Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Yesterday I was a guest at De Electronische Eeuw by Herbert Blankesteyn from Business New Radio. Together with Michiel Frackers we discussed Yahoo Pipes.

At one moment I told them about a Vanity Search I made with Yahoo Pipes and Herbert replied in dutch

“Ok, dus je hebt jezelf ge-piped?”

This is funny because ‘Pipes’ if you translate it in dutch is ‘pijpen’.
And ‘pijpen’ is also the word for a blow job.

Seriously.

So Herbert asked me “Ok, so you gave yourself a blow job”.
Pretty hard to keep a straight face there.

We have more Web2.0 names that are difficult for the Dutch. Flickr sounds like ‘Flikker’ which means homosexual. Orkut sounds like ‘Kut’ which means vagina and now we have Yahoo Blowjobs…

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It is true. Today I switched off my BlackBerry Pearl and re-activated my old and trusted 8700. The Pearl is much lighter and better looking but I just couldn’t really get used to the awkward keyboard. As soon as Vodafone upgrades their software so I can actually photoblog with the Pearl I will switch back again.

I don’t like the keyboard but I would be willing to sacrifice a bit if I could actually email the photos I make with the Pearl.

Last week I learned and wrote about Valorisation. This week I learned about Palliative. Tessa picked up this word at work. She works at a scientific publishing house. The word is used in medicine to describe how a drug works.

There are curative, palliative, symptomatic and prophylactic treatments:

Curative
Serving or tending to cure
You actually get better

Symptomatic
Constituting a symptom, as of a disease
You feel better

Prophylactic
A prophylactic measure such as a vaccine
You don’t get sick at all

Palliative
Treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms or slowing the disease’s progress, rather than providing a cure
You don’t get sicker and you feel better

With a palliative solution you don’t actually fix something but stop the problem from getting bigger and make sure it doesn’t bother you anymore.

That is interesting! If you are sick you obviously would always go for the curative cure. But in business that might not always be the case. Sometimes it is better to opt for a quick and dirty cure and just make sure the problem doesn’t get out of hand.

Example: if two people don’t get along in your team you won’t spend weeks in group sessions to make them like each other. You just use a palliative solution. You seperate them and stop the problem from getting bigger.

Can you come up with similar palliative solution that you have used or are using in your business? Looking forward to hearing about it…

A few years ago I was introduced to an entrepreneur by Scott Rafer. I introduced myself as a ‘Serial Entrepreneur’ and he replied ‘How nice. I am a Successful Serial Entrepreneur’. I probably had my mouth open because he immediately apologized and told me he didn’t mean it that way but that it was just an important distinction to make. After all, there are millions of entrepreneurs, a lot of serial entrepreneurs but only a few Successful Serial Entrepreneurs.

It was the beginning of my (long distance) friendship with the Successful Serial Entrepreneur Mark Fletcher.

Last week Mark announced a new website titled ‘Startupping‘ to help other entrepreneurs become more successful and he asked me to contribute something. One thing that will happen is that each post I publish here will also be available on Startupping.com on the Entrepreneurs Blogs section. A lot of great entrepreneurs contribute to the site and I am proud to be one of them.

Mark also asked me and the other contributing entrepreneurs to think about our best decision and their worst mistake. So here we go:

Best Decision

Age 15 I decided to drop out of school and set my own course through life. Against the advice of all my teachers and most adults around me (except my parents) I left school to attend the circusschool. In 3 years I learned how ride a 2 meter high unicycle, juggle 7 balls and a lot of other interesting things. At age 17 I wanted to go to art school and cleaned toilets for a year to pay for my art courses so I could apply for the academy. I was accepted and graduated Cum Laude 5 years later. My best decision was to do all these things. It was the best way to prepare for being an Entrepreneur. I learned discipline and perseverance in the circusschool and how to ‘think different’ and use my creativity in art school. No MBA could prepare you better.

Worst Mistake

It was a really bad mistake to hold on to my 600.000 shares in Fortunecity which I received between 1999 and 2001. These shares were worth as much as €19,80 when I first started receiving them (do the math) and dropped all the way to €0,04 by 2003 (please don’t do the math!). I went from poor art student to paper multimillionaire and back again within a very short time.

So why didn’t I sell? Because I trusted my instinct. I trusted my instinct when I left school as a kid. I trusted my instinct when I went to art academy and when I first started my business. I kept going when most people said I was crazy working with that internet stuff and I always knew that one day we would seel our company for millions. And then we did. After that it was very hard for me to ignore my instinct and sell those damn shares.

Sure, lost of people told me I should have sold them. But as an entrepreneur you cultivate your stubordness and learn how to trust your instincts. You will just have to learn that your instincts aren’t correct about everything. That was an expensive lesson….

Conclusion

I have started several successful business and sold two for millions but I still don’t have the guts to introduce myself as a Successful Serial Entrepreneur. That is another thing I will have to learn.

Hopefully it will be a cheaper lesson.

Marc D. Bahlmann is working on his PhD. He is a student at the VU University Amsterdam and he contacted me because we wants to interview me about his study that “…considers the relationship between geographical co-location, knowledge sharing, and social networks, and specifically focuses on the so-called New Media-cluster in Amsterdam (The Netherlands)”.

Naturally I told him I’d be happy to help. He will be here tonight for the interview. He also emailed me a ‘form of informed consent’ which has the following line it it:

There are no foreseeable risks concerned with this research

Comforting isn’t it? Unless there are a few unforeseeable risks that we simply haven’t thought about yet.

I’ll let you know how it went, if I can…

It is very well possible that you can’t read some of this page or that content is not displayed where it normally would be displayed.

I’m doing some work on the Fleck WordPress Plug-In. It is going to work more like the comments feature and will display how many Flecks are displayed on your blog in general and your specific posts.

I needed a blog to test on so I decided to use Bomega.com. It will be a few more days before the Plug-in is really finished. Unil then this blog might not look as it should sometimes…

UPDATE: the WordPress side of it is now finished. I’ll be doing more work on the server-side of Fleck but that won’t impact this blog. Pfew…