After a pretty long silence from the daily newspaper, I got an email last week that said "Dear Rhubarb, Okay, here's your first assignment. Interview this guy and write a career paths profile on him [details details details] Okay?"

The guy is an American venture capitalist, originally from Detroit, who worked his way through Canada and Europe and eventually set up shop in Russia about 10 years ago. He developed a way of financing companies that's halfway between venture capital (where the company gets money in exchange for a bunch of its shares) and a normal bank loan--his firm, in exchange for the funds to develop the company, gets royalties from the profits. He said it worked well for small businesses in the States, who don't want a venture capital firm to own that much of their stock, and it works even better in Russia, where the business climate isn't ripe for venture capital.

I had fears of him being a self-satisfied cowboy-type, not unlike Big Midwestern Underground Fungus, who showed up here in the 90s, made a killing, and enjoys telling himself stories about all the good he's done for the world by getting rich and being him. This guy didn't strike me like that--he had story after story of him thinking through ways to make something more economically efficient, and scraping together all the contacts and resources at his disposal to realize his plan. It was never really mapped out, he just followed little incremental opportunities as he saw them, almost like he was solving little puzzles as he came to them and then using what he learned to solve bigger, different puzzles. He's still far from complacent.

He has a crystal-clear, and well-substantiated, view of himself as someone who's independent, risk-taking, self-starting, carpe-diem, etc, and throughout the interview he'd remind me explicitly of how he sees himself. It made me wonder how much peoples' personalities develop as a result of whatever it is we happen to repeat to ourselves about ourselves.