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Tokyo: Japanese Toilets And Express Trains
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9 min read
I was really looking forward to visiting Japan for the first time. First, let’s talk about Japanese toilets. Japanese Toilets In Thailand, you get a teaser of Japanese sophistication when you visit one of those sophisticated Thai shopping malls and sit down on one of those sophisticated Japanese toilets. In case you didn’t know, they…
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Estonia’s e-Residency Is Awesome And Sucks, Too
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11 min read
If you’ve read my recent rant about how painful it is to found a company in Germany, you probably realized that I was quite annoyed about bureaucracy in Germany at the time. What you didn’t know, however, was that I was also looking at founding a company in Estonia, or moving my current one there.…
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While Estonia has famously introduced its e-residency which enables future founders to incorporate their company in minutes, things are still quite different here in Good Old Germany. Germany has a reputation for precision and adhering to rules. I’m not sure how any of these aspects apply to the founding of companies though. It’s just damn…
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I see many founders focusing on the wrong things when building their startup. I briefly mentioned this observation in my other post. Here’s a more expanded list of things which don’t matter. All of this is my personal opinion, of course – but I thought I’d share it because not many people state this publicly, yet…
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I’m part of a few incubators where I mingle with future startup founders and pretend to have knowledge on how to build a startup. Generally speaking, I perceive myself as being relatively clueless, but then again, when the founders ask me some questions, I briefly think that I actually have something useful to share. One…
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Don’t Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
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15 min read
I’ve talked to quite a few people who were considering founding their own startups. Many of them were quite inexperienced regarding, well, everything, as they were either fresh out of University or currently in a day job which was completely unrelated to startups, the economy and broader reality (mostly doctors). All of them tell me…
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Six Years of Back Pain, Episode 1: Mouse Shoulder
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10 min read
This is episode 1 of my medical mystery. As all medical mysteries, it led me to physiotherapists and doctors – but, in contrast to most medical mysteries, it also led me to stuff my scrotum into a leather-lined pouch. And I also ended up shooting gut bacteria into various cavities of my body. But let’s…
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From Two to Three
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12 min read
In 2020, I founded a company called OpenRegulatory. At that time – the height of the pandemic, with low interest rates and near-unlimited funding – most startups were rocket ships – VC-funded, growth-oriented and, most notably, not profitable. I wanted OpenRegulatory to be different – bootstrapped by me, small, profitable – more like a tuk-tuk. Now, while you’re chuckling,…
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From Clojure to Ruby
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5 min read
Back in 2017, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I got my first coding job, I was super excited about Clojure. And what’s there not to be excited about? It’s super fast, it’s concise, and it’s a lisp. But now I’m coding in Ruby. Why? Superficially, Ruby and Clojure are similar (bear with me): They’re…
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From One to Two
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8 min read
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel writes: It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act…