punctuative! by Matt Winn

New York Taxi, originally uploaded by r12a

Those of you who know me personally know that I enjoy chatting with taxi drivers. The position affords such a unique perspective on a city, its people’s behavior, and more superficially (but important nonetheless for the directionally challenged), of course, on travel shortcuts. Domestically, many drivers grew up overseas and see the US with an outside eye. Altogether, there’s lots of conversation fodder.

I used to ask about the business of taxi driving. How many taxis are there in this city? How many miles do you usually drive in a day? etc. Driving is a tough business and the answers, with which I gained a sense of the unit economics involved, usually affirmed this feeling. Eventually, I enjoyed hearing more about the driver himself. I’ll never forget the fellow in NYC who had put his boy through Dartmouth (and into the investment banking ranks) by working 20 hour shifts for days at a time.

And so, today, on my way to the Southeast Venture Conference, riding from a portfolio company in Nashville to the airport, I enjoyed chatting with a sharp and life-savvy driver. He had grown up in Nigeria, spent time in Florence, and then headed to the US in 1979. In the late-eighties, after earning a masters in agricultural science, and facing few job prospects with the country in recession and his native Nigeria under worsening social strife, he started driving. About twenty years later, he’s still doing it, and happily so. I couldn’t help but find him overqualified for the job, but as he put it under separate discussion, “I’ve been in the grandfather business,” by which I understood his interest in family/relationships/life outside career has superceded, and likely infused happiness into, his work.

Backgrounds aside, this fellow piqued my interest with his take on US politics, for which he felt enormously grateful. It’s been a topic on my mind of late as I gear up to get involved in an “extracurricular” way with the 2008 election and I found this perspective refreshing. Politics, he felt, in many countries is not democracy but “democrazy” - a “politics of tears or death,” resulting from literal in-fighting and war-like division. Say what you will about our heavy-handed international policy-making or hubris, we’re still civilized at home, and ultimately, human in our diplomacy. Debatable? Yes, especially under current circumstances. But I sensed a simple gratitude for our “ordered” state, paved roads, and reliable utilities. I’ll be thinking about that as I read Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. What a cab ride.