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Entrepreneurs and Sailors have some things in common: the most relevant one, may as well be THE key to success.

Sailing Anarchy has this awesome picture about a 4y old kid sailing. Who’s not into sailing may not even understand scale here: that boat is an Optimist, a very small boat: that kid is reaaally small!

“The look” is a great title since it represents the focus on the wind and surrounding elements. The kid has it, and entrepreneurs must have it too. Like sailing, building a startup is all about understanding the elements before anybody else, taking choices that edge your position, trimming things to detail toward making the most out of very little and being basically relentless, keeping relentless along the way.

Do you have “the look”?

Image from Sailing Anarchy

Sunday is a good day. Beside wrapping up some random tasks that take too much hassle during the week at InfluAds, you can think and look back. I was recently talking with someone that sent me back to 1992-1995, when I had my first 2 projects.

Selling snails to buy a hot-shot mountain bike when (i was 12 or 13y old)

My first one was catching snails and sell them. For those who don’t know, in Portugal and a few other countries, people eat snails. In Portugal they are mostly small snails, most of times served outside of normal meals… It goes great with beer

The objective was to get 55,000 of the old escudos (around 270€) which at the time would allow me to buy an awesome mountain bike.

That was my first biz and my first experience with scaling a non-scalable business.You usually catch them by hand. That doesn’t scale. A friend and I got a scheme where we would go to some small but deep hills full of high grass, where we would hit the grass and let the snails fall all the way to the bottom, where we had a big bag (somewhat like people do when catching olives). We would then remove any grass and small snails to get a high price for them. We rocked, and we would carry huge bags in our back to one old lady that would offer us cash for them…

Selling t-shirts on a motocross track (i was 16y old)

A few years later I spend 400€ (huge money for a teen back then in Portugal),  to print 80 t-shirts themed “SuperCross 95″**.

I was an incredibly shy guy selling them on a motocross competition, with friends stopping by and all. I’m not a sales man and wasn’t back then. I ended up selling a few but came home with lots of them, selling them to friends & family which made turnover possible. Everybody on that family had a t-shirt like that, maybe even today

One of the shirts had one guy in a motorbike, seen from behind, saying: “If you want to be second follow me”. Even today I love that shirt…. Gotta frame one of those to hang at the office some day.

** Note to self, back them: Don’t create a name that is bounded to one year

When you sail respect for nature becomes something that you naturally respect (well… most do).

For all other people too distracted to care about “her”, only being interested when something affects their personal comfort, watch this.

Storms in NZ called the “Southerly buster” come fast and with little warning. WoW…

Madeira Islands (Portugal) had recently a cathastrophe where it rained like hell for a few hours and everything came down with the massive amounts of water. Years of human development layered stuff into places where they probably shouldn’t.

There is nothing like assuming one little thing: We are small & insignificant on this planet. The last 50y or recorded data won’t predict future behaviour of nature. Be conservative and assume that nature is just a huge mass of elements that fights for balance. Sometimes that just means huge reaction of elements, because that’s the way it is.

(found in SailingAnarchy)

Wow… Great talk about a great brand and car that will change the we see cars.

Great stuff on how UX goes into designing a car with a 17 inch monitor.

An SDK to allow third-party to develop apps for a car…. amazing

Just didn’t understood one statement “Gramma can get into the car an she can drive away.. [due to the familiar elements] and turn the volume up”

Who the heck has a car like this and let gramma take the wheel?????

The chat goes into technology in another talk.

[EDIT: It uses Adobe Air, less 50 miles to power it up ]

(Via @danmartell)

Pure genius of a video…. A nuts turned into a leader, under three minutes. No comments

Via @joshk via TED