I am an entrepreneur. I am a blogger entrepreneur, but I am not a journalist. I was not trained as one. I don´t blog news. I blog about building a company. In this case FON. I don´t claim to be objective. How could I be? But I do try to tell as much as I can of what it is to build a company that went from and idea in my head to global reality with amazing corporate partners and investors in 5 months. What do I think of journalists? Like all professions some are good, some are bad. Should blog replace journalism? No. I give about 3 interviews a week and to me journalism has a key role in portraying developments that blogging, an especially an entrepreneur´s blog, will never replace. When a good journalist interviews me I feel she/he is part detective, part writer, part therapist. The detective part finds out things that I don´t know or don´t want to share, the writer part describes the story in a much better way that I could myself (yes, I do suffer from writer´s envy when I see how well some journalists write), and the therapist side discovers that part of me that I did not even know I had. So I will continue doing both, write my blog and collaborate with journalists including journalists who have blogs.

I already said what went right this week, how we grew our registered fonero numbers 400% to 13,000, how we were approached by many ISPs wanting to sign up to our global wifi roaming platform to increase ARPU and reduce churn, how we appeared in over 100 newspapers around the world, 1300 blogs, dozens of TV shows, radio shows, magazines, etc. Now let´s talk about what went wrong. The mistakes.
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Joi Ichi Ito, one of the world’s most popular bloggers, accepted to join FON’s advisory board for North America. Joi is originally from Japan but grew up in the US. His blog is in english and it’s fascinating. Joi is one of the leading figures of the blog movement both as a blogger and founders of Six Apart. One of the things I really admire in Joi is his ability to start companies that generate social value and are profitable at the same time.

An interesting detail: this blog is designed with the software Joi’s company created: MoveableType. So while Joi becomes a fonero, I blog using his software.

When I was at NYU I met a guy who presented his theory of virginity… sometime in the 80s somewhere in the East Village. It was simple. Even though he was only 21 he had slept with 8 virgins. That meant that there were 7 other guys out there who had slept with none. He then went to ask me if I could help him identify them. I told him that, while I could understand his theory, I could think of no way of finding who those losers were. And we went on to another drink.

Fast forward to 2005. Think of blogging. A successful blogger requires thousands of readers. At the same time there´s no way a successful blogger can read thousands of blogs. Therefore, for every successful blogger there are many individuals whose blogs are rarely read or who write no blogs at all. Is there a connection here? Do bloggers get laid? Do you either write or get laid? Maybe my stud friend is reading my blog now!

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