Meer poëzie
Not on my own
Posted by Rene Jansen
I started to share my thoughts with friends. Lot's of them recognised that they spend hours and hours a day behind their e-mail program, and yes, they all had thoughts about improving their current tools (most of them use Outlook). It was just a few weeks later that I bumped into an old mate, let's call him David, who happened to have his own ICT company. I told him about my thoughts, and he was pretty enthusiastic about it. Let's work on this together! Once in the office, I used to work for Capgemini those days, I shared my thoughts with some colleagues as well. One of them, let's call him Marcus, was already a sparring partner for me for years. We worked together on several projects over the years, and Marcus happens to be one of the best usability and interface designers I have met so far. So, that would make a perfect trio together: having the ICT and business knowledge from Dave, Marcus for the design of the software, and myself for the main concept, business and marketing stuff. Since we all still had a full (or more than full) daytime job, and were based in different locations (I used to live in Brussels those days) we met several times in the evening hours. We ate a lot of Chinese and Pizza to discuss if we would really like to start a company around our thoughts. Looking back, those days were necessary to build our interpersonal trust, but we didn't really make lots of progress yet. It turned out to be pretty difficult to make progress late at night, especially since we were all pretty tired from our busy daytime schedule. Something needed to change...