A few of us came earlier in the day to get ready for our Board meetings in Tampa. Tampa is also the place – strictly speaking St. Pete – that our business and personal friend Amar calls home. Amar’s company and we often compete with each other and then in many other cases, we partner together. He is acknowledged to be one of the industry leaders in our segment. Therefore, as you must have guessed, it is always great to sit down with him and get his perspectives on market, technology and customers. Specially for me who came from outside the industry.

Last evening, three of us from our team – Mark, Bob and myself sat down with Amar for dinner and drinks. We even called his wife – Aparna – to join us. Which was a good thing – since we are always up for one extra person to gang up on poor Amar!!

It was a great evening – and we even got to do business before Aparna came along!!!

Having stepped out of the flight at Tampa, I was weaving thru all those folks at the gate waiting to get into the plane for the outbound flight, when I thought I saw somebody that looked very much like me. Clearly somebody of Indian origin, he was also bespectacled and sported a clean shaven head.

What is more, I thought I might actually know him. He was peering into his iPhone busy doing whatever it is that busy people do with their iPhones at airports. To make sure I was not mistaking a stranger for somebody I knew, I went and just stood next to him. Eventually, he lifted his head and sure enough – it was an old colleague from the past – Gautam Vyas!

Neither of us work in our old company any more – so it gave me a chance to catch up with his exciting moves in career as well as get updates on some of the old colleagues. Funny part is that we do not live that far apart from each other (by Atlanta standards at least) but we actually saw each other first time after I left that job in of all places – Tampa airport!!