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.

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.

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).

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.”

I’m just back from Leweb3, which is one of the big European web conferences. It was fruitful in many ways and met lots of fun people, but the party at La Scala was weird.

When I arrived around 11 pm, the dance floor was starting to get crowded - by middle-aged, slightly overweight engineers, all male, all dancing with each other, shaking their booties. When I looked out on the crowd I could easily count the few women, who must have been either very happy, or very scared.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bunch of male strippers would have shown up on the stage - it had that kind of vibe. But the free bar was nice!

Pick your flavor:
www.kindo.com
www.kindo.co.uk
www.kindo.se
www.kindo.de
www.kindo.fr
www.kindo.es
www.kindo.it
www.kindo.com.br
www.kindo.co.za
www.kindo.co.nz
etc…

Kindo is where families get together, build their tree and grow. That’s why we’re called Kindo.

Kin:
a person’s relatives collectively; kinfolk.
family relationship or kinship.
a group of persons descended from a common ancestor or constituting a family, clan, tribe, or race.

Do:
to perform (an act, duty, role, etc.)
to execute (a piece or amount of work)
to be the cause of (good, harm, credit, etc.); bring about; effect.
to create, form, or bring into being:

We’ve just launched a new version of Kindo. I think this release makes the application really come to live.

We’re still in private beta, but not for much longer - it’s soon time for Kindo to meet the world. You can sign up for news on kindo.com and be the first to know.

Here’s a screenshot of Julio Iglesias’s family tree. He’s not involved in Kindo in any way, but he’s a good singer.

Emerge.se is writing about Kindo, and other similar companies. It’s a good analysis, worth reading (if you’re lucky enough to speak Swedish).