An Accidental Chief Product Officer: Me?

I am hesitant to look back in seven year chunks, but, u know what they say about the Rule of 7. So here I go, putting my perspective back into the eyes of that younger man. Just out of parenting & academia, at 45 yo I was still thinking that I needed to make movies to pay the bills. But I had, clear now in hindsight, a desire to have passive, recurring income filling our bank accounts without having to book more than 3 meetups/day and only leaving the apartment to get some fresh air or leave the hot, fhysical reality of the city entirely.

After my peicemeal MBA thru a sequence of accidentally cumulative semesters of Wharton Online, Founder Institute and the HardKnock Life as

One of my FI Mentor assignments was with a successful 7x tech founder/product guy in the EV/Batteries for School Buses Space (obv.) Jeff Grenata. After at least a dozen unfettered hours of listening to me go on about remote-patient-monitoring in the many\meta-verses, Jeff and I were talking about my first foray to hire a “real” CEO for SindyXR and we were even having our last few conversations in a Safe, Cube-of-Space thru a pair of Oculus2 HMD! Actual mentorship in 100% VR in a War Room of Pins on the ‘walls’ that were relevant, precient and filled with power. I felt Presence AND agency!

Jeff, evidently, did not.

That potential CEO is named Charles Carter and remains a shadow advisor to me personally today. I awarded him 5% off the ClassA Shares of our CapTable in exchange work done IRTime and even tho we had OKRs Pinned to the RED WALL as well as Spreadsheet Thumbnails pinned to the GREEN Wall, and even a 3D Product roadmap that when we clicked on the metadata an interactive and this was over 18 months ago in digital debt!

matching them up with our Product Roadmap and I thought we were cooking with gas!

Then, Jeff ended the conversation abruptly saying,

““Charles, I’m done with this petty power struggle. You haven’t thought more than 18 months ahead about these SindyCUBEs”

— a really smart product officer (not me).

“To run a REAL company you will need to pass off the reigns of capital, fundraising and

See the rest of the original 5 cut sheets at SindyXR.com/legacy-crap/artifacts

This may seem like a digression but, I am obsessing about the difference between ITERATION (a word I held in contempt and would not utilize in Show Business) as opposed to the true meaning of BRAINSTORMING.

I learned somewhere in the last seven years, that Show Business uses a business model broadly referred to as Whereas, Financial Services and HealthTech StartUp types, use a Business Model more akin to Real Estate or Software Developers. This is where iteration is

I see a vision in my head of the long story, the entire episodic anti-hero going all the way back to the beginning sitting with Ni Ni Than - now Chief XR Wellness Officer of SindyXR to my C3PO who sits around the Harkness Table next to my little R2-D2, Christopher M Hill, Board President and CEO - and we had good schewan up in Harlem and shared those original five cut sheets

The irony I see on this beautiful Fall Friday while I sit on the Albert Einstein Institute for Advanced study, in the idyllic In is that, whether you call