Entrepreneurs are like sailors. (Yep, bare with me on this : I’m as a startup geek as I am a sailing geek…)
Entrepreneurs sail into the unknown, away from whats deemed safe and are ready to face 4-story high kind of waves while everybody else says it doesn’t make any sense at all.
But like sailors, some stuff gives every single entrepreneur cold shivers. No. Entrepreneurship isn’t like a hot shot Hollywood movie. Some things scare the shit out of every single entrepreneur, making them sleep oddly at night…
As a sailor, waterspouts are my WHOLLY F#K kind of moment. Watching one of those closely and facing the prospect of getting waaay to close is just beyond description.
I have a few waterspout as an entrepreneur as well. Everybody has. If you don’t, maybe you are just not taking it hard enough and you may want to stop calling yourself an entrepreneur, paying the due respect to the ones that are.
Respect…
via CinderellaMan. Go Russell!!
Tooth fairies and unicorns don’t seem to be related, somehow.
First seen on Facebook (through Samer)
Welcome to pricing strategy linkbait.
When you try to searchin LinkedIn, you won’t be able to see someone’s last name if that person is a 3rd degree connection (or bigger). While they advertise that you have millions of people on your network (a number that I never really understood anyway), they block you from actually seeing who “your” network actually is (unless you pay for a premium account).
Now the interesting comes when you google that person’s first name, role and company. Because of LinkedIn’s hunger for SEO juice they end up creating a backdoor for the info that they don’t want you to see.
This is a funny fact but also creates a pricing strategy dilemma. As a company trying to offer one freemium model (offer some services for free and charge for others), they have to draw a line between free and paid. This line must be aligned with their objective as a company (generating revenue by creating the need to buy their paid service) but that alone is not a justification to fool their own users.
At a time when social virality is playing a huge factor on alternative “LinkedIn”s on Facebook, like BranchOut, having a cheesy strategy against their audience may not be good for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s current demographics are older and time will degrade their value, while allowing BranchOut and others to step up just because they have a younger audience that didn’t used LinkedIn before but start to be monetizable at one certain point.
I was recently wondering what are the tool that i use the most online. My bookmarks bar (Chrome) doesn’t lie:
Work: Gmail, Freshbooks, DropBox and some business links (a lot to google docs)…
Productivity tools being tested: Podio, GoPlan and TeamBox
The real-time web: Twitter, Forrst, http://news.ycombinator.com/
Sailing: Sailing Anarchy rocks!
TechNews: Techcrunch
News news: Some portuguese and danish news. May be fun to notice the very similar ‘P’s from Publico (Portuguese newspaper) and Politiken (Danish newspaper)
Weather forecast Windguru and Danish Weather Centre
Getting around Copenhagen: rejseplanen.dk
There are some more but these ones curated themselves to the top along the way. Once every 2 weeks or so some links get promotedand others demoted. My life online seems pretty basic doesn’t it?
It may be worthed mentioning that twitter became some kind of real-time bookmarking of the the real-time web to me. I end visiting very often sites like CNN through twitter, even if i don’t bookmark them myself.
(Dis-)Honorable left-outs? Facebook and any of the LBS (Location Based Services) out there.
Soem guy I used know 
just posted this thought on his Twitter stream.
That tweet made me wonder: are impossible dreams just a waste of time, specially those that are, say… impossible?
Answer is simple: HELL NO!!
“If you are not living in the edge, you’re taking too much space” and the same holds true for dreams. Not dreaming make people bound to “normality”. Thinking big is part of achieving something meaningful.
If you aim at the stars, it doesn’t really matter if you only reach the moon. Others will still have their foot comfortably aground.
The real winners are the ones that don’t stick with wild dreaming. Dreaming is good but making it happen, even if waaaay more difficult, draining or time consuming than dreaming itself, is unique (whatever is that you’ll be fighting for).
It wouldn’t be fun if you only had some average “possible dreams”.
I started a small, for fun, project. It’s a blog called Periferi.co (@perfieri_co) and I’ll try two things:
- Share my thoughts and promote Web Entrepreneurship, specially focusing on the grassroot efforts that sit outside of the mainstream media and around the challenges that small countries face
- Improve my English writing and story-telling skills
Worst case scenario wont go anywhere. Feel free to pay a visit and let me know what you think
I love sailing, I wish I could sail more.. I’ve been scared, I’ve been sea-sick: I somethings thought about it for a while and got down by it, but never got bored or regret.
I wanna spend some part of my life traveling around the world and meeting places that are very alternative (to say the least). But when I think about it, there’s always two of me.
There’s the one that would comfortably sail in an OK boat with a small but close crew. The one that goes to Greece because it’s close and sunny, the one that has (insanely expensive) internet on the boat.
And then there is the other one: the one that would go upstream into Amazonia on a crappy boat, probably alone or with a close soul, without any fancy stuff that makes western life comfortable (and attract opportunistic pirates). Just a nomadic smile and loads of time to make such a journey something else… That something else seems to be something that I don’t really understand explain, which may be part of the dualism felt when I think about sailing and “What if’s”.
One think is certain. I have no idea if I’ll ever do any of those and probably either one would be something that I’d never forget.
Yaghan, her two owners and their wonderful life-dream come true are one of the many inspiration sources that keep me thinking and sometimes not sleeping. Going to Antartica by your own means, crossing the Pacific along beautiful creatures like whales or Albatrosses is something that make my heart pump. These inspiring people make me travel without even leaving my couch, and I am somewhat grateful/thankful to them, even if I never met them before.. Crazy, odd? For most people, I guess..
