I was the guy who outsourced.
THE FLIGHT + THE STORM + 10 DAYS + 9 PEOPLE =NOTHING.
I got out of the Army in 2009. I spent a year as a government contractor making six figures at twenty-five, and I saw the ceiling anyway. No matter what they paid me, someone else owned my time. I read The 4-Hour Workweek and that was all I needed. Leverage and freedom, and the way there was overseas. I hired dozens of people in the Philippines. I built teams for other owners. I was better at outsourcing than anyone I knew. Then came Cebu.
- The flightIn November 2013 I had an app that people with money were waiting on, a team of developers in Cebu, and a deadline that would not move. So I got on a plane in Las Vegas. I landed in a typhoon. Typhoon Yolanda. It swallowed whole islands, and my plane got in right before it hit. I woke up to palm trees thrown across the property like twigs.
- The hotel roomThe plan was an Airbnb. The first was a loft with the whole team in it, and we had it one day. The second was across town, and the men who followed us there were not interested in the app. My team told me not to stay. I listened. We finished out of the Mandarin hotel. Nine developers and designers. One hotel room. Ten days. Coffee, and chicken cordon bleu off the hotel menu.
- Day 10 · LaunchOn day ten it launched.
- The fundersThen the money people said no.
The flight, the storm, ten days, nine people.
All of that work for nothing.
Overseas teams gave me leverage. They never gave me ownership. Fly there, sit in the room until it launches, and it is still theirs. Here is what took me fifteen years to see. I never wrote a line of code in Cebu. I never have. I ran the company that built hundreds of pieces of software for other people, from an app for an ice cream store to an education system as big as Blackboard, and my job the whole time was the same: know what needs to exist, know how the pieces fit together, tell the builders exactly what to build, and check what came back. That was always the job. The mission has not changed since 2009. The team has.
