It’s All About Me

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.

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.”

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.