It’s All About Me

The guys in the picture below have been drilling outside our office for three days straight. The noise is slowly breaking us down. I think it’s one of our competitors trying to eliminate us, by using their own version of Chinese Water Torture. But we will not give in, of course.

New York, July 2007, Gramercy Park

London, May 2008, Holland Park

With hotdogs, beers, and four smelly friends.

Doing a startup is like playing Super Mario Bros. There are big rocks, living mushrooms, and evil dragons in your way and you have to jump, run, and swim to get pass them. But if you do succeed, there’s a pretty princess waiting for you…

So the video below is good inspiration - this guy is good.

The last week my search engine ranking for glissers.com dropped dramatically. Very annoying, especially since I just started to experiment with banner ads on the site, and was starting to plan my retirement in the Caribbean.

I’ve spent some time researching WHY this might happen, and the only thing I can come up with is that I’m being penalized for selling advertising without telling Google.

When I was using Google Adwords, I didn’t have this problem - everything was just fine, as long as Google got their cut of the actions. So it seams Larry and Sergey have outsmarted me, again.

A few weeks ago I did an interview with a podcaster based in Colorado, USA. The interview happened at 11.30 pm on a Friday evening - not the best time to present yourself to a worldwide audience. And I did poorly, to say the least.

You don’t have to listen to the whole thing, but listen to the first minute. It’s funny: http://www.startupstoryradio.com/nils-hammer-co-founder-of-kindocom/

One of my colleagues commented the interview with: “Well at least now I don’t have to worry about doing a bad interview ever again…”

Lesson learned

My girlfriend is usually angry with me because I spend too much time in front of the computer. As soon as we come home from anywhere, I always go “I wonder what’s happened on the Internet?” and disappear for an hour.

But now she’s found a website where people talk about their true love, their passion, their raison d’etre - their handbags. When I came home yesterday she was typing away in their forum, chatting with her new friends and discussing the best sized Hermes bag out there. And she refused to give me back my computer, using my standard phrase “just give me aminute…”

And then I fell asleep.

Working with people from all parts of the world is fun, but sometimes requires sacrifices. Fridays should be spent relaxing with friends and families, and usually that’s what I do. But tonight I have a conference call scheduled at 10pm GMT, and then phone interview with a US podcaster at 11pm GMT. Better stick to water, then.

I’ve always been fascinated by apes and monkeys, without quite understanding why. The opening chapter of Jared Diamonds book “The Third Chimpanzee” presents one explanation.

According to him, and according to other studies, there are good reasons to put the chimpanzee in the human family tree. Scientists claim that the chimp is more closely related to humans than they are to the gorillas, and should be put in the same genus as us.

According to an National Geographic article about the same subject, “studies indicate that humans and chimps are between 95 and 98.5 percent genetically identical”, and “researchers argue that humans and chimp lineages evolutionarily diverged from one another between five and six million years ago”.

I know this is an explosive subject, and I’m not enough of an expert to really say what’s fact and what’s fiction. (Gareth probably could though, since he’s a trained zoologist).

But when I study photos of chimpanzees, and my own cousin living in here London, I clearly see similarities.

I don’t like shopping. If it was less of a social suicide for a Swedish man (just look here to get an idea of how rough it was where I grew up), I’d buy 4 sets of identical shoes, jeans, t-shirts, sneakers and sweaters and just wear the identical outfits everyday.

I’ve found one relief, though, and that’s the Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo. They’ve got the clothes and prices right, and they’re starting to build a quite nice brand. Yesterday I bought 3 sweaters, 2 shirts, and 1 pair of jeans, for £88 in total (yep, that’s even cheaper than H&M).

Right afterwards I first discovered Uniqlo I bought shares in the company. So far the ROI has been pretty crap (I’ve lost money), but give them 30 years and I think they’ll do fine.