Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

The Flying Boat

Imagine an entrepreneur, lets call him Jack, talking to his partners: "Let's cross the ocean together! We could do that! We could discover undiscovered countries and become rich! All we have to do is build a boat. We are qualified, experienced and motivated. Jim, you have experience with the open sea and know how to navigate. Bob, you know about construction and materials, and I would be an excellent skipper because I know how to motivate people and set a course. Let's just do it!" And so...

Viva la Revolucion!

We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends. Last Friday Patrick and I went to the T-Mobile store and bought iPhones. They didn't have them in stock so we will have to wait for a few weeks before we actually get them. There are several reason why you could get an iPhone but I want to talk about one reason in particular in this post. By buying, using and developing for the iPhone right now you can participate in the start of a new era in computing. Yep, I'm serious....

V3.com VS TwitterCounter.com

In 1997 I started working on an idea I had for a redirect service based on domains from Tonga. I registered come.to, surf.to and welcome.to and together with two friends (Hans-Poul and Eric) we started a company called V3.com. We ended up selling our company in 1999 to Fortunecity. That is a short version of that story as I have talked about it a lot before. What I wanted to talk about is how similar V3.com was to TwitterCounter.com. Don't get me wrong: they served completely different...

New blog theme

As you can see if you are visiting this blog in a regular browser I have updated the design. The last time I spent some time on the design was more than a year ago and recently I received a few friendly suggestions that maybe it was time for a change. The design you see here is based on a very popular Wordpress theme titled "Bluebird" designed by Randa Clay. I only changed some colors and the header image. Because of Twitter and TwitterMail I spend a lot more time micro blogging than...

My presentation at Sprout ChallengerDay 2007

Last year I did a presentation during Sprout ChallengerDay on November 1, 2007. I talked about innovation, big companies and told an anecdote about how hard it is for big companies to innovate. More than 500 people were there and it was the first edition of the 'Sprout ChallengerDay' event. I just received the video and uploaded it so you can watch it too. It is a Dutch presentation but the main story is one I blogged about before in a post titled "Big Companies VS Small Companies on...

The Mouse & The Elephant

In 1995 I remember seeing a documentary where they interviewed Bill Gates. He was asked if he was fearing competition from other big software companies. His answer was that he didn't fear any of the big companies around. He said that the threat to a big company is not in the other big companies, but in the smaller companies slowly undermining the foundations of the business that his big company was built upon. He pointed out the window at the lawn down below and said something like "Up from...

Kill your darlings…

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on March 16, 2006. I'm posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks. This last week I have been trying to finish the layout for the main user interface screens. And I just couldn't finish them. I kept postponing my work, checking my mail, staring out the window and finding reasons to do other things instead. At first I thought I just had a...

How do you paint a white rabbit?

This post was written for the Fleck.com blog where I posted it on April 16, 2006. I'm posting it here so it is more easily accesible. The original post can still be found here, including some comments and pingbacks. On Sunday I was visiting my parents house to celebrate Easter Day. As we drove there we noticed a perfect white rabbit sitting by the side of the road. I stopped to show it to our children and told them it must have been the Easter bunny. My parents hid painted real eggs and...