The miracles of technology obviously don’t protect us from human
stupidity, in this case my stupidity, as I wrote a world-changing,
potentially literature-nobel-prize-winning blog-entry the day before
yesterday but stupidly copied some other mail correspondence in the
file and so this cute blog entry will be lost forever, and I don’t
remember what I wrote exactly.
PetsiAttack!!
Probably I was still raving about our first petsicon core team
photoshoot with our new friend Daisuke Nikaido, a Japanese
photographer who put up his tents here in Berlin recently to get a fresh
perspective and refine his super-photographing-skills as you can see on
our team pictures. Here a small sample:
It was a lot of fun for the four of us, especially with our Duisburg-
petsi Calle, who we can only meet every couple of weeks but who’s in
constant skype-conference reach and,as I mentioned in the last post,
still manages to do a great job.
Later we went to the best pizza place in town (some in the team say
second best) Il casolare, the rustic italian pizzeria run and founded
by Italian punk-musicians, to have our first petsicon company dinner!
(The three-star-michelin restaurants will have to wait until we
actually MAKE some money 
)
Furthermore our long lost brother, Andreas Mertin, our UK vet who we
had lost contact to for a few months while he explored the UK
veterinarian wilderness, must have smelled our reunion and surprisingly
also showed up in Berlin and joined our first petsicon party which
(unfortunately?) didn’t last as long as those parties that we had
when we young (that means when we started studying)
I could never have imagined that I would rather go to bed not too late
to be able to get up the next morning and work, but I’m happy to have
found something that is worth it.
We were also asked recently who we later want to sell our business to.
The answer of course is: “To NOONE!!!” (Yes, we know, that’s not
something potential investors and venture capitalists want to hear)
At least that’s our wish, what the harsh reality might bring we don’t
know and we’re also pragmatic and don’t see that as a dogma.
So I guess the core team is of the same opinion about petsicon
as Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his famous lost-love-quote:
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
We love you petsicon and we’ll make sure never to lose you
So this is what happened this week:
I was criticized for my writing style being “too American” (meaning
too enthusiastic) and one guy even wrote that our description of
the petsies on the team page (“the petsies are working hard to create
the best pet health site on the internet”) made him want to puke.
I therefore want to clarify one thing:
This IS NOT some kind of fake blog where marketing specialists come
up with polished sentences that sound good!
This IS genuinely HOW I FEEL!!! And EVERY SENTENCE is meant that way!!
And I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE for that, and will always defend our team
from unfair insults! It seems to be a German thing to want to discourage
ambitious thinking and look down on the maybe naive enthusiasm and
power of people like us.
That is why NOT A SINGLE MAJOR INTERNET COMPANY is from
Germany (don’t get me wrong, we have great internet companies here
but nothing that could compare to companies like Google, Facebook, ebay
or amazon) because we have to hear shit like that every single day and
I can imagine that a lot of people crack under that pressure and simply
give up their dreams to pick up regular jobs or worse, don’t even try
to go for their dreams.
We have the goal to create the best company on the planet (doesn’t
mean most profitable but that would be nice too) and are doing
everything possible to make this dream become reality and will not
stop to communicate this whether everybody likes it or not!
And this is also how I feel, and this obviously is not the standard
mushy marketing-guys-talk, but one of the core values that we try to
establish in this company is honesty.
I want people to be authentic and honest with their opinions and
we see that as a categorical imperative in the sense of Kant so that means
we don’t stop with that philosophy on our doorstep just because I am
afraid that it might not be liked by the world, we want this to become
a universal principle, but we start by implementing it in our company!!
We are very happy about all kinds of constructive criticism and are
all eager and willing to learn but don’t mistake kindness and enthusiasm
with weakness and naivety.
So I want to end this post with a quote from “Pulp fiction”, one of my
favorite movies:
“And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious
anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.”
Let’s hope that that won’t be necessary
This week we had the pleasure to welcome two new
members to our petsifamily! A new veterinarian
and a new marketing specialist/lobbyist.
It is overwhelming and I am very proud about how our
petsies are willing to put their free time and effort
into our project, so I guess we are like Berlin,
the city petsicon is located at the moment, whose
motto is “poor but sexy” .
Further refinements to the flex-frontend have been
made, that means it now is with English content and has
a beauti- and simplified interface, and we’ve switched our
server from tomcat to jboss to prepare for the masses that
we expect (or hope for) someday 
