Arhiva: 2021

I didn’t really like Algarve too much, frankly. I’ve been there once previously, stayed in Lagos for 10 days and kinda hated. It rained for 7 out of the 10 days. Everyone said this doesn’t normally happen. Didn’t help. Of course, it was March, but still. I hated the wind, the rain, everything (almost).

Well, I was “convinced” to come to Algarve again this week and… I might change my mind. And the water is actually “warm” by local standards, so I might go in. And I’m comparing the “warmness” with the Mediterranean temperature, which can be really, really warm.

Since moving to Portugal, one of the things I miss (not too many), from Romania is the food. Not all the time, since the Portuguese food is quite good, but there are some things that I really miss: sarmale, mici, salata beouf.

I recently found out about a village in Algarve called Almancil, where there are lots of Romanians, apparently. And they have a Romanian restaurant there. Since I will be traveling to Algarve for a short workation soon, that’s where I’ll go :)

I’ve found out about this from Teleleu.eu, a really nice project about Romanians living abroad. The project is in Romanian, just so you know :)

I’ve just seen Friends: The Reunion.

It was quite a nostalgic trip to 20 years ago, when I started working online and I was watching Friends in the background. It’s interesting to see these people and I want to think I’d be like Matt LeBlanc, relaxed and irreverent: “I s#$t here!”.

It’s not amazing, but it’s warm and fuzzy.

We have a dog, an amazing little Westie. Of course, we take a lot of photos of him. And, as a consequence, he’s got an Instagram account.

What I didn’t know, though, is how crazy the “pupfluencer” craze is. You know that there are management agencies for that? Or, sorry, influencer networks for them?

And that an influential puppy is paid $2,000 to put a post on his/her Instagram?

Pet influencing is booming. A 2018 Forbes article pegs the average endorsement deal for some of the most famous “petfluencers” at more than $2,000 per post; some, like Doug the Pug, are estimated to earn hundreds of thousands a year. There are even industry events, including PetCon—dubbed “the Coachella for Pets” in the New York Post. It’s not hard to see why: people love animals, so they’ve been used in all kinds of advertising for the past century, illustrating everything from the importance of family bonds after the Second World War to the humour of the 1980s and ’90s (think: Taco Bell’s anthropomorphic chihuahua or the Aflac insurance duck). And numerous scientific studies over the decades have proven that animals make us feel better—emotionally, physically, and mentally.

Read more here: My Quest to Make My Dog Internet Famous

It’s a space I’m really interested in.

When friends ask me about raising money, this is one of the first articles I ask them to read. It’s a sales deck, but a lot of that transfers into raising money, so it’s worth going through it and understand the fundamentals.

A few months ago, my friend Tim took a new sales job at a Series C tech company that had raised over $60 million from A-list investors. He’s one of the best salespeople I know, but soon after starting, he emailed me to say he was struggling.

“I’ve landed a few small accounts,” Tim said. “But my pitch falls flat at big enterprises.”

As I’ve written before, I love helping teams craft the high-level strategic story that powers sales, marketing, fundraising — everything. So Tim and I met for lunch at the Amber India restaurant off San Francisco’s Market Street to review his deck.

After loading up on the all-you-can-eat buffet, I asked Tim, “At what point do prospects tune out?”

“Usually a few slides in,” he said.

Intent on maximizing dining ROI, Tim went back to the buffet for seconds. When he returned, I pulled out my laptop and launched into a Powerpoint presentation.

“What’s this?” Tim asked.

“This,” I said, “is the greatest sales deck I have ever seen.”

From here: The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen | by Andy Raskin.

I’ve recently seen this news:

Yahoo and AOL, kings of the early internet, saw their fortunes decline as Silicon Valley raced ahead to create new digital platforms. Google replaced Yahoo. AOL was supplanted by cable giants.

Now they will become the property of private equity. Verizon, their current owner, agreed to sell them to Apollo Global Management in a deal worth $5 billion, the companies announced Monday.

The business housing the two brands, Verizon Media, is to be renamed (yet again) to Yahoo (sans the brand’s stylized exclamation point), and the sale will also include its advertising technology business. Verizon will retain a 10 percent stake in the newly formed media group, the company said in a statement.

From here: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5 Billion – The New York Times.

In 2008 I was working for Yahoo! in Romania. I was there for a year, until early 2009.

Around the time they hired me, Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $33 per share, at an effective price of about $46B. Jarry Yang, the Yahoo! co-founder and then-CEO, said he wanted at least $37 per share. Microsoft ended the bid around May 2008. Then the 2008 crash came and Yahoo! never quite got to the value it had again (except a short period in 2013).

Jerry Yang got sacked soon and this actually impacted me, because the new CEO (Carol Bartz) decided to close the push to extend the company in Eastern Europe and, by extension, they didn’t need me there anymore. Which was actually a good thing for me at that time, since I was kinda disenchanted with working in a big corporation, I had my own projects, and I wanted to just leave. But I might have stayed longer, because being the “Yahoo! representative in Romania” was a big thing then in a country where Yahoo! Messenger reigned supreme.

Well, what goes up, must come down.

I’ve moved a lot of the sites over years from one domain to another, but I never remembered the htaccess redirect rules to do it. I always needed to search for them, sometimes finding different solutions that were never perfect.

Anyway, here are some of them, in case I need them again. I took them from this site, which has a lot more situations sorted out through redirects.

How do you redirect an entire site or domain to a new one?

Redirect 301 / http://www.domain.com/

How do you use rewriting to redirect from an old domain to a new domain?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

How do you use rewriting to redirect from a non-www to a www subdomain?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

From here: Common Htaccess 301 Redirect Rules.

In 2006 I started a radio show called Internet Links. The radio station was an online radio in Romania, called Radio Lynx, so this is where the name comes from.

What started as a weekly 30 minutes show with interesting stuff happening online, from news to howtos, ended 6 years later with more than 100 episodes of 2 hours interviews. About 3-4 shows in I realised it was much more interesting to talk to people about their online projects. After that, about 10 shows in I understood that I needed more than 1 hour and I cut all the music I had from time to time. The guys at Radio Lynx were really nice and understanding and adjusted their Wednesday evening schedules (8pm) to give me those 2 hours.

That show connected me to most of the people doing anything relevant online at that point in Romania and even outside of it. But more than this, I loved talking to my guests. I loved finding out more about their projects, I loved asking “stupid” questions and getting unexpected answers.

I was always a curious person and these interviews fulfilled that need.

Today I just interviewed someone again. Not about business online this time, but about something I was interesting in finding out more since hearing about the concept the first time. I won’t tell you what yet, because I will publish that interview some time soon.

I was just thinking that after about 1h30’ of talking, I finished the interview energized, smiling and remembering how much I loved this. Amazing!

I’ve just created an account on Bitclout.

I didn’t hear too many things about this crypto based social network before, but I’ve recently read an article on AVC about it so I thought it’s worth creating an account just to test it.

I don’t know if Mirror is the new WordPress or if Bitclout is the new Twitter. We will see. But it sure feels like we are back in the early 2000s again, experimenting with decentralizing media. I have the same feeling of excitement I had back then.

From here: Decentralized Media – AVC.

It really is worth “experimenting with decentralizing media”. It reminds me of the early days of Social Media, as well.

I swear, not knowing about the price of crypto is bliss (even if you own a small amount, or maybe because it’s just a small amount).

I also bought some GME on a lark in January or February and, after watching it like a hawk for a week, I just don’t do it anymore. And I’m a lot better mentally. That’s not really saying much, right?

Also, how the hell is the pump and dump that Elon Musk is doing with crypto can be legal is beyond me. And that’s coming from an Elon fan, but come on!