Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

On monday evening I made soup for 25 people. It contained broccoli, zucchini and other vegetables. To make the soup more special I added a little Truffle oil just before I served the dish. Truffle smells delicious and makes almost any dish special. Brillat-Savarin called the truffle “the diamond of the kitchen”. Other people describe the pungent scent of truffle as similar to the scent of unwashed underwear. It has a sharp acrid scent to it and you either love or hate it.

Michael Arrington* (Techcrunch editor and serial entrepreneur) has been described as arrogant, a hypocrite or just ‘an asshole’. He can be extremely critical about companies, even the ones he invests in or is friends with, and without ever holding back. Despite, or because, of this Techcrunch is THE technology blog in the world with more than 500.000 feed subscription. Both Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the internet. You either love him or hate him. But you can’t ignore him.

Being controversial is good. It means you are different. It means that you will attract fans and enemies but at least you will garner attention. Being bland is boring and won’t make you the subject of the conversation at any dinner table. It also means that you will have to live with people hating or disliking you.

If you find out someone really hates your stuff (project, company, looks, product, girlfriend, car, song) than that might be a good thing.

In fact, if nobody hates it it will be harder to get people to love it. They can love you or hate you but they won’t be able to ignore you.

* = Just so you know: I love Michael Arrington.

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Entrepreneurs need to be confident and tenacious.
But not arrogant or stubborn.
There is a fine line dividing both.

It is easy to mistake confidence for arrogance and the same goes for tenacity. Some entrepreneurs think they are tenacious but are simply being stubborn. I think a way to test if someone is being confident or arrogant is too challenge their ideas. A confident human being won’t be easy to convince but he will likely take pleasure in being challenged. An arrogant person will not even allow you to challenge any of his or her ideas.

It is harder to detect whether someone is tenacious or stubborn. I remember being accused of being stubborn and later proving my point. That would mean that I wasn’t stubborn but just tenacious. But how can you test this?

I have been accused of being arrogant in the past (not recently) and stubborn too. I would like to think that these people didn’t see that I wasn’t being arrogant but simply followed my instinct and wouldn’t easily give up. But I know it IS hard to see the difference so I don’t blame anyone.

Or is that an arrogant thing to say?

Yesterday evening I presented the ‘Website van het Jaar’ award ceremony in Hotel Arena in Amsterdam. The organization received more than 1.3 milion votes in 14 categories. I announced all the winners on stage, had a little chat with them and presented them with their prize.

The big winner was Google.nl. For all the winners see the ‘Website van het Jaar‘ website. IPAN was the host for this event and paid for some for the drinks.

I took this photo 1 minute before we started. As you can see you don’t see much on stage which makes it hard to get feedback from the audiences. Still, we had fun and I could hear people laugh now and then. If you were there leave some feedback here. Always love that.

This weekend Loïs (my daughter) visited Paris together with my parents. They visited the Centre Pompidou, the Eiffel Tower and went to a church to attend the first communion of my nephew.

I stayed in bed most of the weekend and even yesterday with an upset stomach. But I feel much better today!

Keeping my Blackberry synced with my mac has been a constant struggle for years now. I tried several software solutions and often destroyed my calendar. Right now there is one appointment in my calendar that accidently got itself duplicated 3000 times. I can’t go to that week or iCal crashes. I can’t delete them either because that also crashes iCal. I could delete all older events but then I lose everything. So I just ignore it.

Today Google announced something that might help: BlackBerry Sync for Google Calendar

I installed it and it seems to work fine, so far. Now I have to think of a way to sync Google Calendar with iCal and then I am Synced all over the place. Spanning Sync should do the trick but that is pretty expensive with a $25 one-year subscription or a $65 one-time purchase.

If you have a Blackberry just surf to this link and you can install the application right away:
http://m.google.com/sync.

Wakoopa, a company I own a small share in, is doing very well lately. They are getting more and more members and traffic every day and they are launching new features regularly. Today they announced a new feature that makes them look like the “Alexa” For Desktop Applications. Even Techcrunch agrees and posted a story about it today:

Wakoopa Launching “Alexa” For Desktop Apps

It means that they now allow you to look at growth and usage of applications compared to other applications in a graphical way. Check out this example:

Wakoopa is one of those companies that I really look forward to following and being a part of in 2008. I wonder what the future will bring and how they will develop.

My Wakoopa Page (click to check it out)

Ah! The Wakoopa story is now also available in France and Japan. French sounds so much more interesting. Say it loud with a low voice: “les graphes montre le classement et la portée de l’application sur un échantillon de la population”