Archive for the ‘Entrepreneurship’ Category
Not a Padawan Anymore
I don’t know if you’ve noticed the same thing, but it’s the first year my RSS feeds contain so few yearly retrospectives, as if everybody just wanted to forget about this 2009 when our whole consumerism-based economy fell apart. As far as I’m concerned, I’m so glad this year was so chaotic, as it was a real wake-up call for me. It was the last year of my Padawan training.
I started this decade entering engineering school. I learnt a lot about software, I discovered Montreal, and then I moved in Belgium for the practical part of my training. Because looking back on it, that’s what it was. Those four-and-a-half years were really the best way for me to build up experience, to learn my craft, to meet people, and last but not least to stop trying to learn about my deeper self by looking in the distorting mirror of introspection, and start listening to myself. This last path is still ongoing but all of this work has really awakened me to what’s coming.
This 1st of January, I’m officially and legally starting my new freelance business, Epseelon IT, hence the change of name of this blog and the fact that it now also accessible via epseelon.com. It’s a big step for me, and to be honnest, a little frightening one for now and until I get the first bills rolling. But I’m deeply convinced it is the best move for me, and I’m already baffled by how many opportunities it’s created for me. I’m a Jedi Knight, which doesn’t mean that learning is over, but I am now strong enough to learn by myself.
I hope the decade to come will allow me to turn this freelance business into the company I’ve been dreaming to create for 10 years. I hope it will also allow me to learn more about those parts of myself that I’ve neglected for too long. And I hope I will learn enough about myself to let a family come to life around me. Last but not least, Canada, I’m coming back!
Happy new decade! See you in 2020!
Change is Happening, my Friends!
I know it sounds like an apocalyptic prediction of some sort, but it’s all the contrary. And I’m not talking about politics, or the big-bang-boom-tada-yeah that’s happening right now in a country north from here. I’m talking about our work environment. I’m talking about how the way we solve our problems is already changing. In his very inspiring presentation, Clay Shirky mentioned a transition, that he saw already happening back in 2005, but a transition anyway. The thing is that it takes a visionary to see such a transition while it’s happening because… well… it’s happening. So you’re supposed to be a part of it. Talk about an out-of-body experience (I don’t know the right expression for that in English, sorry).
And this morning, answering a message from my friend and former boss on LinkedIn, I realized that the signs were right here before my very eyes:
- Organisational: when I was interviewed by Axen, I was seduced by their organisational model, because it was completely original. Pretty flat hierarchy, no “I can’t make that decision, it’s not in my prerogatives” thing, a lot of flexibility and pragmatism, everything is a project and people gather dynamically to implement such projects, they learn a lot, and then they move to something else. Astounding! And it worked… for some time. And now even though THIS instance is being absorbed in the guts of a greedy giant, I know it can work. Or to be more specific, I know that people can work like that. Not everybody, but some people can.
- Technical: have you noticed how the Internet is everywhere in what we do? Have you noticed how it expands our natural limits to bond and share with one another. Am I worried that I might lose contact with all the wonderful people at Axen when I leave? No! I have them all in my LinkedIn account, I can follow them, see how they’re doing, where they’re going, what they’re working on. And more importantly I have a permanent way to keep in touch with them. And of course there are all the people that I’ve met, worked with, thanks to the Internet. There’s Claes, the guy I’m working with on ConferenceGuide. There are all the contacts I’ve met at DMF in October… and the ones I’ve lost, because I didn’t get their card and couldn’t add them to my contacts (Damn it!)
- Methodological: this is more specific to the IT field, but still, it shows that minds are shifting thanks to Agile Methodologies. Get back to what really matters: creating value. Let go of your old beliefs that you’re going to keep everything under control and never change your mind. Our business is moving fast, let’s embrace it. Let’s build trust with our teams, encourage everyone to commit, improve our state-of-the-art. And let’s stop saying things like “people are dumb, and lazy, and short-sighted, so we need this control and methodology”. That sounds too much like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And there are probably other aspects that are already changing drastically. I’m not saying they’re changing for everyone. Like any evolutionary process, some specimens are trying it, it increases their chances of survival, others die. It’s like work environment natural selection at… work. Now I’m not a Darwin expert, but I’m wondering whether at some point, seeing that some “features” obviously work better than others, nature doesn’t have a way to push those forward. And even if nature is not capable of this, maybe we are. Maybe now that we are aware of those changes, now that we know they work better, now that we are in times when cards are dealt again, it’s time for us to give a little help to natural selection.
I think those changes are still too shy, they look like an archaeopteryx to me (you know this missing link in evolution, sort of half-dinosaur, half-bird). In other words, all those changes are still happening in what seems more and more like an archaic and unfit environment for solving problems: the company. And here I am, envisioning a work environment full of adhocratic-agile-connected people without the need for a constraining and limiting structure full of overhead and politics. I have a dream! But it’s not over yet…
Conference Guide Available
Woohooo! Exciting times! It’s confirmed, I will be at Devoxx the whole week, and my Conference Guide iPhone application has just been approved. For your information, it only covers Devoxx 2009 for now, but it’s meant to be generic and I will add more information for other conferences soon: TEDxBrussels, JFokus, etc. The application is free for a limited period of time, so go ahead and install it!
More features for the iPhone application are coming, maybe not for Devoxx (the Apple review process makes things really slow), as well as other mobile clients. An Android client is already in the pipe, and if you are a Palm Pre or Symbian developer, feel free to contact me. I can give you access to the same public API I’m using for the iPhone version.
Finally, if you are a conference organizer and you want your event information to be available on mobile platforms without having to develop your own applications, feel free to contact me as well.
And by the way, if you are a company, and you are thinking about developing your own iPhone application, whether it is for marketing purposes, to sell content or to improve the productivity of your salesforce, I’m your guy. And I can do much more than just iPhone development ;o)
Digital Marketing First… Oh my!
I was at Digital Marketing First today. I was invited by Alexandre Colleau from Belgium-iPhone to participate in a panel discussion about iPhone application development. But the presentation was only at 2PM so I decided to walk around the booths before. And I was very disappointed. After hearing someone from eMakina claiming that you can take your blood pressure just by touching the screen of your iPhone, and seen many email marketing vendors claim that email marketing is the future… well, I was disappointed. And then there was the panel.
The discussion itself was pretty interesting in itself. 9 iPhone developers, from hobbyists to professional, from App Store applications to pure B2B stuff, from highly-successful to eternally rejected VOIP apps… very interesting. But what was really astounding for me was after the presentation: people from the audience litterally jumped on us, asking for business cards, asking questions, talking to us about their projects. Luckily for me, I had prepared a bunch of cards, because I secretly hoped that this participation would lead me to a few project opportunities. But I sincerely didn’t expect the demand for iPhone developers to be so high.
So yes guys: I do iPhone development too! In fact I love it, even better than anything else. It’s fun, innovative, and solves real problems. And even better than that, since I do java development too, I can help you design your whole infrastructure. Ain’t that awesome? And even more: if you need a desktop client that is cross-platform and allows you to reproduce some of the functionalities of your iPhone application, I can do that too.
Anyways. I had the opportunity to talk with very interesting people about very interesting projects and it should lead to a few very interesting freelance missions. What a productive day! And a big thank you to Alexandre Colleau!
Enough Big Talk, Let’s Get Pragmatic
First off, by january 2010, I’ll be a freelance software architect and developer. After 4 years at Axen, gathering experience, building up my network, figuring out who I am and what I want, this is just the best way to go for me right now. The best way for me to solve real problems in this world. I won’t let anyone down, I’ll do things properly and it won’t happen overnight, but I’m moving on.
Which leads me to my second point: I’m actively looking for new challenges, new projects, new problems to solve. Productivity, user experience, mobility, modularity those are the problematics I’d love to help companies with. All things Java, Grails, Flex, iPhone SDK, OSGi, this is my toolbox. High level of intervention, coaching and technical leading, architecture, start-up CTO, those are the roles I’d be happier with. So if you have something along these lines, or simply questions you would like to discuss with a software passionate, my resume is here in English and French, and you can contact me here.
And since one of my motivations for going freelance include being able to meet more people and share more, I’m already going to participate in a few upcoming events:
- Wednesday, October 21st, I’ll be at Betagroup to hear about Belgian startups
- Thursday, October 22nd, I’ll be at Digital Marketing First, and I’ll be one of the 9 iPhone professionals answering questions in a panel session
- From November 16th to 20th, I’ll be at Devoxx in Antwerp
- On November 23rd, I’ll be at TEDxBrussels in European Parliament
So let’s meet, share and… solve problems!
A New Experiment : eXperts UnLimited
I love technology watch. I could do that all day. Browsing my RSS feeds, discovering new technologies, reading strong opinions, commenting here and there. And I love answering questions too. Do you know a way to download any Flash video? Which solution would you choose for our messaging problem: Oracle queues or a custom messaging system? What are the pros and cons of Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX and AJAX? What do you think about Unit Testing? I would love to answer technological questions all day.
But I’m a geek. I don’t do that all day. My day job is to develop software. And even though I plan to change that very soon, more often than not, I’m not really convinced what I’m doing is needed. And a lot of customers I work for wouldn’t think that reading blogs, writing articles and chatting with fellow geeks is valuable work… that is until they come to me with a “what’s the better way to …?” question.
What if I could do that all day, or at least earn some of my living doing that? And I know a few guys who would really love to do that too. That’s why I’ve just launched a new public experiment called eXperts UnLimited (XUL). If you want to know more, or if you have questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment there.
MooPlan 1.0 is out!
Yesterday evening has been quite a night. I was watching a movie with a friend of mine when my cell phone rang, with a US number on screen.
Hi, I’m calling from Apple. I’m finishing the review of your MooPlan app. But I just miss a few things before it can go on sale.
I sent the application for review about a week ago, and 24 hours after that, I received feedback from Apple requesting me to modify 2 icons that infringed Apple’s trademark. No big deal, the app was resubmitted with the hour. And then I didn’t have any news for a whole week, and I was not worried because I had read so many people complain about the slow review process and the impossibility to get in touch with anyone inside Apple.
And then BOOM! A guy from Apple calls me twice the same evening, just to get my application in store as fast as possible. And a few minutes after the second call, TADAAAA! MooPlan 1.0 is ready for sale. Isn’t it great?
So ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to announce that my first iPhone application is on sale, and you can get it here for $0.99 or €0.79. If you want to know more about what it does, head to the official website.
Just a few thanks:
- Special thanks to Groovy and Grails communities for producing such a great productive Java platform that allowed me to focus on the iPhone side of things. Grails was really ideal for me: RESTful services are so easy to build, and scaffolding is just great to quickly produce an administration interface. And it was so fast to learn! I didn’t know anything about Groovy and Grails 6 months ago. And thanks also to Guillaume Laforge and his buddies for the tweets.
- Thanks to all my friends and colleagues who tested the app: Frédéric Navarro, Mounira Hamzaoui, Clément Mary, Geoffrey Bogaert, Thomas Le Goff, Quentin De Mot, Louis Jacomet, Jérôme Vanden Eynde.
- Thanks to my employer, Axen, for supporting me in this self-training effort.
- Special thanks to my Geekette friend, who beared with the movie interruption and supported me for the final steps. Hopefully in a few years, we’ll laugh about this screenshot.
So that’s it. I have the feeling that this release could be the beginning of something big. I feel it in my guts. Now it’s up to you guys. And as I read it in a German restaurant last week-end.
If you like it, tell others. If you don’t like it, please tell me.
One more thing…
I just read this amazing article by Semyon Dukach and all I can say is that it really reinforced one of the values I want to put in my new project. But since I wrote my first post about it, I realized there is another one that is even more important to me (like all one-more-thing‘s are, right?). But instead of just adding it to the list, I want to take the opportunity to rephrase all of those values a little bit, agile-manifesto-style!
- Being rich by what you realize over valuing yourself by what you own
- Bringing progress to the world over protecting markets
- Intelligence of the crowd over over “wisdom” of the expert
- Investing in value creation over growth potential
- Focusing on well-identified problems over imagining all the solutions in the world
And last but not least:
- Turning your dreams into projects over dreaming about projects.
But contrary to what they say in the Agile Manifesto, I see no value in the items on the right.
Now all I have to do is to initiate this thing, bootstrap it so that it’s easier for others to create companies with those values at heart.
There’s gotta be a better way!
In 2008, I tried to create a startup around TagSpot, a mobile service. And it didn’t work (so far), partly because of me and my own weaknesses, but also because it’s far too hard to create such a company in Europe, especially now.
Obviously for us, the first breakpoint was money. I don’t have any savings, so I can’t quit my day job, even for a few weeks. And I’m a tech guy so I’m not particularly excited by the idea of spending too much time on a business plan to attract investors. The only things I’ve got are ideas, skills and passion. And in my humble opinion that should be enough. And I’m fed up with all those people trying to convince me that there’s no way around, that you have to think in business terms right away. And where is the room for intuition and iterative realization? Why are so many projects with good business plans and big investors failing? There’s gotta be a better way!
Let’s invent it. Let’s create an alternative way for entrepreneurs to get started. And more importantly, let’s do it by leveraging the current financial situation instead of whining about it. There are thousands of people out there looking for better investment opportunities, disappointed by the stock market, willing to get back to a system in which they can sponsor entrepreneurship and innovation rather than participate in speculation. Banks cannot offer that kind of alternative, they are far too entangled in the current state of things. But we, entrepreneurs can do something about it.
Consider the example of MyMajorCompany. Those guys created a marketplace where music listeners can become producers and allow artists to get started. My idea is to adapt this concept to the IT entrepreneurship sector by developing a marketplace allowing startup creators to propose their ideas and prototypes to small investors willing to participate in collective funding efforts. The idea is not to replace business angels, venture capitalists and banks, but just to offer a complementary alternative for idea-stage projects.
There are a lot of details to figure out, a lot of things to set up, and all I have for now is a set of guiding values:
- Money is merely a means to an end: entrepreneurs, investors and we have to agree to that. I don’t think “money first” is a good strategy.
- Innovation is our end: it will be the main criterion by which we’ll select projects to sponsor. It should be our primary concern, and it will drive everything else (profitability, employment, etc.)
- Transparency: the key to reassure investors is to give them maximum visibility of the projects they invest on. And we have to be transparent about this platform too, it has to offer the best possible alternative.
- No speculation: investors will not buy shares but interest participations, that they won’t be able to sell. I firmly believe that buying potential value is what led us to the current crisis, and I want to allow people to invest on value creation, period.
- Focus on software: this collective investment platform can certainly be adapted to many different sectors but software-based projects seem like the best option to start with, because they don’t require too much money to start, and because it’s the sector I understand best.
We need a name, we need graphics, we need a first site, we need ideas, we need all those who agree with the values above, who are willing to change things and have skills, ideas and passion to put in this project. I’ve started to work on a first prototype but I want to involve more people because it’s the best way to make sure that we will develop the platform WE all need.
So if you have questions, ideas, suggestions, if you want to participate in this project, whatever your background, if you know someone who shares our values, use comments on this post, or drop me an e-mail. And when I say “whatever your background”, I mean it. Of course, we will need software developers (notably Grails/Flex), graphics designers but also accountants to figure out how to make our investment system fit into existing laws, small investors to let us know what they expect from such an alternative. At the very least, let’s start a debate about this idea.
There IS a better way, and we have the power to build it now. So bring it on…
