Rising Taxes

EU citizens are well aware of the financial stress the Euro is in. There are many factors that can be pointed as causes to this situation, ranging from the still ongoing financial crisis to the speculation against the euro to a fundamental breakdown of the EU Dream as pointed by Gideon Rachman in this FT article.

Hit particularly hard are, obviously, the less prepared countries such as the now famous PIIGS, of which I belong the the P. I am certainly not the one to judge the analist that, in the coziness of his office came up with such brilliant acronym but I am certain one or two fancy acronyms could be made with the name of his employer.

Anyway, it is now a reality that EU countries had to react with severe austerity measures to balance their finances as a result of diminishing revenues and same or increasing expenditure budgets. In the case of Portugal such deficit skyrocketed from less than 3% to more than 9%. In simple words this means that the Portuguese Republic is spending 109 Euros per each 100 it generates.

Putting all financial “sophistications” aside there are only  three things that can be to correct this problem of spending more than what is earned:

1 – Cheat. Well this didn’t quite worked out for  Enron in 2002, all the financial banks and institutions in 2008 and Greece in 2010. So this is a no go solution.

2 – Sell more stuff.  This would be the ideal solution. But where are the buyers for what EU in general and Portugal in particular have to sell? I keep asking this question to everyone I know? What does a country like Portugal produce? What is the structure of Portugal’s export balance sheet? Holidays? Maybe.  Cork (not really at only ±450 Million Eur per year accounting for less than 0.25% of Portuguese Exports). I will write a post in this matter. Well, at least for the time being and to have immediate effect this seems very hard to implement and there are structural changes that need to occur. There are many novel initiatives in this matter with Portugal being a leader in renewable energies (EDP Renováveis is the worlds third largest renewable energy operator, with the largest being Iberdrola, a Spanish company.what a coincidence being the two countries under pressure and part of the PIIGS acronym). My company FeedZai is also taking a part in this opportunity.

3 – Reduce expenses. This seems to me the most effective short term measure that can be taken. In my simple life, whenever money is short I simply stop expenditure of more frivolous items. As simple as that.

Now, countries and companies in all their “infinite wisdom” have many other tools at their hands such as borrowing as if there was no tomorrow or simply raising taxes on their citizens but these fundamentally just delay the structural imbalance. Countries like the PIIGS did just that, first they borrowed more money than what they could generate and since international markets told them that the party was about to end (i.e. no more cheap loans) these countries had to go the second way, i.e. raise taxes on their citizens as the only way to boost revenue. If the first was wrong the second was the only option since there are simply no buyers for what these countries produce.

So, for the time being I am willing to sacrifice and dully pay my increased taxes as I believe this is the only possible short term shock. However, what I cannot accept is that I have to pay more taxes for the problems created by those that borrowed too much and produced too little. From now on, I have made a resolution to denounce and confront all those that complain about their salaries and ask credit to buy the newest TV, all those that complain about their low salary and do not abdicate their two hour lunch every day, all those that complain about their salary and have the latest fashion clothing, all those that complain about their salary and don’t want to work extra to guide the PIIGS our of the swamp their are in…

What about you? What do you think?

FeedZai@Ovo de Colombo from feedzai on Vimeo.

High performance teams

Team performance stages

The difference between top performing team and a so-so team are appalling.

Saying this is quite easy and one can read about it in the literature (see Wikipedia article).

However building a team and ensuring that this happens is quite a challenge and it is a lot more related to the personalities of the team members and team leaders than it is to simply applying a formula or recipe.

My team at FeedZai is now performing as a fine tuned machine and the results it delivers are simply impressive. I leave you with a video of the surprise they have made to me on Friday.

Reading of the week

Word of Mouth Marketing

The reading of the week goes to Word Of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz.

For someone building a company from scratch, as I am with Feedzai,  where resources are scarce this is the main if not only source of advertising you have at your disposal.The holy grail of marketing is that your users/customers act as your main source of publicity and that they tell their friends or customers/partners how great you and whatever your are selling are.

If you are in the same situation go and read the book as there are many easy to use techniques that you can apply the next day.

Pile of books

While I await for my ipad to arrive from its world wide tour event (San Francisco to Sidney to London to Lisbon) I have to resort to reading hard copies versions of books. Below is a short list for this week, courtesy of LQ, @loic (from Seesmic) and the 451group @caos.

- If you are out there raising money better read this Harvard Business Review article as it gives you some insight into how VC´s reason. How Venture Capitalists Evaluate Potential Venture Opportunities

- Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us - Seth Godin

- Trust Agents by Chris Brogan

- Engage! by Brian Solis

- Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson of 37 Signals

On the Open Source front reading, the following reads are quite interesting:

I have left Frankfurt and went back to Portugal ± 2 months ago. Before leaving the European Space Agency I was supposed to present one of my last projects, a semantic search engine that we built using a bunch of open source software. However due to the launch of the Cryosat satellite all presentations rooms were booked for media events and we decided to postpone it and that I would come back to present it. 

A date was finally set for Friday 16th April. On Thursday 15th a small volcano in Iceland becomes active and launches a bunch of Ash into the atmosphere that spreads all over Europe. While at the Lisbon airport I saw this strange event of flight after flight being cancelled to Northern Europe destinations (London, Copenhagen, Brussels, Oslo, etc, etc), however Frankfurt stayed open and I boarded my flight with my friend and partner Paulo Marques.

After a three hour flight we arrive in Franfkurt and since we had nod slept much in the previous night I start ranting on how inefficient flights and airports were. I end up the discussion stating that I would just want to open a door to any destination I would want to be, i.e. open a door and be in New York, open a door and be in London, you get the picture…

Barely did I knew that three days later I would still be in Frankfurt with no chance of going back to Portugal by plane and that my only option is to take a 30 hour bus from Frankfurt to Lisbon.

Anyway, as my girlfriend says. What we cannot solve is by definition solved, I decided to take it easy and enjoy the a very sunny day (CLEAR SKY..NO CLOUDS) in Frankfurt..

Frankfurt Main sunny sky..

Tomorrow will be another day..on the road…the way it used to be before highly inefficient planes came along..

As most of you already know I am now leading FeedZai, a company trying to enable you to see your world in real time, with you being a business or an individual.

At FeedZai, we enable business of all sizes to know what is going on at all times and react in real time when things do not exactly behave as expected.

We have some pretty disruptive technology that we will make public in the near future, however until then we are keeping everything wrapped inside  the blankets of secrecy.

We will also work in the area of visualization and how can these massive amounts of data be plotted and consumed by users.

There are some examples out there that I simply love.  Just take a look at the below video that shows the plotting using an heat map approach of all the traffic in the city of Lisbon. This has been done by Pedro Cruz who is not affiliated with FeedZai.

Traffic in Lisbon – emphasis on sluggish areas from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.