Spare time activities
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 21:28 28. Feb, 2008
setting: headquarters@8pm. There is still a couple of Zemantors left wandering around the office. Someone cryies out:
CTO: “Ha! found it!”
UI: “what?”
CTO: “Look, I’ve found a bug in the API or in the documentation of the API”
UI: “put it in the bugtracker”
CTO: “not ours, in Flickr…”
Cables rant
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 18:17 27. Feb, 2008
I hate cables. Power cables, data cables, hubs, splitters, connectors, I hate them. I feel like a monkey everytime I have to plug my nifty ultra portable laptop to 5-7 cables in order to start working normally. After that it looks like an octopus.
Today we had another intersting problem with cables - we had to buy some ups power cables for the new servers. Since we have offices next door to Ljubljana’s largest shopping mall we went for a walk to the first shop, but turned out they don’t have them. Nor the next one, or the third and fourth. Didn’t matter if it was computers shop, electronics shop or home store.
It took us an hour and a half to buy those three ’standard’ power cables. The only cables that are more or less trully standardized in the World (as long as you don’t use Lenovo lapotops). Now I will fear the day, when I will have to go buy another ’standard mini usb’ cable. *sigh*
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In the army now
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 19:45 26. Feb, 2008
The last time I was explaining to a girl friend about the crazy working hours in a startup, occasional adrenalin rushes, beating the competition, irregular sleep and regular food, important life lessons learned and lack of women in the process, she replied simply: “Well, guys used to go to the army, now you go to a startup.”
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SCT with Niklas Zenstrom
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 22:21 20. Feb, 2008
OK, liveblogging from Second Chance Tuesday with Niklas Zenstromm, well, quasy-live, since the internet doesn’t work, as it’s suppose to be at a decent web conference. Anyway, some funny highlights as they were happenin’…
As the moderator has recognized corretly, it feels like 1999 all over again. Niklas is a looser! Had a job, finished his degree, had an office, not garage…
Kazaa had 400mio downloaded copies and no business model better than advertising. They wanted to talk about it with music industry but only recived letters from their lawyers.
“Was your principle back then, that the people won’t pay for content?” Yes, the reality is that on internet you can get anything for free, so advertising is the way to go. “So you ended up sued to death?” Yes, noone but lawyers made any money with it. “So then we continued to create services not involving so many lawyers.”
It took more than a year to raise first money for Skype. Becuase it was a bad year and for the track record.
There was noone offering something like it, and they were not easy to use. You had to have one geek talking to the other. “What a horrible conversation that is.” When we launched, everyone called us, at the end of august 2003.
“Did you have a clear business model from the start?” Yes, get people to use free service and upsell skype-out calls, and then maybe have yellow pages with ads.
The telecom companies said “who’d wanna use a computer to make phone calls?”
“And eventually you’ve come up with a perfect business model - selling Skype to E-Bay for an enourmous amount of money.”
“How much money did they pay?” “It depends on how you look at it…”
“How did you feel when e-bay cut back some of the investment” “well, that was mostly accounting”
“How many of you have tried Joost? quite some… How many are actually using it?” [you can imagine the amount… ]
“Profitability is not on the roadmap for this year” - how long has Joost been around allready?
“Startup is not so dependant on the cycle of the economy.”
Biggest mistake and best decision? I missed the first internet wave, ecause I wasn’t etrepreneur from the begining. To launch Skype.
“How did you come up with the name Skype?” “It used to be Skyper, but that was registered to Deutche Telecom…”
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Big City Lights
Filed under: zemanta — bostjan @ 12:32 11. Feb, 2008
After exactly two months on the Continents (old and new one) we’ve visited midlands of London again. I was surprised that walking around town felt less annoying than I remembered.
We were there for a great party, organized by our lawyers under the roof of The Gherkin Building. Since we were in town, the weather was great, and the view was absolutely fantastic!!! It was like a scene from Bladerunner or any other decent SF movie - a metropolis reaching from one horizont to the other, third and fourth. And you could hardly notice when the city lights changed to stars and Thames transformed to Milky Way. It almost felt like the centre of the Universe. Or the insides of a hollow planet with holes in the ground. 