Björn Jeffery

Love this.

(via The Rubber Barber: Make a Mistake and Give Your Eraser a Fancy Haircut | Colossal)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of alumni for companies. By that, I mean the active (and proud) recognition of once working at a certain place. It is something that you want to mention, even if you have left to do other things.

Some companies have this already. “Googlers” are the most obvious example. Being an ex-Googler is something that is referenced frequently here in the Valley. I like that. People leave their jobs for so many reasons, and I think conflict or underperformance are relatively uncommon. Why not be proud of where you’ve been?

I’d like to be a part of building those sorts of companies. Companies that people look back at and think “wow, I’m proud I was a part of that”. It doesn’t have to be fantastic all the time of course – nothing is. But at least good enough for people to have fond memories of it and leave without regrets. That the ride was worth something for them while they were there, and keeps being worth something afterwards.

I think Toca Boca is one of those companies, although it is a little too early to tell. We are still young and very few people have left. I’d like to think that my former agency Good Old is one too. At least for some. It was a crazy ride in the beginning and I think we all learned a lot from those years. I’m proud to say that I worked there. And I’ll always be a Good Old-person somehow.

If your life is only about you, if what you seek is always for your benefit, if relationships are a means to some personal end, marriage isn’t for you.

Paintings of a sci-fi version of Sweden. Captures the winter light well.

(via Simon Stålenhag Art Gallery)

Paintings of a sci-fi version of Sweden. Captures the winter light well.

(via Simon Stålenhag Art Gallery)

A blast from the past. This is me sitting in my bedroom, living with my parents, and being unhappy in a way that only teenagers can be.

If small children had more input, many “Education” apps would logically fall under a category called “Kids” or “Kids’ Games.” And many more of the games would probably look something like the apps designed by a Swedish game studio named Toca Boca.

I never went to business school and I never studied economics. At the time when I was choosing what to study, it was never even an option that crossed my mind. There was no future where I could see myself working with that sort of thing.

Just a few years later, I was running my own company and I realized that some of those courses might have been good after all. It didn’t primarily come from an urge to deep dive into the balance sheet, but from understanding my clients and the world that they were in. Because they had been to business school. And they referenced things that I didn’t really understand. Had I taken a few courses in economics, it might have been easier to relate to them.

After many of these meetings, I thought to myself that maybe it wasn’t so much about the specific business terminology but more a general sense of context. What mattered to the clients was what they were reading and talking about. So while I was commuting between Malmö and Stockholm, I made a habit of reading Dagens Industri – the Swedish business newspaper. I tried to read more or less everything in it (even when the articles made no sense at all – which was fairly often), and to read it every time I got the opportunity.

Months of reading Dagens Industri later, things were beginning to make sense. I still had to Google what a hedge fund was on numerous occasions, but it was starting to fall into place somewhat. The turning point was a meeting with a new potential client. It was going pretty badly until I referenced an article from Dagens Industri that I had read earlier that morning. I saw the change in the client’s eyes straight away. It was as if I was suddenly one of them – someone in the know. Of course I wasn’t really, but I had apparently learned enough to be able to have an informed conversation. The meeting changed at that very second and went well.

The point here is not to say that the only thing you learn in business school is to talk about hedge funds. I know this isn’t the case. The point is that what was difficult for me wasn’t to learn the business stuff – it was understanding what it was I needed to learn to progress. That context mattered and that stepping into the lives of my clients really helped in bridging a gap of communication and faith.

There are many ways of learning things. Knowing what you need to learn though – that seems to be an everlasting challenge.

A truly great piece of journalism and storytelling, with an interesting twist at the end. Make sure that you make it all the way through.

The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble – NYTimes.com

When designing social software, I imagine one of the most challenging things is finding the incentive to interact. Answering the question: How and why should I use this service? I haven’t really designed anything like this (on a serious scale, at least) so I wouldn’t know from personal experience. But being an avid user at least allows me to see the complexity that is there.

I’ve been thinking about this when using Foursquare lately. As I remember it, Foursquare launched as a service to find out where your friends were and what they were doing. Privacy is of course an issue with these sorts of things and it was structured as a social network where you add your friends. If you don’t want people to see where you are, don’t add them as friends. The Facebook-model, if you will – a symmetrical relationship between two people (if I am their friend, they have to be my friend too).

Over time, Foursquare seems to have left that idea a little bit and moved over to become a way to find new places in a city. You can filter by seeing where your friends have been – not necessarily where they are. That little detail makes all the difference, for me. From a privacy perspective, I’m not sure I want people to know where I am – but I’m generally fine with telling people where I have been. Every person has their own rules, I suppose.

Since the intent of the service is now changed, I would much prefer a Foursquare that was asymmetric. The Twitter-model. Since I mainly use it to find new places to go, I’d like to follow people that live in the city that I’m currently in. I understand that they are most probably not interested in me, so a simple “Follow” would suffice and wouldn’t burden them too much. Asking someone I don’t know to be my “friend” just to get a restaurant recommendation seems a little much.

It’s interesting how these relatively small choices have such a big impact. It seems like Foursquare is going through a bit of a rough patch. I wonder if it would be different if it was asymmetric instead.