# 2016.11.27 Neffs

Hey you two!

Happy Thanksgiving. We had a ball in New Orleans. My best Thanksgiving ever. But not exactly perfect. Perhaps if you'd been there it would have been. ☺️

I was thinking about the container idea and in my over-simplistic head, I thought our key challenges were:

1. financing
2. location

A conversation Umar and I had earlier get the old gears turning and I now think it's more like:

1. time-to-market
2. refinement/readiness of vision for phase 1
3. financing

Maybe this is stuff you already know, but I'm slow and didn't think about it this way previously. If that is the case, please humor me…

**time-to-market** is critical. Someone will create something recognizably (and annoyingly!) similar eventually. The inevitability means if we really want to do this, we have to *find a way* to start now while balancing other commitments in our busy lives.

When I used to tell my friends "that was my idea" they never seemed impressed. Now when I say it they quip "but his is the one making money".

**refinement of vision** was something I just thought would happen… planning, zoning, builder, architect, etc. is just grunt work we need to do. But given our adjusted given our time-to-market need, it seems extra critical we need to nail this especially if time-to-market means we need to do something smaller at first and follow on with additional phases or whatnot.

Maybe **location** is not really a problem. Given the market we're after, it needs to be located where it needs to be located. Acquisition is going to cost whatever it is. So we've collapsed this into the finance problem, which just became bigger.

Regarding **finance** I think this project will be different than the everything I've done in the past. In my past, I only had one level to deal w/ budget gap: decrease cost. Here it seems we have a lot of room for partnerships, special events, etc. Seems there's much more to be gained on the up side than cut on the bottom. Also seems much easier to do. My current thinking is finance is not really an obstacle if we nail 1 & 2.