In English
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
Last week I went back to Denmark for the first time since we moved to Prague. It was great to be back and I got to see some friends and my closest family which was really nice. But I realized that as long I have Denmark within decent reach and can go back when I want I don’t need to live in Denmark right now. And now I’m back home in Prague.
Denmark had also just entered the election frenzy when I got back which was good because I got to put in my vote before leaving the country again. I’ve been following the coverage in the media but it has been a lot of meta-spin and personal attacks rather than political debates that’s been filling the papers.
I’ll be going home again for Christmas on December 23rd and I’m really glad I’m missing out on the Danish retailers Christmas hype.
9. november 2007 kl. 16:25
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
Moving to a new place can be a bit scary because you might not have any friends – here is how we did it in Prague.
I just sent invites to our house warming party. It’s now almost 5 months since we moved here – so about time. I sent to invite to about 35 people that we consider friends. When we moved to Prague we didn’t know anyone, so it’s been an interesting exercise in building a network from the ground up.
Virtual networks
I didn’t use Facebook before I moved to Prague, but otherwise that would be a good place to ask your network if they know anyone who knows anyone. Same goes for LinkedIn. I’ve also joined Meetup and CouchSurfers Prague but I’ve been to busy to go to any of those events.
Blogosphere
By coincidence someone in Slovakia found my blog and that let to the first local friend we made in Prague. Later I also used blogbot and Overskrift to find other Danish bloggers in Prague.
Student Organizations
I had been a volunteer in Erasmus Student Network (ESN) in Aalborg while in university and when I went to US for a trainee-ship I went with IAESTE. These are both international student run organizations that has local chapters at a lot of universities across the world. One of the first things I tried to do when I knew I was going to Prague was to get on the two organizations mailling lists in Prague. It wasn’t easy and it took some work to find the right people to ask but eventually I got on both lists. ESN was inactive during the summer so it was through IAESTE we got the most contacts. A lot of the people we met were trainees that has left the city again but a few has continued in real jobs. With the trainees we did a lot of trips inside of Czech.
Professional Networks
We went to a tech conference in Ostrava in the east of Czech Republic. Here we met a couple of people having companies like our own designing and building software.
Expat circles
There is a lot of foreigners – or expatriates – living in Prague. And for many of them the situation is the same as ours, they don’t know many people when they moved here. So naturally expats are more willing to make new friends than local people who have old friends and family they are spending time with. At the same time it is my experience that expats are very outgoing so there is always a party or an event to go to.
Once you have met one expat you are bound to meet more. Someone will organize a dinner or party and then you talk to a couple of new faces and suddenly you have three new friends that invite you to other events. It really becomes a network of friends of friends (of friends). When you ask another expat ’so how do you know Judy?’ it is usually a chain of friends’ friends that has led to the connection.
Sports/interest clubs
We have joined two different football teams one of them just a play-for-fun team and a another that plays in the Czech football league system.
Unfortunately most of our circle of friends are non-Czechs but all in all there hasn’t been a quite weekend since we moved to Prague and we keep meeting new people.
Also read the blog post by Kelvin from the Philippines about How To Network Without Really Trying.
[tags] networking, networks, travelling, building network, prague, expats [/tags]
24. oktober 2007 kl. 11:46
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
I came across an interesting post and set of photo’s the other day and I just had had one of these moments during work (http://positivesharing.com/2007/10/heres-what-happiness-at-work-looks-like/), were I accomplished true happiness with my job.
Regardless of what avenue you work in in your daily life, the feeling of accomplishing a difficult and challenging task cant help but bring a smile to your face.
[tags]happiness, work, job satisfaction[/tags]
3. oktober 2007 kl. 10:18
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
There has been a couple of interesting blog posts in my feeds lately that I wanted to write about but now I’ll role them all into one post so I can get them out of my system…
First there was Rasmus talking about making the Creative Choice [his post is in Danish] to be an artist and going for the dream rather than the “safe” job. Inspiring reading.
Next was Pelle’s entertaining blog post about Why Globalization wont make everything the same. There is no doubt that we are living in a world that is getting continually smaller but that doesn’t mean that everything will be the same. Yesterday we were invited to a dinner here in Prague by two Germans and a Vietnamese and we had some really good food – the the balut is probably not going to make it into Danish cooking soon.
The last post came today from Ryan about the Reactions to him starting a company. It is always good fun to tell other people about our business and the questions that produces.
24. september 2007 kl. 12:54
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
So we’ve already been in Prague for 3 months so why not try and make some kind of status of what it’s been like.
Cost of Living
Cost was one of the primary reasons why we moved to Prague. Copenhagen is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in so the first target is easily acquired. Prague is not super cheap, but it’s still a good deal when we are bringing money earned in Denmark. A rough estimate is that our money lasts one quarter to a third longer here when we consider rent, food, clothes and socializing. The quality and selection of supermarkets, restaurants etc. in Prague is just as good (if not better) than what you get in Copenhagen.
In a later post I will write more specific about what we pay here.
Social relations
We have used a number of different channels to meet other people and make new friends. As a blogger the first thing I looked for were Danes blogging from Prague and I found a couple. We went to an industry conference were we met a lot of Czech people we still keep in touch with. We used the virtual networks of CouchSurfing and Hospitality Club to meet other expats in town. The network we’ve used the most so far has been the student organization IAESTE that was the organization that brought us to US and we’ve stayed in touch with since.
Adventures
Another of the primary reasons for moving to Prague was simple for the adventure of living in a foreign country. And The Czech Republic has been good to us in terms of adventures. As mentioned above we’ve made a good circle of friends so every other week night and almost every weekend there are social activities or trips to attend. Go to my private blog if you want to read more about our adventures.
Running the company
Our company is still registered in Denmark so it’s still Danish VAT and tax we are messing around with. It’s not an enjoyable task at all but when it’s put into system skat.dk and other sites makes it easy to sit far away from Denmark and do the books.
We haven’t ventured into setting up a Czech branch or company and will not do that either. From what we hear there is a lot of red tape especially when you are not fluent at speaking Czech. Likewise we haven’t tried to work out if it would make more sense for us to pay Czech income taxes instead of Danish. In a not so distant future we will probably be setting up a limited company in UK in order to move more of our international work into that company.
Costumer relations
We still have the Danish cell phone numbers we used in Denmark so I don’t think all of our clients know that we are actually sitting in Prague rather that somewhere in Denmark. To our established costumers most of our interaction has been over the phone anyway so that hasn’t really changed. Other clients have been from UK, Germany and USA and all communication has been through Skype, IM and email so that hasn’t changed either.
Extending our stay
The first plan with our Prague stay was to stay here for six months and then go back to Copenhagen or try a stint somewhere else. But we’ve come to like Prague in our short say so far, so we just extended our plans to span a total of 12 months. That will give us enough time to focus on the project we are running now and really get to know the city.
[tags]status, prague, entrepreneur, startup, bootstrapping [/tags]
14. september 2007 kl. 13:11
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
So after a few weeks in Hawaii with good friends and a couple of weeks back in Prague recouping from the trip we are now slowly starting to get back to the full swing work.
Autumn has started in Prague and today it’s cold, rainy and windy. But it’s also good to be home in Prague with fond memories of a great summer.
11. september 2007 kl. 14:22
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
Today our company celebrates it’s 11th months anniversary – hurray!
When we started almost a year ago, we tried to formulate some goals we could put into our business plan. When you are all green it’s quite difficult to put some figures on how much money you expect to make in the next six to twelve months. So we did a backwards calculation – were do we want to be in a year?
Asking ourselves that question we came up with two very specific goals we could target.
Goal #1: Stay alive for six months
We were more or less both broke when we started the company and didn’t want to take a loan to get things going. So our first goal became to be able to pay for rent, food and partying the first six months of our company’s life. I was pretty sure that we would be down and out by six months down the line but on the contrary we got jobs coming in and were having fun in Copenhagen while making a decent living.
Goal #2: A trip to Hawaii
Fernando, one of our friends who was in Michigan same time as us, got a job as an engineer in Hawaii after he graduated last year. We made it our second goal to be able to afford travelling to Hawaii and visit Fernando. About three months ago we had a good contract that gave us enough stability and income to be able to buy the tickets for Hawaii. So tomorrow we are starting our journey, flying half way across the world to spend three weeks of vacation on the islands of Hawaii with a couple of friends. The picture above is from the beautiful Na Pali coast were we will be trekking for four days.
We need to come up with our next goals but more on that when we get home.
Life is good!
Update: Define Success is a blog post by Rick Turoczy of More Than a Living of how to clarify goals. It rings nicely with how we defined our goals.
[tags]goal, setting goals, entrepreneurship, travel, vacation, startup, company[/tags]
1. august 2007 kl. 09:47
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
I came across a post at www.baekdal.com a few days ago and it struck a perfect cord with me, as we had recently gone through the same situation with a previous US based client coming back with a proposal for further work.
“…my prices has gone through the roof ever since George W. Bush decided to see if he could bankrupt a country.” -The US Economy is killing me
A lot of work in our industry is typically generated in the US and historically the US has been a major player when it comes to outsourcing IT jobs to Europe and Asian countries at much cheaper rates. The ironic situation now is that due to the current economic situation in the US it can now be cheaper for companies in European countries such as Denmark to outsource work to the US as opposed to get local talent for the job. Unfortunately that also results in Danish prices being perceived as extremely high when dealing with US companies. Our usual price estimate (project dependant) of 800Dkk per hour is now the equivalent of nearly $150 p/h, hence we’ve effectively increased our price by nearly 10% in the last year in the US without actually changing our price at all!!
[tags]US, Economy, USA, Rates[/tags]
23. juli 2007 kl. 19:50
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
Pelle Braendgaard has on his blog Stakes Ventures just made a blog post about Danish Entrepreneurship and some of the challenges the Scandinavian mindset poses to us Scandinavians.
“The entrepreneurial tradition thing is a sad thing. In 1988 when various business associations in Denmark needed young Danish entrepreneurs to send to various EU conferences, I was the only person they could find. Yes I knew several others, but it really was not a common thing to be an entrepreneur in the 80s in Denmark. I can see people of my generation are really scared of the idea of entrepreneurship.
However as I mentioned at the talk, I think computers, games, mobiles and the Internet has had a big impact of the generations coming after mine. Dane’s in the 20s are a lot more open to the idea of setting up shop than my generation. I can only assume this trend will grow. From the Copenhagen.rb meetings I can see that there is a definite change in the mindset of people.”
- Stakes Ventures: Silicon Vikings talk on Danish Entrepreneurship
I think Pelle is right that Danes in our generation (people in their 20s) are more willing to try for themselves as opposed to solely being an employee. When Femi came to Denmark from UK he said he was surprised to see that there was a lot of my friends and people in general who at some point had their own small company. We do however still have a lot to learn from the Americans on being bold and thinking bigger.
Where Pelle mentions some of the constraints of setting up and operating a company in Denmark as a stumbling block – I would emphasis the flexibility of the Danish system as a contributing factor to why I created astartup instead of becoming an employee.
- I could get unemployment benefits straight out of university while I was growing my company. (The paperwork is a hassle, but at least I got some money for rent)
- Starting a personal partnership (I/S) is super easy. One (1) paper form and you are in business. The disadvantage is that you are fully liable for the company but starting a software company does not involve any big investments so the risk is not big in my case.
- The economy is strong and there is a shortage of people in IT. Even though this might change for now it has been an assurance for me that if everything fails in my business it is easy to go out and get a job.
- There are a number of governmental institutions and non-profit networks emerging focused on startups and entrepreneurship.
To me the threshold to get started in Denmark is very low. It is when the company is starting to mature and money is starting to roll in that the problems occur. Changing to a limited company and the huge taxation that follows will then be a major issue. My perspective on this mater is further enhanced from Femi’s experience in the UK, where his perception is that the threshold of starting a small company requires significantly more work, whereas the benefits outshine those of the danish equivalent once established and money begins to flow.
2. juli 2007 kl. 10:00
Skrevet af Femi og Michael
If a high school kid asked me for an advice today for how to get through university, it would be to start a company while studying.
While Danish universities provide some hands on experience and real-life collaboration there is a lot of things that can’t be taught in school.
During my studies in computer science and communication I think about 10-20% of my year started their own company (mostly as sole proprietors). It was easy to start and pretty easy to find costumers who wanted something done with IT. I started two companies while studying one by myself and another one with 4 of my friends. None of the companies were a huge success but I learned how to do the books and the experience I gained made me confident that starting a company for a living would be doable.
Most of the people who started companies shut them down when they graduated and got ‘real jobs’ but as far as I know there are now four people living the life as entrepreneurs from my year.
My years in university have taught me a lot and I don’t regret it. But you shouldn’t go to college just to get a degree. Mike Glanz wrote a post about how all he learned in college was how to ‘work the system’.
“If I had taken Guy’s advice and learned how to make money instead of being an employee. If I had just found Seth’s blog when he started it… I’m not saying all college is a total waste. I am saying that my university was a total waste for me.
Let me break that down.
I went to college to get a degree. My parents told me a degree was “something to fall back on”, it was “security”, and it would “prepare me for the real world”. In reality it took away my preparedness. I’m a surviving kinda guy. I needed to pass college so I did it the best way possible: find out what the teachers wanted and gave it to them. Within a year I wasn’t trying… I graduated top 10 in my class because I was the best at giving the teachers what they wanted… not because I paid attention to anything they said.”
[tags]startingcompany, college, university, entrepreneur, advice, [/tags]
17. maj 2007 kl. 14:50
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