Now… I might not be the smartest guy around, but I am a fairly fluent web-user. Probably top 20% in the world. I could not remove this ad from ask.com, there was just no way… and as you can see it LITERALLY made it IMPOSSIBLE to use Alexa...

I tried to click on it, maybe 30 times. Maybe more. But nothing.

Any other good ideas to get rid of it? I already did take a screen-shot and kind of “wiped” the ask-box away using a photo-editor but couldn’t see what’s behind (and it’s hard to use a screen-shot of a web-site. Al Gore has still to invent the offline Internet.)

Please help me out here.

1 AM and I am preparing to go to sleep. As a true Swedish internet entrepreneur, I am in my underwear with my laptop safely distanced from my skin with an IKEA-pillow.  It’s hot in Menlo Park. Not hot like “it’s rocking” (it’s really boring) but rather just plain warm… temperature that is. But not Celsius!

No, to make it even harder for us in the quest for the valley they have chosen an alternative way of describing the world around us. Meters are miles. I think. Temperature is “in the 90s” but I am not in a sauna (back home "in the 90s" is good for one). People weigh like 200…

The only thing I can conclude from all this, the only common denominator, is that you can’t divide or multiply their physical measurements by ten for comparison. 1000 feet are not a mile… they are a really tall guy. At a first glance, the metric-system seems to make more sense, but maybe there is a missing piece I am not getting.

Time is different too. Not only because they don’t use 13-23, but mainly because whenever I prepare to go to bed, everyone else is preparing for their “morning”-jog.

I feel useless in comparison. I have been tired every morning in my life for as long as I can remember, and I see no light in the morning-tiredness-tunnel. And if I did, it would probably be Kafkaesk (a train, a bus?)

People might very well be machines for what I know. I have still to prove it but my suspicions are ever growing stronger. All of them seem to have founded and sold 23 companies… and now they are 21 years old. And they have studied in 5 different Universities (all of which were mentioned in Hollywood-productions I saw as a kid).

They are always happy and positive, keen to learn about new stuff and they master the art of selling themselves. Personal failures, if they exist, are neatly being hidden somewhere... but where? Where do they go to cry? To complain?

When you are busy shaving, they just invented voluntary isolated hair-lessness. When they go to the toilet, they send 5 deal-making e-mails before returning to their cubicle-chair… which is a ball they use to continuously exercise abs.

If indeed they are machines, the greatest invention of all times is right around the corner… as I imagine that future versions will include features like:

Spontaneity

Self-irony

Imperfection

Non-pretentiousness

Sense of (dry European) humor (Id pay extra)

But then again, maybe theyre not. Maybe they are flesh and blood like you and I… and maybe the valley is just a state of mind… a never ending struggle for perfection.

Can I just refuse to be tired tomorrow? Is that how it works? Fundamentalist control over body and mind… and VC-funding will arrive as a Fedexed package?

"Here you go Swedish guy. See? Early-birds are happy campers!"

I will try. I will set the alarm… 9 AM… it’s early for a Monday… but I can do it!

I can be one of them...

... but is it worth it? How does it feel? 

MBAs fist-fighting after a heavy tequila-race? violently (what else) shoving Business Plans down each others throat... but it was nothing like that. We aren't even MBAs.

...but in reality it was a very civilized event. Three panel-debates would decide if we were worthy a membership or not. I didn't like the idea before going there. But the price was worth any possible humiliation to come. I had thought. I was wrong.

The valley struck down on me with great impact, as it told me in other words that I was a crappy CEO. I tried to fake an honest smile when I asked "how so?" but deep down I wanted to destroy. I wanted to jump the table and bite the valley in its throat, spin it around like a crocodile and say:

 "How do you know that after 30 minutes in a room full of weird people staring at us while trying to explain something you´re not even trying to understand? Go flop yourself!" 

I didn't do the Crocodile-thing but I did ask "how so?".

"Well, you can not motivate your employees.. to start with.", the valley said.

At that point I should have defended myself with more attitude. It would have been completely useless but at least my manlyhood would be intact today. Now its torn. Because I didn't.

After a couple of days my confidence (so important in a Start-up) was back were it belonged. We were growing, had a great team, 15 months left in the bank and a business-model that was making more sense every day.

We had taken an idea from a cold place in Europe to Chile to set up development and we had recently installed a HQ in the US. And in less than 6 months we had managed to raise 650K without revenue and not many users at all? in Chile.

So, I thought to myself: I am NOT bad at motivating people.

Little did I know that it would come back and haunt me for weeks to come. People who had appreciated my work for months heard rumors of what the valley had said and told me I was a weak point in the Company.

Meetings to come would be colored by pre-conceived notions of rumors of the opinions of one guy, after one hour of one day in a one year project.

For a while there, I think I hated the valley.

But I had yet to figure out what it was... where it is... and what it had against me.

First time ever in the invisible valley and getting prepared for some mentoring meetings with the so called VCs. The VCs are people and shall not be confused with toilets even though they do cause that same feeling of hesitation and being nervous when you are about to go, the nice relieving feeling when you’re doing it and that pointless wish of never having to go again when you’re done.

Having googled a little bit about “this and that” we had realized that the best entrepreneurs would show up to these meetings in shorts and t-shirts. So we dressed up in costumes and hit the road in our GPS-equipped rental-car... and after re-calculating our way down the winding slopes of La Honda Rd where our “angel” hosted us and after having hesitatively crossed the bridge between Palo Alto and East Palo Alto like 8 times we finally entered the offices of the “friendly VC” RB. On this side of the bridge. The tech-side.

Though just a sand-wedge from East Palo Alto. Shady fund maybe?

He taught us a little bit about pre-money valuation and he said in not so many subtle words that our pre-money valuation contained very few zeroes if any at all and that we should take a hike for a while. As did JG and pretty much everyone else we accidentally bumped into re-calculation our way through the area until we finally went to Vegas a couple of days later. Vegas felt safe. It was sick. But it felt safe.

We decided to come back another business model. It’s not that easy to hide from us. Somewhere, out there, we knew there was a valley to be discovered…

… but we had given up on the great bars.

However, blogging has become an increasingly addicting part of my life and this new blog will give the opportunity to air ideas, opinions and stories that I will no longer share with readers of that other blog. Also, this gives me the liberty of writing pretty much whatever I want... Bla bla bla...

So what will this blog be about? I don't know. But I'm sure it will be fun sometimes, annoying at other (fewer) times and hopefully also interesting from time to time.

I do know what this first entry will cover. My last name. I bought the domain www.hjertonsson.com a couple of weeks ago (still not pointed to this blog, but will be soon). As an internet-entreprenuer with ambitions I had to eventually create my own space in the cloud, and so why not conquer the family-domain at the same time?

Speaking of which, several times a day I am asked one or several of the following questions:

What is your name?

Can you please give me your full name?

How do you pronounce "that"?

Can you please spell it to me?

Again? Slower

Really slow...

So how do you pronounce that in Swedish?

Because obviously neither the Spanish nor the English pronunciation makes sense and people are looking for sense. They expect my name to be sensible. Its not. And its when I am asked to say it in Swedish it gets really ridiculous:

"I cant. I'm from the south of Sweden and we have a dialect and... well... I cant say my own name properly. I guess its something like "jättonson"

But its not and I sometimes wonder if I am one of just a handful in the world who on a daily basis fails to pronounce his own name in three different languages, including mothers tongue. Eg when spelling it over the phone in Spanish there are various sources for misinterpretations. Lets have a look at that:

H - A given

J - Too

E - Normally no problems

R - Cool

T - d?

O - u?

N - m?

S - f?

S - un f?

O - Cmon, you're kidding

N - Again? m?

I will try an analysis:

1) Mathematically

There are 7 possible errors. 2^7 = 1/128. Less than 1% probability of someone actually getting it right the first time. The nature of my life means that I in average need to give my full name away, over the phone, once a day. Give and take a few. So once every 4 months someone would actually get it right without repeatedly double-checking letter by letter until I ask them to read it back to me... and back and forth.

2) Empirically

It has happened once. When I die, if I die and if its what they say its like, I might very well get to experience that moment again as a highlighted moment of optimum communication in my life. Human 2 human understanding at its best. What an outstanding support-rep or secretary or whatever that person must have been.

There are just a few hundred people in the world sharing my last name and I think (and hope for their sake) they all come from Sweden. To collectively spare us from further suffering, I propose a name-change, as a group, for various reasons; Hjertonsson:

1) It obviously doesn't fly in English, key second language for Swedes.

2) Its supposed to be a cool name for only two big families but it still has a son-ending, so who cares. Its like Popuperez, instead of Perez, in Spanish. Or Hjongostewart, instead of Stewart, in English. At the end of the day, its just a fancy-feathered burp with a blue-collar ending.

3) Its too long. In todays world, with more and more people with shorter and shorter attention-span you want a last name, not a last essay.

4) It has (for obvious reasons mentioned above) no stickiness-factor. Networking is important these days, online and offline, and names like "Jim Love" tend to resonate more with the part of our brains that remember stuff.

So I reach out to all us miserable Hjertonssons out there, and I propose we submit a group-filing to the Swedish bureau of silly names (probably down-sizing anyway):

Haj

Oskar Haj. Its short and catchy. It means shark (yeah!) in Swedish and sound like hello in English (and Spanglish)

My logo (in a matter of just a few years, we will all need a personal logo for our online profile) can be a picture of a Shark. Or me surfing on top of a shark.

Simma lugnt

Oskar Haj