Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

As we both know…

A friend of mine had an argument with his girlfriend about who should do what in the house. She told him she was doing all the laundry and that maybe he should help out with that. He replied that he always took care of dinner. He bought groceries, prepared the meal, served it and then cleaned the dishes. She replied "Yeah, but that's not fair. You 'like' cooking". They were both right, of course. It is easy to discard anything you are good at as nothing special. You make something and...

Technology Development: Trains & Hitchhiking

Most people think software development is like traveling to a certain destination by train: You set a goal, pack your bags, board the train, and the only variable between you and your goal is the speed of the train. Unless the whole thing derails, you end up where you were planning on going. Unfortunately software development is more like hitchhiking: You set some general goals (somewhere sunny), pack your bags and after that where you end up depends on a whole lot of variables: who...

‘That will do’ never does.

Do you ever find yourself thinking 'That will do'? I do and have learned to accept it as a warning sign. 'That will do' means you are about to deliver something below par. If you find yourself about to walk away from a job that seems just good enough you should stop yourself and think about what you could add to turn your job from 'That will do' into 'This is it!'. The 'quick fix' is seldon a real fix, the 'Good enough' solution is never good enough and 'that will do' never...

Achieving (and living with) Perfect Knowledge

On September 21 I was relaxing in the sun with Tessa and Loïs. I was drinking Tonic water which is flavored with quinine which gives it a distinctively bitter taste. Loïs wanted to taste it and Tessa wondered out loud 'do you think quinine could be bad for children?'. I thought "Well, maybe it is. Quinine is a fever-reducing chemical and the first effective treatment for malaria". But I didn't know if it was bad for children so I simply said: 'Look it up'. We both own an iPhone so...

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....

How I’m proved wrong by being right

Often people tell me their ideas looking for criticism or confirmation. They will pitch me an idea and I will give feedback. I enjoy the process and always try to really put energy into wrapping my head around an idea. Lately I have been experiencing an interesting side effect of giving feedback during pitches; the opposite of what I'm predicting happens because of what I am predicting. What happens is that someone will casually pitch me a rather simple and raw idea. I think about if for...

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...