Girl about web.

Twitter has gone slight insane this afternoon when it broke that Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19bn (cash + shares). What a ticket! The biggest deal ever for a venture-capital-backed start-up.

Soon after all the B2B and enterprise folk, me included, started sobbing how unfair it is that enterprise start-ups can't even dream of similar valuations. And wasn't the last big one back in 1999 when Cisco bought Cerent for $6.9 billion?

Can Workdays, Splunks, Palantirs be compared to consumer, spreading like a nasty rash, WhatsApps of today? They can't, obviously, because they make money, and making money is a bad thing it seems. But that's beyond the point and obviously I am joking. Unless...

How do you create a product that people simply can't live without, because nice-to-have is not good enough?

You solve a problem that exists. A shared problem - better than an individual problem – will help you grow quicker.

Or you solve the problem that no one realized they had before, but thanks to you suddenly everyone is like OMG, I just have to post every single picture I ever take because otherwise I will like DIE.

You make your product accessible. Not just user-friendly, but dumb-people friendly. And then some.

You make it universal. Use few words. Or just forget the language altogether. Anyone can play Candy Crush Saga.

Make your shit free. Consider a business model when you’re like 100+ million users in.

When it’s time to make money, ask for very little at a time. $0.99 here and there. SALE! And BUNDLES!

I realize this is a massive simplification altogether, especially points 5 and 6. But either that or you make someone else pay for it. Because efficiency increase and ROI.

So are all the B2B & enterprise start-ups screwed from the outset? Not necessarily, but they have their work cut out for them.

I’ve been fascinated by the ‘c-u-n-t’ phenomenon for a few years now.

This most offensive, most tabooed word in the English language. 'The swear word of swear words'. The first word, as one of my immigrant friends said, that you learn not to say in the USA. The word, when muttered, makes those around you to involuntarily gasp and cover their mouths. The word that I, frankly, enjoy using quite a lot.

Here’s what I know about ‘cunt’. It’s one of the Big Six. The worst words in English that include: cunt, fuck, cock, ass, shit, piss. It may or may not come from the word: cunnus – a womans wyket (Thomas Elyot, Dictionary, 1538) or German kunton. Used to describe female genitalia.

Cunt hasn’t always been an insult. As Melissa Mohr notes in 'Holy Sh*t: a brief history of swearing’, it used to be ‘the most direct word to use when talking about a most immodest subject’. The Romans loved the cunt: Futuitur cunnus pilossus multo melius quam glaber / eadem continet vaporem et eadem verrit mentulam (translation includes: hairy cunt and cock).

In the Middle Ages, cunt was still a pretty ordinary word: ‘direct, to be sure, but not wielding any special power to raise hackles or offend’ says Mohr.

So, what the fuck has happened since?

I don’t think we will ever know for sure, but it seems that the less the great writers of the following few centuries used ‘cunt’ the more obscene it became. There was no cunt in any of the Shakespeare’s works nor in Chaucer’s (he chickened out). The moment Robert Burns called ‘cunt’ – ‘c-t’ in ‘Yon, Yon, Yon, Lassie’ from 1796, cunt as a popular term was truly fucked. I guess if you started beeping out every single instance of ‘banana’ on TV and print it as ‘b*n*n*’ it would eventually take a completely new meaning too.

But what’s unfortunate for cunt is not just its ‘sexual’ connotations - after all hardly anyone raises an eyebrow if you call someone a pussy - but how it sounds. Short, harsh, blunt. We can thank Anglo-Saxons for that.

To me, cunt is a perfectly good, underused word that you should not be afraid of. I understand your reservations – I’m lucky, English is my second language. By the time I muttered my first ‘cunt’, it had a different, non-sexual, meaning for me. I learnt it, as so many other words, in context. It simply meant a person who deserved a good kick in the balls for being an asshole. Or as one of my female friends eloquently puts it: “such a cunt, I want punch her in the cunt’”.

Still offended? As another of my other friends said: “(…) a word has no meaning other than what a culture gives it at a point in time. Why as a woman would you accept that the most offensive word in English right now is a word that means our genitalia? Isn't that more insulting than the word itself?”.

Perhaps, because as Liz Lemon explains in a classic episode of 30 Rock, the word demonstrates a frustrating lingual gender imbalance. “There’s nothing you can call a guy to come back. There is no male equivalent to this word.” (thank you Martin Ericksson for that).

As for the feminists, there’s a movement to reclaim ‘cunt’ in a similar way ‘queer’ and ‘nigger’ had been. Wikipedia mentions that ‘the feminist blog Courageous Cunts makes use of the word to point at skewed genital norms and empower women to appreciate their bodies’.

‘Cunt’ is really not all that bad. Also, because it doubles as a pretty decent term of endearment. In New Zealand, saying that someone is a good cunt is not considered bad at all. Similarly, Scotland has fully embraced it and inspired my LOLcat.

English director Ken Loach got into hot water with BBFC (UK film rating authority) over Sweet Sixteen’s rating: “We were allowed seven cunts… but only two of them could be aggressive cunts." Whilst his scriptwriter, Paul Laverty accused BBFC for obsession with ‘that word’: “ 'You wee cunt' is often a term of endearment," he said. "But (they) transpose it as if it were on a public address system at the Royal Opera. They take it out of context.”

America is catching up too. True Blood, Game of Thrones and Californication featured ‘cunt’. When Samantha from Sex and The City says to Carrie: ‘Oh, I'm gonna miss you, you cunt.’, you feel like you just could live your life like you’re on HBO.

I'm yet to compile my '20 people I truly admire' list. I love lists, me.

For now I'm just going to rejoice in the fact that one of my heroes - Kathy Sierra - is back on the public internet. And she's back with ponies! You can catch her @seriouspony on Twitter and Serious Pony blog.

And if you are lucky enough to be in London in late September, Kathy is speaking at the Mind the Product 2013 conference organized by my friend @bfgmartin. You may need to beg or steal to get your hands on those conference passes though.

Here are two Icelandic beauties as photographed by @seriouspony.

A while ago I've resigned myself to thinking that the whole 'women are equal to men' situation is not going to be resolved in my lifetime. Regardless of how many blog posts I write, or causes I support. It's hopeless. Let's surf.

That doesn't mean I cannot get totally get fucked off when I see the whole 'leaning in' developments going backwards.

Here's a prime example. AdAge's infographic on 'women to watch in advertising'. Lost - for - fucking - words. It appears to me that 'wearing pants' or owning 'fishes' is what matters. I must've missed that memo.

Cerra Buckholz put it best.

FFS

5 years at Huddle. Change is due.

It’s my Huddle birthday this week. It’s been five years since Monday, 18th of February, the day I joined then Huddle.net. I remember that day vividly, because having just got back from Scotland, I discovered some bastard had tried to break into my Ford Fiesta.

Based on the CVs that came my way during that period, I can reliably assess that 5 years is an uncommonly long time to stay in the same company, if you value your career. Start-up or no start-up. Unless of course you’re my mother who has just retired after 42 years of running the regional library. I know, it’s a mystery.

2008-2013, I will always remember you with a mixture of surprise, immense joy and some regret. Whether it had been staying up til 2am to launch Huddle Workspaces on LinkedIn (big deal then, now defunct) or starting to drink Martinis at 11am (and continually drinking for 12 hours non-stop) after some hard decisions had been made. Huddle, it had been real.

Having built a marketing team from zero to a 13-strong hero and taking Huddle from an unknown UK start-up to being a recognizable name in the industry, I feel, like, I paid my dues. But as Melanie Griffith says in Working Girl: If you want to be taken seriously, you need serious hair. And I’ve never been a massive fan of haute coiffure.

So after 5 years at the marketing helm, giving up my seat at the table to our new CMO, Chris Boorman of Informatica and Salesforce fame has been a revelation. You’d think I’m pregnant, judging by the number of people who tell me I’m glowing.

Thanks to Chris’ arrival, I could go back to doing what I truly love: building our brand and telling stories about it. Not to mention picking new colors for the brand color palette and obsessing about Oxford commas.

Accelerate or a midget in a museum

Slow down. Do less. Disconnect. Breathe. Drive slower. Be present.

FUCK IT.

What bloody genius’s idea was it that the older you get, the slower you should live? Do you know what happens when you slow down too much?  You stop and you die.

I got caught speeding once. I drive much slower now, because I’m shitless scared of getting another three points on my licence. The fear of trying new things is less justifiable.

I’m too fat for this. I cannot justify spending so much money. I’m going to look stupid.  I can’t do another 10 reps. I’m waaay too old for this. The paralyzing fear of ridicule, injury and disappointment.

Fuck slowing down. Here’s to accelerating instead.

No complex algorithm required. 30 after 30, 40 after 40… and so forth. By the time I look like a midget with oversized earlobes, I’ll be looking at another 80 new things to try before I wear a pine overcoat.

This post is dedicated to my mother whose reaction to anything new I try is: Why don’t you do something cultural instead like visit a museum? And that’s, my dear boys and girls, because in a museum a midget with oversized earlobes will never look out of place.

Welcome to Fatty Lumpkin!

Welcome to Fatty Lumpkin, a surf ranch.

Release your inner teenager!

Have you ever wanted to:

- Surf in sunny California? - Ride like a cowboy? - Skateboard like Tony Hawk? - Play in a rock band? - Brew your own beer?

If the answer is – yes to any of the above, then our surf ranch is just what you’re looking for.  At Fatty Lumpkin, your teenage dreams come*.

Here, in 1,000 acres of lush green land in San Luis Obispo, California, you will find top notch accommodation, excellent food and a perhaps just a few of those cool activities that you always wanted to try, but ran out of time to in your busy day.

Surfing

Picture this: salt water in your hair and big smile on your face as you stand up on a surfboard for the very first time. Whether you’ve never surfed before or you’d like to try out a few of our local breaks, we have you covered. Take a land lesson with our surf instructor and jump in the Surf Wagon to check out Pismo Beach, just 10 minutes from the ranch. Here amongst the mellow waves, you will discover the joys of surfing. Don’t fear the flat spell. We stock paddleboards too.

Horse riding

We have 30 horses on our ranch, all ready to be saddled-up and ridden into the sunset. If you’ve never ridden before, we’ll teach you how to saddle-up, read the horse, walk and lope. Choose from our morning or evening rides across the neighboring ranches or have some Western fun learning to rope cattle (yes, we have cattle too!), barrel race or play horse ball. Our cowboys will take really good care of you!

Skating

Who said you cannot skate like Tony Hawk? We’ve purpose-built a wooden skate park, with ramps, rails, poles, pipes, platforms and even a pool to prove that you can. We have a selection of boards for you to try on and an instructor to guide you through your first steps or help you improve your dropping in technique. Or grab one of our longboards and go for a ride along a 1-mile long super-smooth path that will take you round the ranch.

Music

There’s no larger pleasure in life than to create something. Or bang on a drum set aimlessly. Whatever rocks your boat, you can try it out in our practice and recording studio. We have a selection of guitars: classical and electric, bass, keyboards, drums and pedals in every color of the rainbow. Take a guitar lesson or jam with your new friends.

Beer

At Fatty Lumpkin, we brew our own IPA(enjoy it at the bar) and we kindly invite you to try your hand at home brewing. You want be able to drink your own beer straight away, but rest assured the bottles will follow you home.  

And of course:

Swimming pool (indoor and outdoor): splash around or learn to dive. Yes, we do serve pina coladas by the pool, with an extra shot of dark rum. Or just proceed straight to our swim up bar.

Sauna: relax after a hard day’s work in a proper Swedish sauna.

Outdoor Jacuzzi: we stole this design from a resort in Stowe, Vermont.  Sip your cocktails under the stars.

Bikram yoga exercise room: not a fan of board sports? Check out our daily yoga session in a heated, 40-degree room. It will leave you re-born.

Mini gym: bikes, rowers, weights, kettle bells, medicine balls and the TRX system. Just ask our resident fitness instructor for a session if you need some help.

Sports massage: once a week, Frieda will calm your tired muscles.

Cowboy poetry: we do readings every other day. Just because we can. And you never heard anything like it.

Cocktail making sessions: we don’t claim to be expert mixologists, but with 125 different spirits and mixers in our bar, there’s a lot of fun to be had. We even have glasses to match.

Entertainment: all cabins are equipped in iPod docks, LED TVs, DVD recorders and satellite television; just pop into our digital video library to grab a movie or have listen to Spotify or SiriusFM.

Wi-Fi: absolutely everywhere. We’re recovering techies.

What about food?

At Fatty Lumpkin, we’re big foodies. We like serious breakfasts, filling lunches and over-the-top dinners. But we understand that not everyone is like us. That’s why we offer you two ‘food tracks’. You can eat healthily during your stay or you can splurge or mix if you like. Rest assured, there’ll be a large selection of food choices awaiting you here, fridges fully stocked with your favorite soda (just help yourself), beers and wine (just don’t get on a horse afterwards!). Sample menus can be found here.

All accommodation, meals, activities, equipment and entertainment are included.

*If you bring your kids along, they may never want to leave. We’d rather you took them back if you though

For Steve

Steve Jobs has died tonight.

W.B. Yeates said:

 It’s been more than three and a half years  since I sat down with Ali (Alastair Mitchell, co-founder and CEO, Huddle) in a hotel bar next to our Southbank House office in London and asked him: “What is it that you want from me?”

These were the early days:  Huddle had just taken its first round of funding and I’d joined as the employee number eight I believe. The boys (Ali and Andy McLoughlin) had just pitched Huddle.net at Demo 2008. Does anyone remember their extraordinary ‘Mr Work and Mr Play’ performance devised by the mighty Erica Lee of StrategicLee?

“Build me a brand like Innocent Drinks,” said Ali.

For those of you hailing from across the pond, Innocent Drinks is an awesome brand (and business) success story. The company was set up by three Cambridge-no-idea-about-juice-making-graduates. The organization  quickly dominated the UK’s previously non-existent smoothie market and it is currently owned (58%) by Coca-Cola.

The smoothies are tasty, the marketing is refreshing and the customer service is exemplary. The founders have  built a strong, family-like internal culture. Innocent Drinks is widely considered a brand legend. As John Simmons, the author of Innocent: Building a brand from nothing but fruit, describes it -  Innocent is one of these brands that we refer to with ‘awe, affection and sometimes envy’.

“No pressure then,” I thought.

Looking back at the last three and a half years, I’m proud of what we’ve achieved.  The product’s awesome: easy to use and genuinely changing the way people work together. Customers love us. Our fellow start-ups respect us and - dare I say it – hold us in awe. We’ve managed to retain the family feel in the company – no need for happy hours to get to know each other. And don’t you just want to hug our logo?

On the business side, how about tripling-every-year growth, taking away a market share from SharePoint, domination across the UK government and a state-of-art lead generation funnel. Innocent Drinks is no Coldplay - it never broke America. But more than half of Huddle’s customers are from North America, we were one of six launch apps on LinkedIn and we built partnerships with HP and InterCall before we even opened our San Francisco office. So far, so good.

But shit happens. You wake up one beautiful morning and find that Google’s launched ‘Huddle’ as one of its Google+ features. Your brand monitoring is screwed. Customers get confused: We thought Huddle was an enterprise tool. You have to politely respond to all the well-wishers congratulating you on being acquired. Inside, you die a little. Not knowing what happens next  and when is excruciating.

Only in the UK: Equity is for punks

My heart leaps with joy every time a mate of mine gets funding. This week was no different when Nick Halstead announced a $6m funding round for DataSift. From a US rather than a UK investor. Nick let it all out in the Wall Street Journal: lower valuations, killing you on terms, risk averse, lesser supportive than the US VCs. Yet again, the European VC scene lost out to the Americans.

Huddle had been lucky. We’ve managed to achieve the perfect balance with two extremely supportive VCs (Eden Ventures and Matrix Partners) from both sides of the pond. Huddle may as well be ‘exceptional’. See what I’ve done here.

But who needs VCs anyway?

Take my all time favorite beverage brand – BrewDog. Set up in April 2007 by two 24-year olds in Scotland of all places, it’s home to the fastest growing alternative beer brand in the UK – Punk IPA. The boys have recently opened the BrewDog craft beer bars in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, the London one in Camden is expected to open this autumn.  But why stop there? The BrewDog beers have been recently spotted in the Bayou bar in Salt Lake City and Hardcore IPA is my cousin’s favorite tipple in New Hampshire.

In all its uniqueness, BrewDog has chosen a unique route to raising funds, which they called, rather uniquely, Equity for Punks. It’s this simple: for £95 you can own 4 shares of BrewDog and become richer with every BrewDog you drink.

It’s not a novel concept. Trampoline Systems pioneered tech ‘crowdfunding’ a while back. But BrewDog had me at their prospectus.

Loads of dough in pizza pie

Last night I got some rather depressing, although not surprising news, that due to ‘significant reductions in public expenditure and continued uncertainty in the outlook for the economy’ plus a few other reasons that I can think of which do not involve ‘outside influences’ I’m $10k out of pocket.

So I decided to boost my mood by listing all the most recent – speculated – valuations in tech.

Facebook - $100bn Groupon – $30bn Zynga – $20bn Dropbox - $10bn Twitter – definitely more than $7bn LinkedIn - $4.3bn Pandora - $4.2bn PopCap (EA acquisition) – $1.5bn

I went to see Bad Religion on Sunday at the HMV Forum in Kentish Town. Gently rocking to Generator and Cyanide, I pondered upon their 30-year anniversary as a band. Can you imagine working for the same company for 30 years? It has been done before, I hear.

Apple’s Chris Espinosa celebrated his 34 years with Steve Jobs just last March. In Swindon, there was a council employee who spent 47 years as a bench operator. No, me neither. My own personal mother refuses to retire having worked in a local library for 40 years.

Here’s one way of looking at it: if you’re happy, why move? If you’ve been lucky enough to land a job in an organization that treats you well, allows you to grow professionally amongst friendly people and keeps you on your toes/offers enough challenge you’d be silly to jump ship. Right?

Throughout my career, I have been extremely lucky. My first paid job was at my father’s publishing company. There I was tasked with translating an anthropological study of Elizabeth Vann of University of Chicago on, amongst other things, how different dialects: German, Silesian and Polish were used by the natives in specific social situations.  I think it’s safe to say that she largely influenced my master thesis: The German minority in Opole Silesia.

My father, then a recovering sociologist (once a sociologist, always a sociologist), had a habit of lending me to his colleagues at the Silesian Institute for a spot of demographic research. I enjoyed that too. Then came the Centre for European Studies where, with a bunch of mates, I completed a piece of research about the challenges of the European Union expansion (Interesy, szanse i zagrożenia a postawy Polaków wobec integracji europejskiej, Galent, M., Kubicki, P., Pasierbinska, Z. i Turyk, E. (w:) Integracja europejska w oczach Polaków (red:) Mach, Z. i Niedźwiecki, D., MCRD, Kraków, 1998, still not on Google Books I’m afraid).

Whilst at Stirling University, I worked in a local pub in Bridge of Allan. If you ever visit the Old Bridge Inn, have a pint of McEwans’ 70/ on me. Happy times.

My longest stint so far had been at Rainier/Rainier PR/Rainier Group/Custard PR/Loewy (never a dull brand day). Seven years, more than 50 brands from hardware, software, mobile, networking, telecoms, electronics, engineering, digital, consumer, you name it. I covered digital valves and DLP technology, mobile advertising and smart fabrics, chips and porn (you must be 18 to click on this link). One day you sit in the wardrobe (as in: The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe) room with Disney, the next you’re talking to Rolls Royce about reducing noise of their plane engines. Building Custard PR as a business in its own right was enormous fun as well.

And even though, I always wanted to work for Google (the day before my first interview the job I was going for was ‘no more’), I cannot help feeling that Huddle and I were meant for each other.

Fast-forward three and a half years. We’re 60-strong, with offices in London and San Francisco. 90,000 customers across 180 countries, and used by more than 60 per cent of the UK central government departments. Not to mention kicking SharePoint’s behind.