I was alone in the center of a small Chinese town, the weakly glowing streetlights hardly illuminating the streets. The silence was heavy and absolute. It was different from the eternal light and sound of Shenzhen, and the high elevation gave the air an unusual taste. Things were not the same up here in the mountains, and this strangeness seemed a bit menacing. The roads had been tarred, courtesy of the rich central government who gave special attention to the Chinese minorities, but the villages up here in the mountains of Yunnan province did not have many cars to wear down the roads. So they felt incomplete, and leaves lay about, their crushing beneath my feet giving my walk a strange soundtrack.

A group of men sat in a doorway smoking tobacco from a big bong, watching me walk past with impassive faces. I hurried a bit. What I was looking for was near, I knew. I turned a corner into a small side street, and saw it – the red and blue glow of the humming fluorescent lights, the pictures of the scantily clad lady with big breasts. I had found the local internet cafe.

I walked in through the narrow doorway, squeezing past a young teenage couple holding hands and staring out of the door. The guy had a scar across his forehead, I wondered idly what their story was, it may have been an amazing love story, it could have been endlessly tragic, perhaps they were completely boring. I’ll never know, because I walked into that room and was hit by the combined glow of hundreds of computer screens, different figures danced across many screens in some dance dance revolution clone, colourful websites reflected off the eyes of engrossed guys, smoking men scrolled through the news, cliques of teens starred together at a screen and shouted and laughed. The room was huge and it was filled with people surfing the internet and playing games. The internet cafe, long thought to be dead, had simply retreated here into the mountains, and it fed the local population with all the entertainment they could not afford to have at home.

After the necessary registration with my passport at the counter, I bought an entire night of internet surfing, starting off by checking what was new at techcrunch. I went through the usual schedule of websites I read, skipping only facebook and twitter, as they don’t work here.

Being the only foreigner in there, I was getting a lot of looks, giggles and yelled out “HELLOs” from the kids around. I expected them to come talk to me at some point, so when someone tapped my shoulder, I was suprised that rather than some spiky haired teenager, it was a somewhat middle-aged smiling man with a cigarette dangling from his lip. He introduced himself with the sentence: “TechCrunch is my favorite website, too”. His english was heavily accented, but good.

I simply looked up at him, unsure what to reply. I didn’t need to say anything, because he started talking to me about the last few articles he had read on TechCrunch. I got only a few sentences in, mostly in agreement with his somewhat unusual but pretty insightful opinions about what they wrote. He spoke as if he had never spoken to anyone about TechCrunch, and needed to get all his thoughts out.

After 30 minutes of mostly listening, he invited me out to have a drink with him and his friends. He excitedly made phone calls in the local dialect and we went out. We walked over to some local food place, and sat outside on plastic chairs, several beers quickly appearing on the table. Soon, several of his friends popped in a shinily new BYD car, and they joined me.

He told me what he does: he sells software. And he sells a lot of software. Every month, he makes more than $5000, which is more than 50 times the average salary where he lives. He told me how he does it, and it’s a bit unusual.

He had learnt how to program from a friend of his. They had both moved to Kunming and started working, but when his dad got sick, he had to go home and farm to keep the family alive. His dad was sick for close to a year, and they needed money. Unable to travel, he had started looking for jobs on Odesk, Rentacoder and such sites based on recommendation from his friend. After writing some software for a client, he noticed something important:

- If he simply looked at the list of software projects available for jobs, he would have ideas on what software to develop.

He did this, and rather than making software for clients, he created his own software products, which he put on the internet. He said that 3 days after he copied a simple idea from the rentacoder list on his website, he was making 2 sales a day. $20 per day, which basically doubled his monthly earnings as a farmer. He continued working on more products and copying more ideas, and soon he had 10 different software that he was selling. Sales were low at the start, but even then for him it was a lot of money.

He kept doing this, cloning software he found that people wanted by looking at open projects on rentacoder, most of his software being related to video encoding. Additionally, he would take open source software, change the way it looked and sell it online. He said he’d get a few refunds, but most people would purchase it without complaining. He said he tried selling Firefox for a while, but sales were very low due to the free competition.

At the moment he’s making more than $5000 a month, and he’s been making it for more than 4 years already. He’s one of the bigger players in the video encoding software market.

As I left, he dropped me off at the local hotel where my friends were. He shook my hand enthusiastically and said he would email me, but that he had to sleep now, because he had to go to the farm early the next morning. Surprised, I asked him why he still farmed. He shrugged and lifted his palms in that typical smiling manner that the villagers there have. “No why!” he said. “I enjoy farming”.
—
Follow me on twitter I’m average like you.

For young smart programmers who study a bit about the basic principles of making money, it’s pretty easy to get a steady income from the internet. It’s almost trivially easy, particularly at this point in time where there are many consumers of internet-based products and few producers.

But many people who try to make money on the internet are failing – and one of the main reason they fail is because of angels. Dark angels, flying about and preying on fresh minds.

You see, the angel investors, however benign the name may sound, are not investing money to help businesses get off the ground. They are not investing money so that others will get as rich as they themselves are. They are not doing a nice and social service – they are investing money because they want even more money back. That’s all they are – they are hawks looking to see where they can prey.

And one of their main bait methods is in their writing. Angel investors and others in their eco-system are writing on the internet about how to make money on the internet. These articles are what young programmers read, and the methods that these people write about is what the programmers end up using. Not knowing that they have fallen into a deadly trap that will maximize the potential profits of the angels, while rendering them nothing but statistical nothings, to be discarded at any time.

Angel investors are not interested in companies that create value and that can hire one or two people, while making a steady profit. The investors are interested in blow-out companies – companies that either grow huge, or that will be bought by other companies. Those are the only types of companies interesting for the angels.

And these are exactly the hardest types of companies to build, and the ones most likely to fail. But the angels will write and convince the programmers, and build this system where it seems like this is the right kind of company to build. Yes, it is, but only for THEM!

For you, young programmer, the right kind of company is not that insanely difficult, high risk company! It’s a simple product company that has a large market and that will pay your bills quickly. That’s EASY to build with the talents you have, and it WILL satisfy your needs.

The angels don’t want you to do this. It’s exactly what they don’t want, because those types of companies are taking away from their potential pool of candidates. They will write and talk as if those types of companies don’t even exist. Don’t let them sucker you into wasting the best years of your life trying to build something ambitiously dumb.

They will tell you to change the world, because you’re young and you still think you can. What they really mean is that you should join the ranks of their small investments, reducing their risk slightly, while increasing slightly the probability that they will make another 5 million. You’re just a statistic to them.

There is an easier path to the money you want. Good stand-alone product, big market. Execute well, the money will come. It starts slow, but it gets faster a couple of years down the line.

Don’t see venture capital as your aim. Don’t see seed investments as your aim. Don’t build only things that google may acquire. Don’t start unrealistically ambitious companies.

Don’t let those venture capital and angel blogs sucker you into doing stuff that is rather unlikely to work. Just make a good product for a big market, and ignore the vultures. When they smell the meat, they will come flying around anyways.
—
Follow me on twitter

I sat at the top of the tower in hong kong and looked out over the bay. The bed I sat on was expensive, the writing pad on the desk was made of heavy expensive paper.

The view was awesome, the room was awesome, my new shoes were awesome – everything was expensive and great. Except that it wasn’t. I felt no different than before – the money had done nothing to make me any happier.

I’d worked so much, and sacrificed so much to be able to sit in this room, but I felt as miserable as ever.

I sat up there, looking at the bay below, watching the big machines work on the land reclaim project. The ferry picked up people from one side, and took them to the other side, a task it had been doing for years, and will continue to do for a long time to come.

There was a tap on the door. I stood up, arranged the smile on my face and opened the door. He strode in, a round man with a constant smirk, and his confident loud presence seemed to immediately change the dynamic of the room.

The man who had taught me everything I knew. The man who had showed me how to be confident, who had taught me how to sacrifice to get what I wanted. I needed him once more, and had called for him once more, but this time, the task was different.

This time, he was to teach me, not how to become rich, but how to make true value in my life. How to make the kind of wealth I really wanted, and not the wealth I had mistakenly gathered.

When I had told him, he had confidently and loudly assured me on the phone that he would show me the missing element. He said he knew the thing I was missing and the money could not fill.

He said he would take me into the belly of hong kong, and I would find what I was looking for that night. He clapped his hands and laughed out loud, as he usually did, and I looked at him, wondering what lay behind that laugh.

Art
The room we walked into was filled with many men in suits. They all sat on sofas in groups that included young pretty girls. We sat at the back, a single bottle of whiskey filled out in front of us.

Then a spotlight shone on the stage. Two girls walked out, holding a big sheet of a paper. A thin, dapper man strode out from the side, picked up a paintbrush and quickly drew a chinese character on that sheet of paper. He was done in 20 seconds.

Then the bidding started. That sheet of paper sold for US$9000.

He looked at me and smiled. That’s art. It’s not in the paper, it’s in the man. Your art has to be in you for you to be happy. Be proud of what you make, and you will be proud of yourself.

Discipline
We walked and looked at the people doing tai-chi in the night. He looked at me and said : this is not a sport for the impatient. When you do this, you have to be disciplined – you have to repeat yourself everyday, when you fail, you don’t blame yourself, you just stick with it.

Know what you want, keep training yourself to strive for it correctly.

The kung-fu house had men punching in the air, and I marvelled at the way they jumped. He looked at me and said, they have spent their lives in controlled discipline, to get this far. Do you think they feel confined during all those periods they had to practice? No, they felt free.

Be humble in what you want to do and what you want to do. Your sacrifice should be your greatest joy, and not something you lose.

Beauty
Later in the night, we sat in a Karaoke Lounge, voices screaming around us, whiskey splashed in glasses and on the tables, someone yelling out for another bottle. He pointed to the girl sitting beside me and said – look at the perfection of her face. Look as her smile curves, as she glows and is radiant. You laugh and you are enjoying yourself – that’s because you are surrounded by beauty, or an approximation of beauty. Around you is song and pretty girls.

That’s human life, my friend, if you give that up, in the end what will you have?

Violence
The man punched at him, pleading even as he fought, that we should just pay the bill. They screamed at each other and a few punches were thrown. The police came, and a few notes were flung on the floor.

In the taxi, he looked at me smiling and said : I enjoy fighting every now and then.

Friendship
The next morning, I woke up with my head splitting in two. The headache was awful, I had no idea where anyone else was. I was in the room, the sun was cheerfully peeking through the window blinds. The air was fresh and the view was awesome.

On my phone was a text message: “Enjoying life has nothing to do with what you have, it has to do with who you are hanging out with”.

—

Follow me on twitter and exchange ideas with me.

The plane was in that tense state just before the captain starts taxiing. I gripped my seat – I knew that most plane crashes happen on take-off or on landing. Then there was that bump, and the plane started moving down the runway. First gently, then it roared to life and raced down the runway. I held on the seat tighter, watching the airport buildings jump past. Little men in bright green mechanic suits moved briskly about, efficiently making sure that nothing went wrong at this airport.

I was leaving all this behind – this engineering efficiency, this orderliness, this sanity. As the plane jumped into the air, my heart dropped and my eyes struggled to hold on to some part of this place. Then the wing came between me and the ground and that quick silence fell over the plane – the silence that means you are no longer leaving, you have now left.

Hong Kong would be the next stop.

I was sitting in the Airbus A380. The largest airplane in the world, built in Europe by european engineers. A technical marvel that could have been built almost nowhere in the world apart from Europe or the U.S. Why would I leave the place with such a high engineering standard for a place that is still the wild west of engineering?

Because life in China is like living in a startup and life in Europe is like being in a big company.

Europe, and in particular Germany is a very controlled place. There is a ministry that is responsible for everything – from registering your company through declaring your profits, there are a large number of rules and regulations that you need to know about, and they will come down hard on you if you get them wrong.

These rules are also very difficult to discover and very difficult to implement correctly. From the situation with healthcare for your employees through to filing your taxes correctly, the amount of paperwork is insane and complex.

There are so many little ‘unfreedoms’ in europe that seems insignificant, but together they add up to a society that advocates safety over freedom. All these rules and regulations are there to protect people from harming themselves, but the end result is a nice, peaceful society in which you have several well regulated ways to bore yourself.

For example, a friend of mine was hired in a company to do some advertisment work. It was manual labour – just stand at the side of the road and hand out flyers to people. The problem was that the person running the company was constantly contacting her privately, calling her at night, and then when she was done, he delayed her payment for weeks.

She waited for a long time, and when she finally got her money, she went online to some review forum for such services and wrote a long and scathing review about the company. A few days later, she received a letter from a lawyer informing her she was being sued for defamation, and she should delete her review and pay the lawyer costs, which came to 600€. She had to.

That’s the effect of all these regulations – they prevent you from stepping out of line. If you stick to simply working in a company and doing things the regulated way, you’ll be fine, but once you start trying to go a different way, you’ll discover that there are a very wide array of rules that come together to discourage this.

But I don’t want to focus on the negative, rather, I’d like to speak about how china offers a completely different and more free experience compared to europe.

Starting up in china

- Programmers: This is the number one concern. In europe, programmers are very expensive. A good programmer will expect to receive at least what he would receive in a big company, or he would want a chunk of your company. That’s 5000€ in costs a month for a single programmer. Additionally, you cannot fire him. The programmers in europe are also interested in staying for years with companies – when your company is in its starting stage and you don’t even know it will be existing in a few months, it’s difficult to attract good talent.

In china, you can pay a programmer 600€ a month, you can fire him with one months notice, and you have a wide pool of qualified people leaving university which you can always pick from. The chinese university system means that people who complete such a degree are intelligent and hardworking. The work ethic is high – a 6 day work-week is not unusual.

Also, in china people are more willing to travel around to find an appropriate job than in Europe. So you can source from a huge population of programmers all over the country.

Quite apart from the chinese programmers, it’s also easier to get foreign programmers to work for you in china than in europe. It’s easy to get a chinese visa for a skilled indian programmer – but try doing so in europe. It’s very, very difficult as a small startup, and when the programmers arrive, there are a huge number of secondary costs.

And also, foreign programmers have a tendency not to stay in germany – whereas in china and other parts of south east asia people are generally friendly towards foreigners, in Germany and many parts of central europe there is a generally negative attitude towards people who don’t speak the language and are there to work.

It’s even easier to get American programmers in china than in europe, because many american programmers come to china for the adventure, but would not do the same to europe.

- Costs: Starting up in shenzhen is not the cheapest place to startup in. But it’s still way, way cheaper than in europe. Your daily food expenses are way lower, travel is way lower, and most importantly, the cost of staff is much, much lower. Rent is not significantly lower, both for private apartments and for the office.

Important is that there are very low additional costs paid to the government. In Europe, you could pay 1/3 – 1/2 of your profits as a small company just servicing the goverment, China does not require this.

- Comfort and fun. China is much more comfortable than Europe if you have money. You can get a nicer apartment, travel better, and in the evenings you can eat in nicer places. You can also go for massages, pay less for your gym.

If you want to go on holiday, you can travel cheaply to nearby exotic places like bali, thailand, mongolia, japan or russia. The standard europe travel destinations are less dramatically interesting than those places.

Renting and living is easy in china – it’s easy to find a place to stay in. In big european cities, you need to prove income and there is a lot of competition for the nice places. And depending on if you look respectable or not (don’t be a 24 year old grubby male), it can be quite hard.

- Expanding and growing business. In china, particularly south china, there is a lot of opportunity. All the hardware manufacturers are there, and you can easily source all the hardware you need. Chinese people are interested in doing business, and in expanding their social contacts. European business people are more aloof.

And the other way round – if you need to shut down your company, you can simply fire everyone without ending up with a bunch of lawsuits.

That’s basically why I’m giving up on Europe and choosing china to grow my business. Europe is regulated, controlling, and boring, where china is dynamic, fun, flexible and cheap.

—
This is article 1 of Season 2 of my blog. Follow me on twitter for updates, or subscribe with RSS

His life is an inspiration to everyone. But I’d like to go a bit deeper than the obvious inspiration. Why is he successful? Why are his talks sold out? Why are his DVDs doing so well? The answer is simple: it’s because he has no arms or legs.

If he made the same speeches, the same message, but he had arms or legs, he would not have the impact he has. Without this great disability, he would not have the success he has. Now imagine I took away your arms and legs. Do you think you’d become successful by making a series of YouTube videos and motivational talks? Most likely not.

You already have your missing arms or legs. There’s something about you that’s special already, even if it is your greatest flaw. But you’re no Nick. You’re not taking advantage of that thing to make yourself successful and happy.

Success is not about having an idea or lacking arms or being in the right spot at the right time. It’s about breaking out of your apathy and just doing stuff. Really, that’s all there is to it. Take what you have and what you don’t have and make something out of it. Stop waiting.

—

Follow me on twitter. Let’s get rid of the spin and get to the point.

I’ve been noticing that a great deal of successful people are very consistent in what they do and in their approach. For example, a weather man. You will see him having weather kits, weather shows, etc. It’s all about the weather. That’s what people know him for. And he leverages his knowledge to move horizontally in the weather space.

In 2006 I took a holiday trip to Bali. I spent most of the days on the beach, sunning and body boarding. I had never body boarded before, but I loved that sensation of floating on the ocean on that small board. Till this one day, when I went a bit deep in the ocean. I went behind the waves, and I couldn’t get back.

I was out in the ocean on this small body board, not very far from the beach, but out of earshot. When I tried to paddle to the beach, the wave movements would push me backwards. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not make any progress forward. I was stuck.

The guy who had rented me the body board was a wiry dark Indonesian man with a charming smile and an engaging manner. He spoke excellent english, would always joke and smile with his customers.

Floating out there on the waves, I could see him. He was gesturing and laughing with a couple of foreign women. I lay there, calling out to them as they spoke, but my voice faded out before it reached them. The women gestured to him to come with them, and he started packing up his things to leave with them. Panic gripped me as I saw him pack up. I imagined myself stuck out here for days, having to eat small raw fish floating about to survive, till I myself got eaten by a bigger fish or shark, all within eyesight of the shore. Some type of perverse, comic food chain.

But then he counted his boards, and noticed one missing. He started looking around, and I raised my arm. He saw me, noticed my predicament, got on a board and got me out. He immediately proceeded to have a lot of jokes at my expense, which I thought was a bit cruel, seeing as I was just a few days away from being featured in the wacky and unusual deaths news section of a British tabloid.

I became great friends with that man, though. Over the next days, we proceeded to chat a bit, and I discovered that he was actually a gigolo. Like many of the other men on the Bali beach, he offered more than just body boarding, he offered his body too.

Very curious about all that, I asked him a great deal of questions. He spoke frankly, and told me a lot. He told me that he had earned more than $100,000 in the last few years. I was absolutely astounded, and proceeded to ask him the question: What are you going to do with all that money? He answered: I’m going to start a brothel. I spluttered : Why in heavens name don’t you start a motorcycle shop or something and make money legally?

He gave me an answer that is one of the most important sentences I have ever heard:

“What do I know about selling motorcycles? I know about selling bodies, that’s what I do, it’s what I’m good at, and I’m not going to throw away all I have learned over these years and do something where I have absolutely no experience.”

Nowadays, a few years later, in this internet business, I see people constantly making the mistake that that Indonesian gigolo would not make. They are jumping about and moving from one business to another. For example, you’d see someone who made a web app to teach languages suddenly show up with a web app for designers or so. That’s inconsistent. There is little overlap between the two areas – you can move the technical knowledge across, but the business knowledge does not apply.

Take people like George Soros. He does one thing. He’s about currency trading, and he’s really really good at it. You don’t see him suddenly going full scale into the real estate market, do you?

Knowledge is difficult to acquire mostly because it’s quite difficult to learn without experience. You can give a man a book on how to fish, and he will read it for years, but once he starts fishing, he will actually start learning how to fish. Nobody can read a book and immediately become a great fisher. You need experience in the area.

And when you spend time in one particular field, you gain valuable and critical experience that newbies coming in just don’t have. When you create a new business, you should not just throw all of that experience away and get started in something new – you should go on an offshoot of the business where you can transfer your knowledge over.

If you watch the TV show The Wire, you will remember the Stringer Bell, a successful drug dealer decided to take the drug money and go into real estate. He did, and all the people who KNEW real estate trounced him and took his money. Success in an area is not transferable. You need concrete domain knowledge. A successful drug dealer is not a successful real estate tycoon.

And a person successful in selling web apps or in selling drugs is not a successful mobile developer.

—

Follow me on twitter, I’ll entertain you with stories that also help your business

Twitter is a very useful tool, but at some point, twitter can become a terrible waste of time. And this is very likely to happen when you have a desktop client. Twitter can increase your productivity, but at some point the benefit from twitter reverses itself, and twitter starts taking away from you, instead of giving to you.

When I started using twitter, I really didn’t understand it. I just knew that if I had many followers, I would be able to push a message out to many people. That sounded like a good thing, so I joined twitter, and started trying to get followers. Initially, I had a lot of benefit from twitter – I could get answers replied immediately, I could see what was currently happening, as one of the people I followed was sure to tweet it.

But then at some point, the benign helpfulness of twitter turned dark. I started checking twitter whenever I took a short break from work. And there would invariably be something interesting to look at, and I’d waste 10 minutes reading an article. I’d tweet, not because I had to, but because I wanted replies and some type of acknowledgment that I still existed.

I ran a short experiment over a couple of days, and discovered that twitter as a distraction, took away more than an hour of productive time out of my day! I was getting less done that before I had twitter, which was unexpected, as I had not even noticed this happening.

I tried using the web version of twitter, but the problem was that with the web version, you don’t get notified when people mention you. Then turned up notifo, that nice iphone tool that makes a loud ping whenever you are mentioned on twitter (or when people reply to your comments on hacker news).

After installing it, I discovered something. With notifo, I get all of the realtime of twitter (it’s even faster than tweetdeck in notifying), and none of the distraction of always having a stream of people pushing information to me.

Desktop clients allow people push information to you, and they are easily accessible, that instant distraction is just a single icon click away. The web is not as easily accessible, so it does not push the info to you. Rather, you go and visit it when you need to.

After I deinstalled tweetdeck and used notifo and the web, I discovered that my productivity went back up

- I  was no longer being distracted by the one-click-away desktop client
- I could still participate in the realtime conversation with notifo
- My twitter reading because less frequent, freeing up a lot of time for real work

The instant gratification of twitter clients is terribly addicting, and it gives a false sense of accomplishment. But in actuality, nothing is achieved. Having this stream of information being pushed to you is nothing but a distraction – it neither helps your business nor educates you a lot.

Using web twitter together with notifo is the solution to this problem. It places you at that sweet spot where twitter helps you as much as it can, without taking away from you by distracting you.

—
Ironically, follow me on twitter here

I’ve been having a big problem in my company. We’re making very good money (close to 40k last month), and everyone is paid excessively well, but morale is dropping massively. The income we make is very passive – even if we did no work at all, we’d still make about the same amount, but we’re trying to grow, so we are working on new products all the time.

Well, we would be, if we were not so bored out of our minds.

You see, we’re working from different contintents. I’m working from London, my partner is working in singapore, the programmer is working from romania, and we have a couple of guys doing manual labour in china. We communicate using google wave mostly, and we have a skype conference every couple of weeks to discuss what needs to be done.

But the less we see each other, the more of a drudge the tasks become. Where in the past I would be excited to implement a new feature or to share what I have achieved with the others, now it seems like there is very little direct feedback when I try to type out what I have done. Nobody is there to share the little triumphs over stubborn code with me.

And for the others, when they have to do the boring but neccessary things, they are finding it more and more difficult to concentrate and focus.

Shit hits the fan
3 weeks ago, the situation got terrible. I lost motivation, everyone else lost motivation and we hardly got anything done for an entire week. And nobody cared enough to remind anyone else to get to working. We’d just half heartedly post an update with things like “replied two customer emails”, and the other guy would reply with “took a look at the website”. And that was the progress for an entire day for two people. This could not go on.

So I called a meeting. In Bangkok.

Everyone booked a flight, and we all flew down to Bangkok to have a face to face meeting and spend seven days together. (We met the awesome Dustin Curtis there at the same time, by the way).

In Bangkok we checked into a five star hotel and we all went out to one of the infamous Bangkok nightlife spots, and over glasses of whiskey mixed with soda water, had a long discussion. That single face-to-face discussion solved more problems than a two week skype session had.

The next day, we woke up and got to work beside the hotel pool. The productivity was incredible. Each person got ten times as much done as he had alone, even with the distractions of other people talking. Programming went much quicker because I could directly explain what I meant.

We had a lot of other fun together as a team during the days we spent in Bangkok, including swimming on the rooftop of a hotel, partying with tourists, eating street food, going to expensive restaurants and having boat rides. You could have a movie montage at this point of us doing all these activities.

A day before we were about to leave, our programmer remarked – I wish we could do this again. We looked at each other, and I thought – we SHOULD do this again!

An ambitious plan
Seven days together, with all the fun we were having were extremly productive. The dullness was wiped out of the team and we were refreshed and recharged and we regained that energy we had when we started first. We had also made plans and timelines and schedules and everyone now knew exactly what he had to do when he got back home.

We sat down and came up with a plan for our company: We would build our company like this – everyone works from home for five months of the year. The sixth month, everyone gets together, flys out to a cheap country and we all work together. Just like ship captains have to leave their families to go out to sea, workers in our company have to leave their home and family for a month to work with the team. We sleep, work and have fun for an entire month. We do all major planning, demo everything, attend conferences and all that during that period, and when it’s over, everyone goes home and works as he pleases again.

The month together will give us the direction we need to be going in, and create a clear task list for everyone.

Costs
A good hotel in a cheap country would cost $2000 for a month. The flights would cost $700 per person. That’s $10800 base costs for the month. Then entertainment, food and drinks could come to $200 a day, that’s another $6000. So the entire budget would be $17.000 for a month together.

Spread out over 6 months, that’s $2800 a month the company keeps aside for this meeting. That’s just 7% of our monthly revenue, so it’s very doable.

Is it neccessary?
After coming back from our 7 day trip to Bangkok, everyone was refreshed and eager to work. Morale has once again spiked and our energy levels are back to what they were. Having the idea of another jam session to look forward to makes working alone a lot less dull and there is a clear goal that is coming reasonably soon. Without this, I believe our company will fall apart from demotivation. So in so many ways, it’s worth it.

We’re already planning our next trip, this time to Mongolia.

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It’s all so easy for us ultra rational geeks to dismiss religion and people who have strong beliefs in something that is unseeable or unprovable, but in doing so, you are doing yourself a great disservice.

There are billions of humans, and the vast majority of them have a very strong faith in something that is not rational. For some, it’s a god, for others, it’s a king or a leader, for others, it’s a country, for some, it’s some cause and for a few, it’s in their own ability.

This type of thing would not stick around within our societies were it not useful. And indeed, it is very useful, it’s actually one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. As a human, you are drawn towards having an overwhelming and powerful blind faith in something – and you are drawn towards this for a supremely rational reason.

Faith motivates.

As a rational person, I would not fight in a war. I’d just get myself killed, and that would not be nice. If I were in Nazi Germany, the rational thing would be to not help any jew. It’s dangerous and has no advantage for me. But why would I do it? I would do it because of my inner conviction that it’s the right thing to do. I would do it because even if everyone around me was telling me the opposite, even if I were alone in my quest, I would persist because I know that I am doing the right thing.

That’s what the religions preach. They are telling you to simply decide within yourself, and simply believe that you are doing the right thing, and not be constantly swayed by the winds of rationality.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the rational person will change his mind more often than the person who believes. I’ve seen people who believe in a cause continue to stick with it for years and years, even when they were the only ones left. Rational people on the other hand, when they see something new and that makes more sense logically, they will change their mind.

People who have faith have one absolute advantage over those who do not – their path is always clear. They know what they are doing, they know why they are doing it, and even when they doubt, they can always fall back in blind trust in some invisible thing.

And they are happier, because as each step along their route unfolds and turns out to be right, their faith increases and their belief that the problems will always be overcome with more faith grows.

Using the word “faith” is an instant turn-off for most geeks, but you can replace it with “passion”. It’s the same thing. It’s like a person who is passionate for nicely designed things. Why does he insist on making it nice when average looking would do just fine? It’s because he believes it should look good – and he believes as blindly and irrationally as any person crying out and speaking in tongues in a baptist church.

Don’t dismiss blind belief in something. It’s an extra-ordinary tool. It’s fundamentally human, and when you rationalize it away, you are are taking away one of those quirks that make us human – those strange things like love and laughter and revenge that should not be there, but are, and separate us from machines.

An extra-ordinary programmer believes that software should be beautiful. A rational programmer believes that software should be bug-free and work.

One does what is required of him, and the other does has an inner belief in the way it should be. The religious person will think – if I follow the path of my god, and strive to achieve the tenets of my religion, then all will be right with me. The artist will think – if I work on making this thing absolutely lovely, then all will be right with me. The programmer will think – if I strive on making this some of the best code I can write, then all will be good.

People with faith don’t dwell on the “why”. They don’t second guess themselves. They don’t think “why do I believe in a god”. They don’t think “why must this be beautiful”. They don’t think “why must this code be very well written”. They just know that it must be that way. Their internal compass tells them so.

The concepts of programming vs religion seem far apart, but faith is all about a belief in a “way” without questioning the “why”. Once you give up the doubting, then you are working on faith and belief, and it makes some things easier, and some things harder.

Having faith in what you are doing streamlines your journey. You stop questioning, and start forging ahead as quickly as you can, and it turns out you are then able to achieve much more.

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Co-founders are both the most important thing that your company needs and the most likely reason your company will fail. If you don’t have any co-founders, when you hit that dip, that speed bump along the road, you will be unable to continue. There will be nobody to talk to, nobody to brainstorm with, nobody who will come up with fresh ideas or new ways of doing things. When the customers are complaining, when you hit an impossible bug, without a co-founder, it is easy to give up or just bury your head in unimportant work.

But with a co-founder, the situation can be even worse. It’s a bit like being married – if the marriage works out well, it’s way better than being single. But if the marriage turns out terrible, being single would be heavenly.

A while back when I was consulting in the DirectX area, I had a client called Eric. He was a soft spoken guy, incredibly nice, but he always had this air of sadness around him. Once, we were chatting in the evening, and he suddenly started telling me his life story. He had been running a software business with a co-founder from college, and the business had just started taking off. Suddenly, his co-founder started acting over-bearing and trying to get Eric to reduce his share of the business. They started fighting, they disagreed on some core features, and at some point, Eric came back home and he could not access the servers. An ugly battle started then that ended with Eric being ousted from the company in exchange for some cash. And that was not the worst part – shortly afterwards his girlfriend left him and moved in with his co-founder.

The co-founders of small startups have very personal relationships. The line between family, friendship and work blurs completely and they intersect and merge with each other. Flaws in people become magnified when people get that close. Just like the biggest fights can be between brothers, people who have their lives so intertwined can get into big battles about unimportant things.

How co-founders should be

Imagine you were in some 16th century tavern, having an ale and then a man walks in and says – which of you men here is ready to join me in war, and have your chance at fame and fortune? You will immediately size up the man and decide – can I do battle with this man by my side? Can I follow this man? Can I trust this man? Will this man be smart enough to actually make me achieve fame and fortune, or will he leave me to bleed to death in some field?

A person who instills confidence in you in all of those questions is the person you want to co- found a company with.

And yes, a partnership is never really equal.  There has to be someone who is somewhat more equal than others. There is nothing more devastating than a partnership were all the members have exactly equal rights and votes. This just does not work. Human society and all monkeys always have a single individual at the top  and with all others, even though they are almost equal, being not quite equal.

Any company where several people believe they should have final say or be consulted on final say is usually going to fail with a bunch of arguments and fights. The partnership may actually work very well in this mode so long no money I’d bring made, but as soon as there is cash, the clashes will start.

There has to be a clear and obvious leader who has final say within every company. That’s just how the big apes roll.

So you want to start a company, huh?

Don’t just go for the obvious co-founder person around you. You may have some guy you know who is somewhat good in IT, this should not be your cofounder just because he lives near you.

Spend some time getting out there and meeting people and finding out who you are compatible with. Form short term collaborations on small projects and websites and see with whom you can work the best. When you want to get serious with a co-founder, make sure you have really worked together for a while.

When you have someone you want to work with, you will know pretty quickly. It’s like meeting the right girl – you know quite quickly this is the person for you. But to find that person, you need to have met a lot of the wrong people first. Few people are lucky enough to meet the right person straight away, or to have the perfect person be your childhood friend.

Professionalism as a way of doing things

Crazy Internet startups where everyone is really chummy with each other is s great way to start a company, but it does not scale. Close personal relationships means that people will get into fights, and in small companies, this can be devastating to moral and your productivity. As a company grows, relationships should be formalized. People who are friends should be friends, but people who are not the types likely to be friends should not be forced to do this.

Work should be governed by mutual respect between the people working. It will seem as if the tone of the company is becoming more drab, but taking away the biggest highs also takes away the lowest lows. And the company In the end is there to make money, and this works best when everyone feels comfortable at work, Is able to be as quirky as he naturally is without getting in the hair of other people, and has his space to be productive in.

The story of Eric, completed

Eric, after having been kicked out of his company had hired me as a consultant to build his new software. I got a salary to do the code and also to talk with him about the software. He would come up with a business strategy and ask my opinion, and together we designed a good business model.

When the software was done, he said thank you and gave me a nice bonus. He launched the software and now, a few years later, he is one of the biggest players in the media world. I did a lot of follow up work and watched as he basically out competed his old company to pieces. He took everything he knew from the old company and not only reimplemented it, he fixed the broken parts.

And when the big payout came, he did not have to share with anyone. Last I spoke to him, he has a lovely wife and is quite happy.

Business building is about relationships in no small way. When you start a company, keep that in mind, and choose wisely who you want to be that close to you.

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