About

About Skinner Layne

I used to have an SEO-oriented bio here, written in third person with my name repeated over and over. A good friend tried to help me craft one that had all of the zing of a Twitter soundbyte and all of the impressiveness of a keynote’s pre-speech introduction. But every time I navigated to this page, I cringed a little bit, embarrassed by the self-absorption of it all. These things are supposed to help one build a following among an audience of people who are tracking the Google Analytics of their own blogs, and keeping accounting records of their re-tweets. But that approach is really inconsistent with the tenor of what I want my blog to be, perhaps it’s even hypocritical. So instead, I will provide a narrative that is less about what I’ve done and more about who I am, some of it will be historical and some of it psychological. I’m on LinkedIn for those who want to see my curriculum vitae.

This is my animus vitae.

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The most important questions in life are neither existential nor cosmological, but rather teleological. That is, what things are or how they came to be are less important concerns than the purposes to which they are aimed–the purposes to which we ourselves are aimed. I have always had some internal sense of this, but only became cognitively aware of it after reading The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck in 2005 on a flight from Anchorage, Alaska back to my hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. After three summers in the Alaskan wilderness, a lot of reading, thinking, and reflection, the teleological question of vocation weighed heavily on me. My lifelong trajectory toward going to law school and then into a career in politics was interrupted by these reflections.

This was the beginning of my process of becoming an entrepreneur, a pathway to adulthood that brought me into the vicissitudes of the ‘real world’ that shattered the sheltered farm life of my childhood in rural northwest Arkansas. I was immediately thrust into a start-up environment in a new city (the first time I had lived away from Arkansas) with none of the support structures of family and friends to which I had been accustomed. There was immediately a conflict between the two founders of the company, and I found myself at the age of 23 having to make what would be life-altering decisions about which side to take and whether I should play an active role in the conflict or not. In hindsight and with the emotional and geographic distance that those years have permitted, I know now that I made several mistakes in the earliest days of my entrepreneurial life that have plagued me ever since. I chose the wrong side and I passively allowed my newly minted allies to drag me and many other people into what would be seemingly endless litigation. There I was at the age of 23, fresh off the blueberry farm, getting a crash MBA and JD from the University of Life Ain’t Easy. I learned more about accounting and finance, and contract law than I would have in any classroom. My “business school by immersion” was accompanied by tough lessons in securities law when my business partners went off raising equity capital without filing the proper Forms D.

I learned about technology, coding, software, hardware, and was at the bleeding edge of social media before social media was even a thing. I was a pioneer in an industry that is now ubiquitous even though we fell far short of what I had envisioned for our company those years ago. The failure to realize that vision was the greatest lesson of my life. Bad business partners are an easy scapegoat, and where they may have caused many external headaches, the ultimate failure to create the product that we designed was a collective fault, and our acceptance of mediocrity a corporate sin. Our combative and bipolar CTO and I were constantly at loggerheads and our product development efforts, when they were on track, were consistently undermined by my business partner the CEO’s combination of arrogance and ignorance. But I was the minority shareholder and I thought I should go along and get along more than stand my ground. For the first time in my life I abandoned my stern disposition to fight to the death for a cause. My complacency ultimately is to blame for the not-quite success, not-quite failure of my first venture. We took the company public by reverse merger after securing an advertising agreement with Yahoo and negotiating deals with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean companies, which gave me my first exposure to the world of international business, and when I left my full-time role at the company, we had a market capitalization of $100 million.

Unfortunately for me Rule 144 prevented me from liquidating my shares at the time and when I stepped away from a direct role in the company, the software development effort essentially came to a halt and the visionary product I had designed never left Alpha stage. Whether I made the right decision to leave when I did could be the subject of some debate. I believed I had a moral duty to force my business partner’s hand, and that meant one or the other of us had to go. As the minority shareholder, it ended up being me. But one thing I cannot do is to be complicit in unethical behavior, my business partner’s favorite pass-time it seemed.

I went into the world of consulting, which I found to be unfulfilling, uninteresting, and more or less destructive to my happiness and spirit. I could never get motivated by the mediocre vision of the people I frequently consulted for. I bade my time and paid the bills until the inverted yield curve appeared in the US bond market. The talking heads on CNBC said that the inverted yield curve was an antiquated predictor of recessions and there would be nothing but bull markets as far as the eye could see. Recognizing this as not substantively different from the sentiments I heard in the late 90s during the first tech boom, I decided it was time to liquidate whatever remaining assets I had in the United States and begin looking for a place to weather the coming storm.

Influenced by my studies of the Austrian School of Economics, I looked for a country with a low debt to GDP ratio, an economy with a heavy commodities sector, and domestic agricultural security. Combined with a desire to live in a free market economy with low crime rates, good weather, and an absence of poisonous snakes, I landed in Chile in June 2008, not speaking a word of Spanish and not knowing a soul.

I went to work figuring out the market, immersing myself in the structure of the economy, who owns what companies, how they are related, and examining the market for opportunities. There was a tremendous opportunity at the time in private equity buy-outs in the aftermath of the crisis, and so I set up a private equity fund with a  master feeder structure, first tier third party administrator and blue chip auditor. I have been through AML/KYC due diligence processes, secured senior independent directors, edited hundreds of pages of offering memorandums, crafted pitch books, and spent endless hours attempting to raise capital, earning my second MBA in finance from the University of Doing Real Business. Unfortunately due to the hangover from the financial crisis, being young and raising a first-time fund, and then the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile just as our fundraising was starting to take root, it was not to be. It also turned out that our local partners were both mal-intentioned and incompetent, trying to squeeze as much as they could out of what they perceived to be a naive gringo. Fortunately my prior experiences in business had honed my talent for early detection of such types and we cut our ties and I went back to the drawing board.

Since then I have built a network of honest, hard-working business professionals both in Chile and abroad, and have worked on deals in mining, agriculture, energy, pharmaceuticals, banking, real estate, and technology, learned the details of industries that had never interested me in the past, and accumulated wisdom, maturity, and experience that I didn’t have before. But I am not where I want to be, and so the struggle of vocation continues.

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I play the violin, love to read and write poetry, am obsessed with the Napoleonic Era and the Great Game, and I have varied literary and intellectual interests that include Russian and English Literature, American Transcendentalism, Game Theory, the works of G.K. Chesterton & Kierkegaard, Scholasticism &Theology in general, Ethics, Epistemology, Political & Diplomatic History, Pedagogy, Computer Science, Biology, Botany & Gardening, English Gothic Architecture, Medieval & Renaissance Church Music, and many other subjects.

I am a skilled public speaker, fierce debater, and natural conversationalist for whom any topic is fair for consideration.

I am an ardent defender of capitalism while a frequent critic of its practitioners, an apologist for the Christian faith, though I advocate a 21st Century reformation of its institutions, and I am comfortable frequently standing alone in defense of my ideals.

Presently, I am working to improve my Spanish skills to the point of native fluency, re-visit my 7 years of French to become conversational again, and have over the past year been gradually picking up Russian so that one day I can read Dostoevsky in his native tongue.

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 As a man of varied avocational interests, I am also, not surprisingly, one with several vocational passions. These have evolved over the course of my professional life, as I suspect they will continue to do so. However for the most part, the overall themes have remained relatively constant, and the list has grown organically from its foundations, evidencing my own personal growth and engagement with adversity rather than mere fitful caprice.

1. Transformation of the assessment and award of educational credentials away from the current gatekeeper model and toward a more open, transparent, and egalitarian system based on academic achievement and merit over time rather than the present system which emphasizes education exclusively in one’s youth, and particularly in the form of admission to prestigious schools rather than on the content and knowledge mastered after admission. I will be blogging more about this in the very near future.

2. Decentralization and increased resilience of food & energy production.

3. Building new business models for transferring and applying new technologies in emerging markets to help catalyze developmental leap-frogging to help emerging economies catch up with the developed world.

4. Searching for and creating a new model for venture capital that can be applied more effectively in developing countries that aligns the interests of emerging market entrepreneurs with their financiers.

5. Developing Chile’s regions into engines of economic growth both for the country and Latin America in order to help Chile reach its full economic, social, and political potential as a model for development for emerging economies around the world.

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Like all living beings, I am in process. My thoughts, actions, and existence are in a state of Becoming, and as a result this miniature biography is a snapshot at a particular point in time. I will continue revising it as appropriate. I am ever watchful for new opportunities and ways to enhance my personal and professional platform for pursuing the ideas and vision for which I have so much passion. My hope is not to achieve some goal, but to improve my own process and the processes of the world and the people around me so that when my own life comes to an end, I will be able to say that I did everything I could within my faculties and circumstances and even tried to work beyond them.

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Advancing on Chaos and the Dark – Readings with Skinner is my Tumblr, where I share what I am reading and my reflections and analysis on my reading.

 for what I find interesting in the world.

 

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Skinner G. Layne
Santiago, Chile
26 December 2011