I’m getting increasingly pissed off by this message, which appears every time I want to add someone as a connection using LinkedIn :
Please note: You should only invite people you know. Several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don’t know you. If enough recipients indicate they don’t know you, then you will be required to enter an email address to invite classmates in the future. More info…
Tonight, I just had it. So I wrote this email to the LinkedIn Customer Services Dept., which is shared below. Wanted to share it with you here, in case they do not comply. As I’ve said before, I’m not a big fan of these types of closed social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook and others. In fact, we don’t really like them, but we use them anyway, as long as they are beneficial to us and can connect us with people we wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach. But obviously there are limits. I don’t want to be insulted, and the above message comes pretty close to feeling like an insult to my intelligence.
So I wrote this email :
from Morten Blaabjerg
to cs@linkedin.com
date Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 9:50 PM
subject Please remove annoying message
Dear Sir,
Can you please remove the message saying “several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don’t know you etc”… from my “Add connections” page? It is kind of annoying to see it there every time I check into that page, and there’s no imminent way I can remove it myself, it seems.
It simply spoils my good mood. If someone doesn’t remember me, is their business, and they can elect not to connect with me. I don’t care if they do not connect with me. If they don’t remember me, I can live fine without that particular connection.
But I take insult from repeatedly getting my good mood spoilt by being spoken down to like a baby every time I want to connect with someone using your service.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to remove that message, I would like to cease to use your services and have my complete account erased from your servers. And I’d like to have our LinkedIn group removed too. This stuff just gets on my nerves.
If LinkedIn does not comply and remove their system message from my screen, I’ll simply demand my accounts be erased and leave LinkedIn. I will also cease to recommend others to use it. I’ll focus on other networking services such as Plaxo Pulse or others, where I don’t have to be spoken down to every time I want to connect with someone. LinkedIn is useful and a fine tool, but it’s not life support.
Also, I forgot and should have given Customer Services a heads up, that I have never worked in that big company called Rubicon, which they constantly recommend I connect with employees from. I once co-edited a students’ periodical of that same name, though. It seems strange to me that LinkedIn cannot see, that these are very different entities.
Finally got around to get an account for us on Flickr and upload a bunch of photos from one of our recent sessions. These photos are from a meeting on the Kaplak premises in IDEA House in Odense, June 23rd, 2008.
This also gives me the proud opportunity to introduce to you developers Anders Nicolaisen and Jesper Beltoft Lund, who joined Kaplak in May. Please give them a warm welcome onboard! :-)
There’s a place close to where I live in Odense, where I come often to walk my dog. It’s one of those places I call ‘cracks of the industrial city’. As anyone familiar with the lyrics of Leonard Cohen will tell you, the cracks are ‘where the light gets in‘… In this case, it’s a stretch of unused railway tracks grown full with weeds and bushes, and surrounded by the backsides, walls and fences of old industrial buildings.
This place invites two particular breeds of people; dog owners and grafitti artists. It occured to me as a fitting spot to do our first videoblog, on what I term the ‘grafitti phase of a startup’ :
The video is also accessible on YouTube, which didn’t, however, work wonders for the quality of the video. The difficulty of getting compressed video (mp4) into an editing program, and getting it out in the same quality as it got in (mp4), is something I have yet to master. Add to this the further Flash-ification of the video on sites such as Blip.tv and YouTube, and you have a recipe for massacred material – especially if the quality was not that great to begin with.
This post is our first video blog post, and I know we’ve got a lot to learn. There’s a long way to go for us. We’d really like your input on how to improve. Ideas?
I’d like to share some of the insights which motivated me to deliberately, willfully and consciously choose to spend a considerable number of years of my life enduring the hardships of building a startup business from scratch. What motivated me to found Kaplak? What motivates me to work on Kaplak, each and every day?
There are a number of avenues to take to answer these questions. One of these is Dreams of a Diva (org. Danish title Diva Drømme), a documentary film I produced/directed in 2005. This trailer for the film gives you an idea of what kind of film this is :
The film was produced under the FilmTrain program, and therefore, to a certain extent, sponsored as part of my participation in this program. FilmTrain was financed as an Interreg IIIA project, which basically means it was funded by the EU. It was a cross-border Danish-German project of which one particular objective was to try and develop and keep young and independent media professionals in the regions of Odense/Funen and Kiel/Schleswig, rather than “lose them” to the big cities of Copenhagen and Hamburg.
I’ve never been very good at thinking about how to market any film I produced. In short, because I never cared. Every current project interested me, and older ones were soon shelved, after airings on local or national television, or screenings at festivals. None of my films have attracted or tried to attract a mainstream audience. I made films about subjects I liked and which interested me, despite the fact I never earned more than a little on any of them. In 2004 I met Sofie Krog, which is a world-class puppeteer, and she hired me to do a promotional video for her. I knew already then, that it would be great to eventually do a longer film about her and her show, and decided to make the film the following year.
Much hard work later, the film had a blast of a premiere in a local movie theatre in Odense in January 2006, with an invited audience of about 100 people. The following week, when the film stood it’s ground in the theatre on it’s own merits, it attracted as many as two paying moviegoers, of which one was my aunt. And this was after what I’d say was decent local press coverage, on television, in radio and in the printed press.
Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed. Some rational analysis later, this was hardly surprising, even though we’d hoped for more. The film had a niche subject, puppeteering, which was little known about locally, featured an up-and-coming star in this field, which were little known outside theatrical circles – and to top it, it was a documentary film. Apparently, documentaries never do very well in theatres (with the rare exception).
This was what I call an eye-opener to me. What may have been latent knowledge before then, was then crystal. It was clear to me, that I couldn’t rely on any traditional distribution channel, such as movie theatres, for my work – and nor for financing my work, if I wanted to continue to do the kind of non-mainstream creative works I wanted to do.
At the same time I released the film on the bittorrent-indexsite The Pirate Bay, from where the torrent spread to other torrent-indexsites. Also the official FilmTrain DVD (which was free) was later leaked to the bittorrent network. While none of these files were ever big hits on the torrent networks, the traffic they brought from as far away as Greece and Japan revealed new avenues of distribution. Gargantuan amounts of data were transported to far away places – not with the speed of light – but comparatively hazzle-free, for such a young technology. It was in fact possible to distribute large amounts of data to the other end of the world with comparative ease and very little cost. It was clear, there were problems. Lots of problems. At one point I managed to send 13 GB or so across the Atlantic. It took 14 days or so to do it, though. With just two people connected, this was not the economical method of doing this, but it still amazed me. Shipping this amount of data from a home computer to another through the internet was unthinkable just 5-10 years ago. Eventually I got tired of seeding myself, which basically made the torrents unavailable (and they are so now, not just this film, but most of the stuff I put up there). But the possibility existed. We “just” needed some method to pay for the bandwidth and hosting. We needed to make it even easier.
I can’t possibly go back to directing and producing a film, before I get to a point where I can rely on the architectures of it’s distribution to actually bring the film to those interested in it, and give me a decent living from it, which helps finance my work. Sending a film in 100 physical copies to 100 different film festivals around the world can’t do this for me, it’s only further expenses. Now, we have a global, open architecture of distribution at our feet. We “just” need to tweak and improve the tools at our hands to enable us to create new business models.
I can’t publish my work online without a method of making a living from what I do. I found back then, that there were a ton of videosites and p2p networks which enabled internet users to distribute their stuff. Yet, amazingly none took seriously aim to crack what I increasingly saw as “the niche producer’s problem”; financing, and what’s going to get a niche production financing : increased and targeted visibility towards it’s niche market. I also found that there were lots of methods to put advertising on one’s website – and earn a dime doing so. But what if you don’t have a website? What if you don’t want to become entangled in online advertising, but would rather go about your business doing what you do well? Or what if you can attract so little traffic, that it isn’t really worth your while? I found none which were interested in appealing to niche markets, on what I refer to as “the slim end” of the long tail. This was the situation Kaplak was founded to remedy. Not just for myself, but for anyone for whom this resonates.
Earlier this winter Rasmus Dahlberg of the Odense-based publishing house Det Historiske Hus asked me ‘why we had founded an association and not a company?’. I answered something to the meaning that the association was much more flexible than a formal business at this point, where we still needed to put together the right team, find investors and expand our network etc. I also told him, that I wasn’t sure if our leadership and organization was in place etc. All these things were true enough.
A few weeks later the association exploded in my face. As a matter of fact, I did see it coming, but, I’m sorry to say, didn’t react swiftly enough on the early symptoms and gut feeling I had. I didn’t realize our differences would escalate into open conflict. Instead I nurtured the vain hope that our differences and different backgrounds would only make Kaplak stronger. Now, the association is no more, and has been replaced by a regular for-profit company. And this is all for the better.
For a long time I have wanted to elaborate on the background of these developments here, but have held back, because I’ve dreaded the painful aspects of reliving the conflicts we had. Yet I know this is something we need to be open and talk about. We want to create an open business, which dares be vulnerable too and openly show what the process of building a company like Kaplak entails, even when it’s rough. It also may allow other startups to learn from our experience.
Last and not least I hope and think that this article may also be part of our internal healing process, which we need to cater to – before we shoot ahead into our bright future.
What went wrong with the association?
The Association of Kaplak Investors (Kaplak Investorforening) was founded on October 15th 2007 by Morten Blaabjerg, Jens Wellejus and Jesper Böttzauw.
We chose to found an association because we believed it would be more flexible and better able to expand the circle of ressourceful people around the project, as well as attract further capital. We needed candidates for several key roles on the team, as well as more capital to create the company we wanted. The association was a method for hooking up our different professional networks, which would help provide the team members we sorely needed, while we jointly saved up cash for a ‘real’ company.
All this was very good in theory, and this idea may indeed have spawned such an outcome, if we’d been a larger circle of people to begin with, with a higher willingness to lay down real money on the table. As it was, it relied too heavily on too few members to invest in the company, as well as lobby and activate their professional networks to also invest and become members of our association. And it relied (too) heavily on information sharing between members, about activities, valuable contacts and potential customers in our networks, and between the association and new investor prospects.
In return for this, all members were given equal influence on proceedings, in their vote and electability for board membership, regardless of the value of their investment. This spelled trouble.
In fact, this choice of organization proved less than flexible. Formal proceedings became too great a mouthful for too few people involved, taking valuable time and ressources from more important tasks, i.e. developing Kaplak as a company. If the association was to work, we needed to work hard to expand it and nurse it, as much as we needed to work on Kaplak the business. At the same time, I had a growing feeling that my partners, albeit enthusiastic about the project, wasn’t so enthusiastic as to actually invest human money, or alternatively, spend more time to help attract and close further investments for the company, and in doing this expand the circle of ressourceful people connected to the project. I felt I was the only one working on the project, but without real ownership to my work, as it became the property of the association.
The conflict arose between Jesper and myself, with Jens in the impossible position as a mediator or taken hostage between us. There were deeper misunderstandings and differences at stake, but the point of conflict was our new wiki.
From the very beginning of Kaplak in the spring of 2007 an internal (and later public) wiki was a key element in Kaplak’s communications and information sharing plan. It was in the first business plan.
Now, when the wiki finally was online in late November, Jesper suddenly objected to using it, even when asked directly to do so. I found myself spending more and more time “persuading” or trying to trick Jesper into using the wiki. One key goal of the wiki was to abolish email as a knowledge sharing tool, yet I kept spending an increasing amount of time in one-to-one bottleneck email correspondance with my partner. This was frustrating, because we could have used all the energy put into emails and explaining back and forth to build our wiki at the same time. My point was then and still is, that there’s no saying “I don’t understand it” when you’re in front of something new, without willingness to dive in and try things out and experiment. Without this willingness to try new things you’ll never learn what it is. This goes for wikis in particular. As an experiment, I copied all of our correspondance into the wiki. In part, because I hoped to show, by example, that we could have this exchange in the wiki just as easily – everything readable and editable by anyone in our circle, not limited to two people. But nothing really happened. Jesper felt reluctant to share any details on his contacts and possible Kaplak customers in his network, although this sharing and connecting was in fact a key contribution of his to Kaplak by his contract. I didn’t feel he trusted me, my leadership or the company, and I slowly lost faith in him as a partner. These events were probably inevitable, given our series of misunderstandings, difficulties and conflicts of which I describe only some here.
In early January we had a very loud board meeting, which culminated with Jesper leaving the board. At this meeting I tried to demonstrate, that Jesper’s efforts didn’t amount to what he had said he’d deliver : leads and contacts. Jesper in turn said he had been talking to a lawyer about my ‘criminal act’ of copy-pasting our ‘private’ correspondance into the wiki, which he believed to be in violation of Danish law. This ended the meeting, as I can’t tolerate a partner who believes I am a criminal, and who had the audacity to discuss these alleged criminal offenses with a lawyer before considering the interests of the company. I can’t live with a partner who’d rather discuss my possible acts of crime with a lawyer, before he’ll contribute value to the company, do the work much needed, and learn to use the tools he’s been given to do so, and by all this protect his own investment in the company.
In addition, I could under no circumstances spend time arguing about any possible grounds for such accusations, because that would just even further lead focus away from what was important : building a great and durable business. To put it bluntly, I found the accusations ridiculous, but also revealing, in terms of how deep our differences struck in relation to Kaplak. Kaplak is a company and product based on technologies of sharing : open source, wikis, filesharing protocols, copy-paste, widgets which flow from platform to platform and so on and so forth. I couldn’t see my partner representing Kaplak in this sense, and this effectively terminated our business relationship.
It was the final straw in a chain of events which spelled out the need for simplifying things. The board was in effect put out of business, unable to legally enter into agreements on behalf of the association. I resigned as a chairman, although I continued to run Kaplak as a CEO, according to my contract for 2007, but without any certainty that my work would be authorized with a new contract for 2008.
Now I worked without any ownership to what I made. This was clearly intolerable.
One thing was sure. I didn’t want Jesper on the board, and I wasn’t very happy to have him as a partner. But it wasn’t any sufficient solution to simply replace one board member with a new one. The real problem, as I saw it, was that influence was awarded to any member of Kaplak on completely equal terms, regardless of investment or value contribution. As a majority investor, CEO and chairman, I technically had to refer to the board, i.e. myself and my partners, even though I owned much more of the company, than my two companions.
This in effect undermined any motivation for further investments in the company by members, as well as for inviting others to join the circle. This also undermined the authority and leadership of the association. Why invest in something you couldn’t be sure (theoretically) wouldn’t be led by a completely different group of people after the next general assembly? Why respect leadership among ‘equal visionaries’? Why work for and respect an assocation which claimed ownership to the company and it’s values, but wasn’t capable of delivering the ressources, it was created to facilitate?
Something needed to be done about this. If we kept going without abiding by the formalities of the association, we would just undermine the authority of the organisation even further, and risk undermining the entire project. We could try to get a stand-in for our board, to sign documents which would subsequently have to be approved by our general assembly. We could change the rules and demand cash investments from all members, in the hope that this would lead to a more responsible board of investors, who would be more careful about protecting their own investments. In other words, we could patch up things a bit and try to keep going until we acquired more members and investments – or until we were fed up with working for nothing, while our business suffered.
Or we could realize that something was wrong with our choice of organisation, at least at this level of Kaplak’s development. We could abolish it altogether, in spite of fears that it might not be very pleasant.
The association was designed to be difficult to abolish, and dissolving it meant to deprive present members of formal influence on the project, and carry over investments and agreements to a new company. As it was, I was the majority investor and only investor of capital so far, but this didn’t provide me with any special influence in the association, where the highest authority remained the general assembly. Two extraordinary general assemblies were needed to dissolve the association, each called with 14 days notice.
The first assembly took place February 21st, which was in effect an ultimatum to all members. To be square : put money on the table or lose influence – or alternatively, abolish the association. An ultimatum may not be the best road for dialogue, but I wanted to make sure the seriousness of the situation was manifest, and that this could not be sweettalked away. I also made it clear, that if we weren’t capable of electing a new board at this assembly, I wanted to dissolve the association. This in effect meant, that we needed at least one new member to sign up before or at the assembly, which made it hard to resist laying down the organisation.
I was the only attendee, which I took as another testimony to the malfunction of the organisation and as a time to wake up to the fact that I had chosen the wrong business partners.
On the other hand, it made things very easy. The association was formally dissolved at a second general assembly on March 10th.
The rebirth of Kaplak
Thus, we abandoned the association in favor of a regular for-profit business, which is the best thing that could happen for Kaplak. There is a re-established clarity of ownership and leadership, which is capable of reinstating confidence in the company. We can begin building income streams and develop Kaplak v1. We’ll do this by selling complementary products, i.e. products which complements Kaplak v1 and attracts the same kind of customers, i.e. somewhat web-savvy niche producers, who knows that they need to get out there with their product, but still has to find the best, precise, low-cost method and tools of achieving this.
To begin with Kaplak will be listed as a private single-person company. Under Danish law, there’s no capital requirements for this type of company. The new company honors the spirit of all agreements entered into by the association, with the exception, that A-shares will only be given to investors who invest a cash amount of a certain level in the company. Mikkel continues to be our hosting partner. As before, warrants will be effective when the company agrees to list as a private limited liability company (anpartsselskab), which requires a substantively larger amount of capital.
We’re also increasingly facing a choice concerning our communications strategy, which this blog post goes to prove. Open business and open communications is not just something you do when everything is running smoothly and there are nice things to report. If there’s something I hate it’s the superficial niceness of startups with only positive stories. This is not something which establishes confidence in my book.
In Kaplak we need to re-orient ourselves at a much more radical level of public openness. It may hurt our chances with certain investors, but then it’ll win us others who understand how we want to do business. The clear argument is that an open system can operate faster (no passwords to remember everywhere), grow bigger, be much more visible online, and invite readers as well as input to the company, at all levels of our activities.
If we want to attract the right people, we need to show a considerable openness concerning our challenges and problems too. And if we want to grow this market we’re in, we need to be daring enough to help others, who will also be our competitors. Because competition is a good thing. It helps you stay on your toes, and it sharpens ideas and business models. And if there’s something we need, it’s this. Smart people, capable of breeding and nurturing sharp ideas and business models.
I’m getting increasingly pissed off by this message, which appears every time I want to add someone as a connection using LinkedIn :
