard or prohibitively expensive. Two, you come up with some unforeseen use for their technology that really hits gold for a particular target consumer. Don’t flatter yourself, it’s got to literally be gold, and you’ve got to be able to prove it in volume, with multiples of people holding out checkbooks.
If you can swing it, save a week at the end before the presentation of vacation or sick leave. This is crunch time, and it’s quite frankly very difficult to meet your responsibilities at home, work, and school here.
Hope that helps!
Oh, and in case you don’t want to go through the food processor that is GAP, and come out pureed on the other end, here’s what you learn: primary research, defined as feet hitting the street, talking to as many people as you can, asking them similar questions, and proving or disproving theories based on this input, is vital to learning about the prospects of a business.
Newly opened in the Orchard Hills Shopping Center off Portola Pkwy and Culver Drive, Ayame is a Japanese sushi bar and restaurant by the folks that brought us Zipangu. We ended up there in our neverending search for a decent neighborhood sushi joint, which gained new urgency now that Wasa in the Irvine Marketplace is temporarily closed.
As Randy might say, “that was only okay for me.” The spectacle was reasonably done, with the knives, and the big wooden salt shakers and the catching of the shrimp tails. The kids probably couldn’t tell the difference. But for me, and here’s how I sum up the place: I went to Benihana not long thereafter, to remind myself what the “real thing” was like.
One of my morbid fascinations is with the subject of death itself (yeah). I’m drawn to it because I fear it, and because I’ve always lived in its shadow. So it should come as no surprise that I have been keeping tabs on Randy Pausch’s journey, the unfortunate CMU professor who is dying of pancreatic cancer. He gained worldwide attention for one of the many ways he has been trying to leave something behind for his very young children for after he’s gone. I think many people talk about leaving a book, and these days, video behind to let future generations know what they’ve learned in their time, to hopefully head off some of the more painful mistakes their children and grandchildren might otherwise make. I’ve thought about it too, writing fragments and pieces of things that might make up a part of this message for my wife, for my children. My father wrote some pieces of what he’d always said would be a book, a kind of user’s manual for life.
But Randy’s gone ahead and actually done it- a poignant speech on how to live your life, and how to achieve your dreams, presented at a forum that used to be called the “Last Lecture” series. And the online video of this speech turned into appearances on Oprah and Good Morning America, and ultimately into a book deal, something Hyperion Books is hoping will have Tuesdays with Morrie type sales. This last bit was quoted in a news article on Randy, talking about how both were college professors facing death in a dignified way, and ended up being why I picked up my copy of the book and started reading it.
I’m taking a management class this quarter called Managerial Interpersonal Communications, and Tuesdays with Morrie was on the reading list. I’d like to say I read the book because it was assigned this week, but I actually didn’t know that it was until after I’d finished it. I read it out of order, starting with the chapter on death, and then the one on family, and by then, I was hooked, starting from the beginning and reading the missing pieces.
And there are two parts of this book that resonated with me- the first was an anecdote about Morrie Schwartz’ appearance on Nightline with Ted Koppel, where he talked about a letter he’d received from a woman who was teaching a class of students, where each of the students had suffered the loss of a parent when they were quite young. And he was very emotional about his reply, that he would have liked for there to have been a group like that when he was young, after he’d lost his own mother, and that he would’ve joined the group because he would have been able to talk about how lonely he felt.
And when asked whether or not the pain was still fresh, more than seventy years after the fact, Morrie replied, “you bet.” And I think I know about that a little bit- it’s been more than 30 years for me, but really only a little more than ten since I really let that grief out of this box I’d kept it in. I remember growing up how I’d make greeting cards and gifts during arts & crafts times near Mother’s Day for my dad instead. I remember that people would get this look of shock, then dismay, then embarrassment when they asked about my mother and I told them. And as a child, I smiled, told them it was a long time ago, when I was very small, and so I didn’t really know anything else. I think I was trying to make sure they didn’t feel badly about it. And even as an adult, I still do that today.
But I think that’s where the loneliness comes from. Being different- missing a mother I didn’t know. And pretending so well that it didn’t matter. Pretending so well that nobody ever really took me aside to tell me it was okay to be sad. That it was right to be sad. So yeah, it was actually good to read that Morrie carried that with him for 70 years. I’m happy to know that the pain was as fresh for him throughout his life as it was. Not because it means he suffered, but selfishly, because it means that it’s supposed to be this way for us, for me as well as him.
The other part of it is just the whole idea that, when faced with the knowledge that time was running out, he was able to connect with Mitch Albom, and produce this work in thirteen Tuesdays. It reminds me of all the Saturdays I spent with my dad, when I knew he was dying too, and makes me wonder what could have been if I’d been able to connect with him more. Instead, and I owe a great debt to my little girl who was little more than two years old then, Jacqueline was the one who sat next to him on his bed, reading him stories, bouncing a ball around his room, and laughing and jumping. I hope that spending time with her made him happy, and I hope he forgives me that I didn’t let him tell me what a dying man knows.
I think he didn’t tell me, because one day in the ICU, months before when I came to visit him, there he was, looking not at all like himself, barely able to speak or move, arms and fingers swollen. And he lifted his arm to me, and I touched him lightly, his skin so stretched it was shiny. And he says to me, in his only clear word, “goodbye.” I wasn’t ready to hear that.
So I said no. And I told him he’d be fine, that he’d get better. And I rushed out of there as soon as I could. And he did get better, in a sense. But in another sense, I don’t think he was ever quite the same again. It’s almost like he gave me several more months to come to terms with saying goodbye, but that in some sense he’d already been gone too.
Morrie says you have to forgive yourself first, and then forgive others.
More officially, I found out a couple weeks ago that Professor Sussman has won the class selected Teacher of the Year award, nominated and voted upon by my friends and classmates. I think he was the perfect choice, because he blended a raucous storytelling personality with meticulous lectures and case discussions, and strong expectations of excellence from his students. Although, I’ll admit to not having taking classes from all of the nominees (which, by sheer number, might not actually have been possible).
