2008 February « It’s All About Me

Archive for February, 2008

My Cousin - the Ape?

Published February 27, 2008 friends , kindo , private life , random 1 Comment

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.

Uniqlo Makes It Tolerable

Published February 18, 2008 investing 0 Comments

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.

Four Harmonious Friends

Published February 14, 2008 kindo 2 Comments

This is a picture that my girlfriend brought home from Nepal, showing an elephant, monkey, hare and a bird working together to reach their goals.

And this is a picture of the four co-founders of Kindo, doing the same thing.

(I guess we’ll argue about who the elephant should be).

Kindo’s Got Some New Friends

Published February 7, 2008 investing , kindo , marketing , social networks 3 Comments

This is from the Kindo blog, but I post it here as well. This is by far the longest blog post I ever writtten.

“The family and friends that surrounds you during your first years in life make a big impact on who you become later in life. The same is true for a startup, which is why it’s so important to get the team right from the start.

So as we today announce funding from top European seed investors - including Saul and Robin Klein (The Accelerator Group), Stefan Glänzer (former chairman of Last.fm, founder of Ricardo), and ASI, a VC-firm set up by the founding engineers of Skype - I know we got off to a good start. When I worked with some of them at Skype, I was blown away by how good they were.

Kindo now has all the opportunities you can ask for to grow up and become what we set out to become - a global brand, focusing on the family and the family life.

It’s worth remembering why this is an exciting vision. When we set out building the business less than a year ago, we did it because we wanted to build something that helped us keep in touch with our families back home. We’re all avid users of other social networks, and used Facebook to stay in touch with our friends, and LinkedIn to keep track of our business contacts. But even though the family is the network that will stick with you for the longest, there were no good and dedicated social network for the family and relatives (at least that we could find). Tons of sites that could help me learn more about my ancestors, but I really want to learn more about the folks that are still around, my living family. So, we decided to build this site, because we wanted to use it.

Secondly, being entrepreneurs, we realized that there’s a real opportunity to build a real global business in this space. If you look out on the world of the web, you realize how many of the biggest sites out there that are social networks, in some kind of shape. Facebook and MySpace comes to mind immediately, but there are so many other local players (skyrock.com, vkontake.ru, netlog.com, etc) that aren’t spoken about in the press, with huge numbers of loyal users, growing rapidly. Social networking is here to stay, for the family, your business relations, or your family.

There are over 1,000,000,000 Internet users in the world today, all of them with a family or a family history to explore. So, this is not a niche product, for a niche audience - we’re building a global product, for a global audience. And since this audience doesn’t only speak English, we don’t either. We might be a small little toddler, but we’re already speaking 14 languages fluently. Imagine where we’ll be when we’re a teenager.”

4 Years with the Queen

Published February 2, 2008 private life 3 Comments

Gareth wrote a great story about his 6 years in London, which got me thinking.

When I was studying in Sweden I had no idea where I was going, but I knew I wasn’t going to London. I didn’t like the combination of bad weather, bad food, and single-glassed windows. I used to scorn at my banker friends destined for excel-sheets and suits in the city. Yet, here I am, having spent the better part of my 20s on the district line.

I’ve made a few serious attempts to escape, first moving to San Francisco, and then back to Sweden, but for different reasons (such as Ebay, Pema, and Kindo) I always got thrown back here.

Do I regret it? Of course not. But I really don’t think that I’ll be here in 4 years time. Hopefully I’ll live somewhere closer to the nature, where you don’t have to use wikipedia to get the idea.

On the other hand, that’s what I’ve been saying for the last 4 years, so don’t listen to me.