A traditional Spanish village instead of Silicon Valley and the launch of a startup

It’s been almost 3 months since my last blog post, a little over two months since my last tweet and no I am still alive. For those who’ve known me or gotten to know me through my writing or tweets quickly realized I was very hyper-connected. I would send dozens of tweets each day and engage in a lot of conversations. So what happened? I moved to a tiny village in the south of Spain where I was the first on my street (without a street name) to get a phone line and hence DSL. Which surprisingly is faster than the DSL I had back in the Netherlands. So what led me to go offline besides the occasional village power cut.

Before I moved I wasn’t planning on staying longer than a month and wanted to start the application for a visa to the US more specifically; Silicon Valley. So what made me trade in the world’s largest start-up hub for a tiny traditional Spanish village. Once I started living here it was as if I had entered a completely different world. It started with waking up and having the skies being blue and the sun shining; if you’ve lived in Holland, UK or similar places where skies are mostly grey, it’s like you emerge out of dark basement you’ve spent most of your life in. The village I live in is built upon a mountain side and is known as a traditional Pueblo Blanco, a village where all the houses are white. What made me stay though isn’t the weather because California might even be sunnier, neither is it the economic crisis luring over the US.

It was the people here that made me stay. A few days after I arrived I came walking down the street and the neighbours were having a family barbecue; without hesitation we were invited and dragged into join. Even with my limited Spanish I had one of the best nights of my life because you could just feel that these people were giving from their hearts. At least 3 times a week Francisco walks by and brings with him fruits and vegetables. He’s not the only one; vinegar, avocado’s, paprika’s, mandarins, so many people here are giving and what makes the difference with Holland and so many places I’ve been to in the world; people here give without even having the thought of expecting anything back. To some it might be a small example but it shows the nature of the people here. A nature you’re lucky to find in a handful of best friends anywhere else in the world.

Throughout my life, especially as I grew older I always said I put no value into material items. I said I did all my actions for myself and not for recognition. I said I wasn’t selfish. I believed all these things until I moved here and started realizing how we all say how we hold to these moral values but they have become words without meaning. Living here allowed me to put meaning back into those words, reflect upon the life I was living and the things I wanted to change. While being here I started reading some of the books recommend to me by commenter’s on this blog amongst which Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the within 6 days finished and now my all time favourite book; The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. A lot of pieces of the puzzle started coming together. It’s hard to put it all into words but to try… I feel like I’ve become a better person then before…less selfish…less materialistic…more myself. And don’t worry, I am still the technology loving self I always was and I haven’t become a hippie either.

About a month ago my entrepreneurial urges started itching again and what had once been a business plan pitched to VC’s and Angels I now made the decision to bootstrap it instead; to write as much code as I could myself, instead of outsourcing it. The purpose of my startup started changing, instead of building the features and design as I would like it. I built something bare bones. A web application which shares a lot in common with many others out there but it has one big difference. It’s going to transform into what users want. Everyone who looks at it sees a different use or direction it could into. I want to engage you into voicing your opinion and together with the other users vote and together built something we will love. I remember Loic le Meur writing about the Community CEO and thinking that would be amazing to be, but let me first build my vision. Instead I am going to try to engage as many people as possible to build our vision. True this is going to be difficult at times, you can never please everyone and you’re asking a lot from a community whose compensation is not monetary. However I believe that there are enough people out there who want to be involved; your opinion matters.

The startup is Tyba and it’s a simple concept: You download a Firefox extension which allows you to rate web pages and append tags (a feature I like is that when you come from Google or Yahoo the search term is automatically sent with your rating). The rating and tagging is simple, done by clicking stars or using keyboard shortcuts. Then when you feel like it you can login in to the web interface and organize the links you’ve rated into groups. These groups become public and anyone can view them. The other Tyba users can follow your groups and you in turn can also follow other people’s groups. When you follow a group you can do two things, see when new links are added to them and you can search through them. It’s a bit like building your own search engine with the links you rate and the groups other people make. Right now all this functionality is there in its most basic form.

Now all I need is users; daring and innovative people who aren’t scared of a private alpha with its bugs and downtime for upgrades, who are willing to give feedback and help decide upon the direction of Tyba. If you this sounds like you, go to Tyba.com and request an invite. I am sending the first 100 invites out tonight.

November 26, 2008 | Filed Under For the Moment, Mini Essays, Startup Updates 

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