International Women's Day 2017

A greeting on the eighth of March.

By this point I had been running businesses here for years, and I want to make a specific observation rather than a general compliment.

A foreign company operating in an unfamiliar market survives on people who understand things the foreigner does not: how a customs office actually behaves, which document will be questioned, what a counterparty means rather than says, when a deadline is real. In every company I have built here, those people have overwhelmingly been women, working in roles that carry no glamour and enormous consequence.

The flowers today are appropriate and entirely insufficient. To the accountants, the customs specialists, the contract administrators and the office managers who have kept my companies out of trouble for two decades: thank you. You know exactly which errors you prevented.