2008 27
Tim O Reilly interviews me
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This is the video on the Berlin Web 2.0 Expo Europe on stage interview.
2008 27
Most Investment Banks are gone, Jefferies survives
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In this video I tell how investment banks used to work with entrepreneurs and I wonder what we are going to do now that most except Jefferies are gone.
2008 24
Alan Greenspan is shocked and so is everyone
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I was reading about how shocked Greenspan is at the global financial cancer that developed during his leadership of the world economy. Now the worse part of this is that I believe him. The problem with conspiracy theories against the Bush administration is that they fail to explain why would anyone in the Bush administration would want America to collapse the way it did and drag the world along with it.
This was not a conspiracy. This was just incompetence. A blind belief in markets. A conviction that if government just got out of the picture everything would self adjust in the end. The result? Bush established socialist America, in which the US government is the largest home owner and bank owner in the world.
The only good news is that if this had to be done, I am very pleased that Obama will come to power after this disaster. If Obama had had to start his presidency nationalizing everything he would have been accused of being a communist.
Now one current development that is very unfair is that even though the current crisis is the result of USA mismanagement and at the beginning US markets were affected more than others, currently the dollar is king and foreign markets are down more than USA. And this is when the rest of the world saved and USA squandered.
2008 21
George Soros on how to get out of the crisis
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Image via Wikipedia
Soros: There are five major elements.
— First, the government needs to recapitalize the banking system by buying equity stakes in banks.
— Second, interbank lending needs to be restarted with guarantees and bringing LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) in line with Fed funds. This is in the works. It is going to happen.
— Third, we must reform the mortgage system in the U.S., minimizing foreclosures and renegotiating loans so that mortgages are not worth more than houses. Stemming foreclosures will cushion the fall of housing prices.
— Fourth, Europe has to fix a weakness of the Euro by creating a safety net for its banks. While initially resisting this, they have now found religion and done it at their meeting in Paris on Sunday.
— Fifth, the IMF must deal with the vulnerability of countries at the periphery of the global financial system by providing a financial safety net. This is also in the works. The Japanese have already offered $200 billion for this purpose.
These five steps will start the healing process. If we implement these measures effectively, we will have passed through the worst of the financial crisis. via Huffington Post
George Soros was my first investor at Viatel. I disclose this because you may think that my agreement with his plan may have something to do with that. But that was in 1995 and if I post his comment, which is something I rarely do in this blog. It’s because I agree with them.
Now to add something that Soros left out, I believe that another needed element to get out of this crisis is to sort out who will run USA. The combination of such a horrendous crisis with a US President with the lowest ratings in history and two extremely different candidates competing for what is now going to be the toughest job in the world adds tremendous uncertainty to the purchase of any assets. I wish they could move the US elections forward.
2008 21
Berlin Tempelhof will not operate as an airport anymore…
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Here´s a video on one of the last landings at Tempelhof.
2008 20
Fonero brunch in Berlin: introducing the Fonera 2.0
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I keep getting asked where the Fonero event is on Tuesday morning. It is at Cookie’s Cream Restaurant, Unter den Linden / Friedrichsstrasse (next to KPM) at 1030. At this event we will introduce the Fonera 2.0 which is a new Fon social WLAN or WiFi router that does many more things than allowing you to share a little signal at home and roam the world for free.
The new Fonera 2.0 is the open source router that allows you to manage your relationship with the Web 2.0. Examples? You can stick a USB pen drive full of pictures and have the fonera directly send the pictures to Flickr while you take your laptop along with you somewhere else. Same with videos, torrents, etc. More tomorrow.
2008 19
Fon.gs and other Fon´s “toolvertorials”
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Some time ago at Fon we decided to improve on TinyURL and came up with Fon.gs or Fon Get Simple as we call it. The idea was that as opposed to TinyURL at Fon.gs you could both shorten and choose the name of your domain. Plus Fon.gs is already consideraby shorter than tinyurl.com. But of course what we wanted to do is to find an inexpensive way of having our company name, Fon circulate on the internet. I am glad to see that our “Toovertorial” worked and already over 2 million fon.gs have been served. Other Toolvertorials from Fon include Gspace the free cloud storage tool which is used by half a million people around the world. And Twitxr, the twitter with geolocation and picture upload to Facebook and Flickr that is used by around 70K people per month. Less successful ones such as Unfolding News (the search engine for news as they unfold real time) which allows you follow a certain topic minute by minutes as news are written about it and Gmail uploader, a tool that allows you to load old Outlook emails into Gmail (Gmail is great for search but when you open an account you wish it had your emails). Now of all these tools the most successful one has been the Fonspots software that allows your Linux or Mac connected to 3G to turn into a Fonspot. This tool is the most relevant to our business at Fon. My advise to other start ups is that in difficult times when advertising and even PR is outside of your budget try having your coders spend a few hours developing “toolvertorials” people will remember you and like you more when they use them.
Polls have shown that the majority of Iraqis want US forces out of their country. Bush, in his last months of his horrendous presidency should at least make life easier for his successor and call for a referendum in Iraq with a simple question. Should US stay or go. And most likely Iraqis will say go. And Bush will say what a wonderful democracy we now have in Iraq, they voted for us to go. And USA will save American lives and $10bn per month and focus in Afghanistan and the Taliban which should have been the only occupation to begin with and where Al Qaeda was.
2008 16
Sequoia says, Get Real or Go Home, quite late in the game
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Sequoia is a small investor in Fon. Sequoia is probably the most famous VC firm in the world. But Sequoia, as you can see from this presentation is confused and in a state of panic because first they made all these investments some very recently, and now they are telling their own companies to Get Real or Go Home. Plus they are coming very late in the “we warned you” advisory role. Allen and Co is another investor in Fon and Allen and Co advised us that markets were drying up for start up fund a year before Sequoia. At Fon we listened to Allen and Co closely and made the necessary adjustments. These painful cost reductions were done at Fon half a year before the other Sequoia companies who are only getting their warnings now, in the midst of the hurricane. So we are ahead of the game thanks to Allen and Co. We now find ourselves losing around 300K euros per month still significant but down from 1.2 million euros a year ago. With revenues and margins growing we are going towards profitability in 09. September was our best month in terms of revenues, margins and cash burn. Sequoia now only owns around 1% of Fon but if I had Sequoia as my lead investor I would wonder why is it that it took them so long to warn their companies. Maybe because Allen and Co is in NYC they seat at the center of the current financial hurricane and were able to warn us so much earlier but my advise to Sequoia would be to stop panicking and take advantage of the crisis to make more opportunistic investments.
2008 14
Fonera 2.0 and the crisis: the Interview on Mobuzz
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Here´s the whole show.