Philippe's blog

Us versus Them versus John Lennon

2011-07-15T13:55:00.000+02:00

We live in a world of polarization, where everything seems to be an Us versus Them situation. Corporations vs Mom and Pop Stores, West vs East, Employers vs Unions, Liberals vs Conservatives... All these conflicts don't make you happy, and they really don't serve anyone's interest.

I've learned the hard way to use less superlatives and to include the words maybe and perhaps in my vocabulary. (You can get started by reading Dale Carnegie's "How to win friends and influence people")

Instead of preaching, I just want to point out one terrific example of a company that broke through the Us-versus-Them-mentality. The company Milliken has an activity in the center of Gent. While this causes some inconveniences (think: large trucks passing through your street), Milliken wanted to involve the neighborhood. With the help of the city, they decided to open up one of their warehouses for use as sports hall. Normally, the warehouse is used as a parking garage, but on Wednesday afternoon and in weekends, the warehouse is used by the local kids, for sports activities.

Isn't that fantastic? Instead of alienating from each other, this company and the neighborhood have found a common ground. I bet John Lennon would have loved this.

Networking organizations

2011-01-21T20:55:00.003+01:00

Entrepreneurs are invited to join dozens of networking organisations, which have hundreds of meetings throughout the year. If you want to get any work done, you should choose carefully which meetings to attend, and perhaps more importantly importantly: which networks to join.

Networks or Gross works?

On a recent the invitations for a New Years reception, the Chamber of Commerce (Voka) bragged about the number of local entrepreneurs that would show up. A lot of new people to meet! But does an entrepreneur want mingle with 700 people and exchange business cards? Do I want to spend two or three hours of my valuable time talking to people from unrelated sectors, that I will undoubtedly never meet again? What is the value of undiscriminated local networking for a global business owner?

VMA lists some high profile members and has networking events in famous companies. These events are announced as "In the boardroom with ". Yes, it is nice to talk to somebody who has achieved something in life, but it is not nice to have to fight through a few dozen groupies in order to shake hands.

There is a fundamental problem with organizations like Voka and VMA. Voka attracts new members by explaining how many of the local companies are Voka members. Will this attract new visionary members that try to find their own way of building a business? Or does this attract bookkeepers and management consultants that want to sell their services to all those companies? I am a member of both Voka and VMA, but I feel increasingly like I don't belong. Oversimplifying things, Voka focuses on quantity, VMA gets its quality from a select elite.

Curator

So which networking organizations are more useful? The answer is blindingly simple. You want to join an network who's value comes from the combined value of its members. That is why it is called a network. Ideally, this network organization would have a good curator. Curator is the word used by TED's lead Chris Anderson. It is a bit unconventional, but very to the point. Wikipedia teaches us that a curator (from Latin cura, care) is the overseer of a cultural heritage institution. And a network is very much about building and preserving a culture.

Let me give some examples of a few clubs and their curators. I've mentioned TED, and I have had the privilege of participating in two TEDx events. I know this is not the real thing, but it gets close. It gets close in the same sense as eating the best paella in Gent gets close to Spanish cuisine. TED events consist of a series of talks by world experts, with lots of long breaks. These breaks are really opportunities to meet with people and discuss what has been said in the talks. There is lots of emphasis on the audience. Take away the speakers and you'd still have a crew that will change the world. Take away the audience and TED would be degraded to a National Geographic recording studio.

Another high quality project is Bryo. I have had the honor of joining the Bryo pilot project back in 2007. Like TED, Bryo events include some high profile guests. These guests give a short talk about their experiences in entrepreneurship. More importantly, the Bryo participants get a lot of face time with these guests. (Focus on people and on networking!) After a while we noticed that much of the value of the Bryo network comes from the Bryo members. The members are a small group BRight YOung entrepreneurs, carefully selected by curator Eric Kenis. He has nurtured the group an built a tight network. Another thing: what happens in Bryo, stays in Bryo. Because we have committed to keep things confidential, we can talk openly about our challenges and successes.

Third, SO Kwadraat. SO Kwadraat is a non-profit organization that helps high-tech starters launch their business. The three curators are successful entrepreneurs. Successful in the sense that they have sold their business and made a good buck out of it. They meet with future entrepreneurs and help them in building an entrepreneurial team and in writing a business plan. After starting a business, founders are invited to become members of the SO Kwadraat Business Club. The only people at business club are three curators and entrepreneurs that have consulted with SO Kwadraat in their startup phase. You have a very select audience, with the same level of thrust and confidentiality as in Bryo.

So, lets summarize some common traits of good networks:

there is a certain filter that keeps uninteresting people out,
there is a trust, people can speak openly,
there is a certain bond, a common trait that the networking members share.

We all know that TEDsters are of nobel price quality. But I am convinced that within the next decade, people from the Bryo and SO Kwadraat network will kick some serious ass too.

Colleagues and Competitors

2010-07-07T21:59:00.000+02:00

Last month, Sigasi co-founder Hendrik Eechkaut and I visited the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim, California.

We decided not to get a booth at the exhibit, but wear polo shirts with our twitter names and the company name instead. This saved us a lot of money, but it also allowed us to move around freely and meet with many interesting people. (perhaps I should talk about some of those people in another post)

The most interesting experience perhaps, was meeting with two people that have a product that is very similar to our own product. The easy way to label these people is as competitors. However, that label is not entirely correct. If you compete, that means there is one resource (in this case, customers or market share) that will be won by one competitor. The other competitors lose. The term competition is also (and more correctly) used with regards to sports and games.

In my native language, we use the word concurrent instead. This word comes from Latin and means to run together. This suggests that both concurrents (forgive my English neologism) are facing the same direction and headed towards a common goal. In fact this is true for me and Cristian and Andy. All of us would much rather grow the market than win market share from each other.

Sadly, the connotation of the word in the Dutch language has become the same as it has in English: that of two competitors facing each other in combat. People have wanted to use a term that has some of the original meaning of having common goals. They use the word "concullega", a portmanteau of concurrent and colleague. As it happens, even this word is used pejoratively. I'm sure we will need to find a new word soon to preserve the original meaning.

Nice philosophical and philological aside, there is always a feeling of adversity when you are fishing in the same pond. I'm sure that one concullega will sooner or later do things that bother the other. Some customers will move from one provider to the other. There is certainly information that cannot be shared with competing software providers.

Still, I'm happy to have met with Andy and with Cristian. In the spirit of Sigasi, which lets information freely flow on its website, I have been open with them. I hope to continue growing mutual trust in the coming years. We can collaborate on certain projects and compete on others.

VAT regulations and how to avoid them

2010-02-16T12:49:00.001+01:00

In the previous millennium, there was a clear line between goods and services. Goods consist of atoms and anything else that can be sold are services. Companies started out by selling their goods or services close to where they were based. Japanese companies sold in Japan, American companies sold in the US and Belgian companies sold in Belgium. Only as your company started to grow, you might want to think of international business. The fact that selling abroad causes so much paperwork was fine, since only "big" companies bothered with international trade.

Fast forward to 2010. The world is a village. High-tech start-ups want to sell to as many villagers as possible. My company sells a very specific niche product: our software helps electrical engineers make digital chips. If we'd have 100% market penetration in our own country (Belgium) we would go out of business. We need to tap in to the global market from day one. Which we did.

But we are still stuck with value added taxes, a system that was introduced in the early seventies. For those of you lucky enough not to know VAT, let me explain. For (almost) all services and goods that a company sells, it has to charge VAT. The question if you should charge VAT and the VAT rate depend on a lot of factors:

if you sell goods or services,
the exact type of goods or services,
your turnover for the customer's country,
the type of customer (business customer or consumer),
the fact that your customer has a valid VAT number (which you should check)
the destination of the goods,
the country in which the customer is located,
and the phase of the moon.

(Sadly enough, only that last bullet was a joke.)

We did not find a nicely packaged web service that offers us on-line payments, taking all VAT rules into account. Again, when the world was younger and the animals talked, only big companies would think of selling abroad. Big companies can afford to do this right and pay a consultant to build an online sales platform.

PayPal is really nice, but is built with American-style sales taxes in mind. You only need to know where your customer lives and then you know the tax rate.

I do not understand why the government does not provide such a PayPal-like platform, with full VAT support, for all companies to use. It would allow all of us to increase sales without upfront investment in an online VAT module. This way more customers would buy our cool stuff, we'd make more money and the government would raise more taxes. Everybody happy.

Enough complaining. Here is how we have solved the problem: we ignore VAT.

All of our customers get to see the same PayPal "pay now" button, and all customers pay the same amount of money (€499). Putting a "pay now" button on your website is trivial, thanks to PayPal. After we receive the money, we email a new license key to the customer so that our software will continue working.

After that, we go through the whole VAT mumbo-jumbo, in a mechanical Turk way (that is: by hand). If it turns out that the customer did not need to pay VAT, we're happy. The full €499 is revenue for us. If it turns out we did in fact need to charge VAT, we're still happy. We give the customer a €86.60 discount: €499 - discount + 21% VAT = €499.

It turns out that in our business very few customers will ever have to pay VAT: only Belgian customers (small market) and consumers (we have a B2B product). If ever we decide that we lose too much money on these discounts, we can always pay somebody to build a system that charges VAT the proper way.

By all means, feel free to try our purchase form and payment mechanism. I'll send you an invoice and a software license key!

Outsource everything, part2: share an assistant

2010-01-26T22:17:00.000+01:00

We started off in the attic of my house for two reasons. First because it would buy us some hey-we-started-in-an-attic street credibility. And second because it would save us some money.

After half a year, the startup was having two interns and I was having a second baby, so we had to move. We looked at office spaces. Free advice: do not rent an office space! You want to pay for services. You do not want to pay for square meters (or square feet, if you please). Finally, we ended up at our current location, a full service business center.

Our office is cleaned regularly, trashcan cleaned and recycle bin emptied. When we are on the road, our incoming (land line) phone calls are answered, our FedEx deliveries and certified mails are taken care of. If the lights or the heating is broken, help is already on its way. The receptionists of the business center can provide services as management assistant, on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Last week, we ran out of black toner for our laser printer. This could be a major problem to a company that is just about to have a meeting with a VC. A quick mail to the front desk with the PDF took care of the problem: our document was printed on their color laserjet. Does it cost extra to have stuff printed for you? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely!

The same day I ordered a new toner cartridge online, which was delivered to our office the next day. As any HP customers might know, you are encouraged to put your old cartridges back in your new box and send them to HP by mail. I've done that before: go to the post office, wait in line, wait for the post officer to print a large label and stick it on your box, say thank you, get back to the office. Not very productive, and HP makes extra money from me standing in line at the post office. Turns out we have a big box in our building: I just throw in my cartridges, somebody else collects the box and the value of the empty cartridge goes to a charity. Big time saver.

I have one roll of "normal" post stamps. Anything out of the ordinary (too heavy, too big, international,...) is handled by the business center's front desk at a small surplus charge over the post stamp's cost. I don't have to know all the silly rates for international mail (or look them up every time) and I don't have to buy seven different post stamp values.

Bottom line: first, outsource your computer stuff, second move to a business center that offers you good and flexible support. That way, you can concentrate on building your business.

Outsource everything, part 1: SaaS

2010-01-21T20:37:00.002+01:00

If you run a startup company or you work as a contractor, you are not good at many things. Actually, you are great at one particular thing. In my case this is creating an intelligent development environment for electrical engineers. This means neither me nor my co-founder are good (or want to be good) at dealing with paperwork, setting up mail servers, cleaning the office, shopping for office supplies doing dishes and so on and so forth.

An important decision we made early on is to move as much IT as possible out of our company. We are computer scientists and we love working with computers, but we hate maintaining servers. We started out by buying a big fat server, and have regretted it ever since.

SaaS is great for startups and contractors. You don't have to worry about buying hardware, getting broken hardware fixed or installing software upgrades. It all just works. Google Calendar has improved since I started using it, but I never had to upgrade. If a Google computer breaks down, I don't even notice because a zillion computers are ready to take over its job. If something bad happens with the service, a thousand Google engineers are getting paged to fix it. That is a thousand more than I want to afford for software maintenance.

From day one, our e-mail was hosted by Google. No, we never used a GMail address for our business. Google lets you link your domain to its services, including e-mail, calendar, Google docs and more. We have written entire project proposals using Google Docs. Docs is not as good as your average word processor, but it allows to work on a document together, at the same time!

You don't want to spend time keeping your own laptop or desktop computer up and running. Our desktops run Fedora Linux, who's modern versions are pretty self-maintaining. Linux on laptops is and remains problematic (especially finding compatible drivers for audio, video and network), so we have Macs. Macs work out of the box, period. I get headaches when people ask me to fix their Windows PC, and for good reason. Even for IT guys, a Mac just saves you a lot of trouble.

To wrap it up, here are two nice hosted tools. We use Dropbox for file sharing, even with partners outside the company. Crashplan for off-site backup. (You need backups, hard drives will eventually crash!)

Bottom line: get a maintenance-free computer, outsource all you can to SaaS providers and spend your time at building your business.

Next post will be about outsourcing non-IT tasks.

a gap between students and ex-students

2009-12-03T21:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I gave a talk to engineering students about career planning and job applications. It was really a talk about networking, or rather: connecting with their future employers.

I only left grad school a few years ago, so I remember being a Ph.D. student quite vividly. Still, I notice some serious gaps between academia (or rather: students) and industry (or rather: entrepreneurs). Which is a shame. It's a shame, because students and entrepreneurs are two classes of people with a spectacular freedom to operate. Both get judged by their output (grades or profit) and not by their input (hour of work invested). As a result, both have a choice to spend the entire thursday morning in bed or to spend the entire saturday night working (and they do).
Nobody cares about how exactly entrepreneurs or students get to results. They can use any (legal) means necessary, but the cold numbers are presented at the end of the year, be it the book year or the academic year.
In a sense, we should feel connected. I know I do.

And still, when students make contact with entrepreneurs or with a corporate environment, all of a sudden most of them switch to a whole new set of social rules (a different protocol, if you will), which is awkward both to the student and to the entrepreneur. Which is a shame, because a good relationship with their possible future employers would make their job search a whole lot easier.

Example: I had a discussion with the president of a CenEka, a student's organization. She tried to contact companies, trying to get sponsoring and to get her organization invited for toured visits in interesting companies. She asked me how long her e-mails should be for getting in touch with companies. Apparently, she never got an answer to her two-page long e-mail. She wondered if she left anything important information out, while she should be wondering how to the e-mail shorter and more powerful. If she had talked to anybody who runs a business, she'd have had a better e-mail and probably some direct introductions.

It would be nice if students and people from the industry would be able to interact more spontaneously. After all: we are future colleagues. So I'd like to call on all students to start interacting with their future co-workers -- I'm sure entrepreneurs and employees are willing to accept student's invitations. Ceneka has made it its core business to organize toured visits to companies. This is a good starting point. But it would be even better to build lasting relations between the companies and the student's club, or even better: between the people.

Careers, sabatticals and entrepreneurship

2009-11-15T21:54:00.000+01:00

I've been talking to a friend who is close to graduating. He plans on building his own business, but at the same time he's finding a job. Bad Idea.

In Belgium, you the government pays you while you are working on a Ph.D. The exact amount of your paycheck, is around €1500 or €1600, after taxes. Especially Ph.D. students that adhere to a student-like lifestyle do not spend anywhere near that amount. The result is that after four years of doctoral research, most Ph.D. graduates have a nice savings account. Moreover, many young graduates are not bound by a family or by mortgages and real-estate.

A graduation is a big milestone. At milestones like this, you should take some time off to think things over and decide for yourself what you want with your life. Just accepting the first job offer you come across would be a waste of opportunity.

Only a few times in your lifetime, and perhaps even only once, you get the opportunity to take a year to try something new. Something you really want to do, whether or not this new thing yields an immediate financial return. If you have this chance, it is your duty to yourself and your community to follow your heart. If you'd just take the first job you run across, you risk ending up with a mediocre career.

Some people would call this opportunity a sabbatical. A sabbatical however, to most people implies that you spend time doing something fun but useless (like traveling around the world). If you can afford to spend a year pursuing your passion, traveling is only one option. Other options include

starting a business venture,
starting a non-profit,
building your own new FLOSS project, or
building your own house with your bare hands.

Think this through: what have you got to loose? You know how much you will spend each month and you know how large your savings account is. After 12 months, you can always just find yourself a job. I started my company using my own savings while having a family and a house (i.e. mortgage) but also having a loving spouse to support me. If you have none of the above, the choice should be even simpler for you.

After a year of spending your savings, but more importantly: following your heart, you may decide you do not even want to pursue the career you previously had in mind. Especially people who want to start their own business, do this with the intention of making a living out of it, and changing the future of their lives.
But even if you have to/want to go out searching for a job, future employers will surely appreciate a person with a mind of his own, who thinks outside the traditional box and takes chances. And if they don't appreciate that: would you really want to spend 40 hours per week in that organization?

Bottom line: you have nothing to loose. You know how much this sabbatical will cost and the benefits are yet to discover. Do yourself a favor and take this opportunity.

Getting your neck chopped off

2009-11-07T20:59:00.003+01:00

This week, three prominent Belgian athletes received a 12 month suspension from the anti doping authorities. Not because they tested positive, not even because they are accused of using any forbidden substances, but because they failed to comply with anti-doping formalities. More specifically, they did not log into anti-doping website to fill in their whereabouts.

The government requires athletes to disclose their whereabouts, so that they can at all times send an inspector for doping tests. Three failures to comply with the whereabouts requirements is equal to a positive doping test. Penalties are one to two years of suspension.

The three suspended athletes were highly successful and highly respected. They worked hard for their career, performed well and were good sports ambassadors for their country.

In a radio interview, an anti doping official explained that the suspension was conform the law. The Law, he explained had been the result of a Democratic process. And the athletes shared the responsibility in the war against doping.

So there it is: Long live Democracy! Long live the War against Doping! In the name of slogans, we let these people hang out to dry. They stick out their neck. The work three times as many hours as their average countrymen. They become heroes, both national and international. And what happens next? Their necks get chopped off. A twelve month suspension can easily finish of an athletes career.

So shouldn't athletes take responsibility? Yes they should. Shouldn't there be consequences when they break the rule and fail to disclose their whereabouts? Yes there should be consequences. But these consequences should be targeted at improving anti-doping enforcement, not at breaking careers. All officials state their sympathy for the three athletes in question, but still willingly take part in destroying their career. These officials choose to follow procedure instead of showing common sense.

As an entrepreneur I stick out my neck. I solicit funding from the government and from investors. I invest my own time and money. I do this to change the future of hardware design, to create value for my customers. I strive to contribute value to my community by paying taxes and creating new jobs. But if this community chops off heads so easily, where will we keep finding people that are willing to stick out their neck?

"I have been busy"

2009-10-01T16:38:00.008+02:00

Everybody has heard this excuse for an unaccomplished task: "I've been busy." I would like to make a plea for not using that phrase ever again. First of all, it's not an excuse for not doing something, it just means exactly the same as: "I haven't done that thing." OK, not exactly the same. There is always the possibility that you weren't busy but you were just bored to death, but you still didn't do that thing. Let's assume that that was not the case (and if it was, you wouldn't want to admit it). So saying you've been busy is (for most people) a non-statement.
I'm always busy, and I bet you are always busy too. Busy working, busy calling customers, busy spending quality time with my family or even busy sleeping, which is absolutely necessary if I want to spend the next day being busy and productive. Come to think of it. Perhaps we should just ban the word altogether.

So let's look at some alternatives that are more honest or more meaningful. And then, let's find out how if these alternatives can be made to sound socially acceptable.

I had more important (or: urgent) things to do.
That's honest. It's probably true, too. Depending on who you are talking to, you may need to convince them how important those things were, and that you'll get to their task as soon as your important things have been taken care of. Be careful not to make this sound like the other person is not important!
I was really busy working on a project with a big deadline next Friday. After that, I'll get to your task.

I had planned on doing this task tomorrow.
Yeah right! Try to avoid this one. If you had planned to do it tomorrow, you probably should have informed the other guy three weeks ago that is would lay on your desk for three weeks before you'd look at it. If it's just an excuse (which it probably is), then (a) make sure you have it done by tomorrow, and (b) mind your reputation and avoid using the same excuse twice.
It slipped my mind, but I'll have the report ready tomorrow.

Your task (or whatever) is on a low priority for me now.
Honest. But not very helpful. However, if that's the way it is, you should really get this message across in a way that the other person would know what to expect. This puts him in a position of uncertainty, akin to the halting problem.
As long as I we are struggling with quality assurance, I can't make a priority of this thing.

I'm not planning on doing it at all.
Good for you! You've just freed yourself of all guilt and all future reminders and requests to complete this task. Downside: depending on your relation with the other person and the nature of your task, you may need to
I'm not going to mob the floors any more, but instead I'll make arrangements to get a housekeeper. (or: I'll buy an iRobot)

Best solution is to be very clear to other people on what you want to commit to, and by what time you can deliver. Also let people know what the implications are when you agree to a task.

I'll mob the floors tomorrow, but then I won't have time to go grocery shopping.
I can have your report ready by next Friday, but that means the other project you assigned to me will be delayed.

Everybody knows that you are busy. Just be busy doing the right things.

Google sites vs Blogger

2009-09-02T20:34:00.002+02:00

Just a quick note to let you know that I move this (two-entry) blog from Google Sites to Blogger. Google Sites gave the impression that they had a "blog" feature, but comments are restricted to "collaborators", so that's pretty worthless for a blog, right?
Anyway, I hope I can get used to this new home.

Will you help me for free? No I won't.

2009-09-02T20:18:00.001+02:00

I'm a computer guy and everybody knows it. My family knows it, my neighbors know it and my friends know it. I spent ten years in college earning an engineering degree in computer science and then a Ph.D. in computer science, so there's no point in denying.

So I'll fix your computer, right? No, I won't. At least not wholeheartedly. First of all, I'm not really good at fixing your computer. I know how it works on the inside, I write new computer programs, but I'm not a fixer. I just don't have that experience. Just like your grammy-awarded neighbor will not fix your stereo or your Pulitzer winning cousin will not fix your typewriter (not that I ever won any big awards). Second, I don't even use the computers that you use. I use Mac and Linux and I've been keeping away from Windows for the past ten years of my life.

So, when a cousin, friend, [fill in the blank] asks me to fix their computer, I'm not exactly thrilled. On one hand, I have a tendency to want to help people. On the other hand, I know it's going to take more time than I want to spend and more than they would dare to ask for if they would know the time budget in advance. Long story short: I used to fix the computers as good as I could, often not fully satisfying the owner and always spending more time than I wanted to (think: several hours).

I know this is a common situation, even for non-technical people. My dad is a physical therapist who regularly gets requests for free therapy and advice at family parties. I'm sure lawyers, writers, car mechanics and basically anybody with a specific skill gets this kind of informal requests for free help. Since you have studied to become a lawyer, writer or car mechanic, and you're trying to make a living out of it, it's only fair that people will pay you for your skills. But since these specific people are your neighbors or your cousin's best friend, and they ask you not during office hours, but at your sister's wedding party, they think you should help them for free (or perhaps for whuffie). Worst thing is that people will start taking your help for granted and will keep coming back to you.

There seems to be a problem here: you look bad if you don't want to help and you look bad if you want to ask money for helping. Here is a solution to both problems, call it a win-win solution. First, offer to refer a good colleague who can help with this problem for a fair price (I'm still looking for a good computer-fixer-guy near Ghent, Belgium that I can refer to). This sort-of takes care of being helpful, but most people will insist that you take care of your problem personally. If there is no way out, help the person that has come to you. However, you don't have to do this for free.

The last time I helped a neighbor, she asked me how much she owed me. I wrote her the following note:

Dear Ann,

Fixing your computer and getting all data from its harddisk took me three hours of work.

While I am self-employed, I could easily write an invoice to cover my expenses, but I won't. It is not my intention to do this sort of work (fixing computers) on a regular basis. It is also not my intention to make money at the expense of friends and neighbors.

So instead of writing an invoice, I suggest you make a donation to the Flemmish Cancer League, by wire transfer to account number xxx-xxxxxxx-xx. That way, at least something good comes from your crashed laptop.

Good luck with your research.

kind regards

Philippe

So here is the win-win in this deal:

I'm not the bad guy, because I helped a friend and I don't want money for it.
Next time, Ann will probably consider a different solution to her problems (path of least resistance)
I feel good for helping Ann and for helping a good cause.
Ann feels good for helping a good cause.

(Would that make it a win-win-win-win situation? Nah, that would be overkill.)

This trick also works the other way. I told this story a friend at the Chamber of Commerce, and he says he pulls the same trick on speakers he invites for seminars: "To which non-profit organization shall I donate your fee for addressing our members toningt?" This way you're not cheep, but you still know your invited speakers are not in it for the money. Turns out only two people "turned down" his offer and gave them their own bank account number.

2009-09-02T20:17:00.001+02:00

As many of you know, I have plenty of places on the web where I write stuff: twitter and my corporate website to name a few. But some of the things I work on, or that I want to write down just don't fit in these paces. That's why I decided to create a small Google-powered place of my own. I haven't laid down any rules for this website, so it may very well become a big pile of stuff. (Hey, I should write a blog post on the concept of "big pile of stuff!")

Anyway, in case you live in 2015 and you find this to be the first and last post on this website, give me a call so that I can remove the entire from Blogger's servers.