Tiago Costa

23 March 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Living in the fast lane

In the last couple of weeks a lot has happened:
– a long waited four legged friend finally joined the family (welcome!);
– lots of new and challenging projects @ WayNext;
– the evaluation and green light to a new small enterpreneurial endeavor;
– finishing the classes I was teaching @ Restart (evaluations and paperwork);
– dealing with a running knee injury – still under evaluation (fear :-))

I have really been living in the fast lane. Time is as limited as ever and that is why I have not been posting here, althought I have a couple of drafts waiting to be finished, specially the one about Barcelona’s Marathon, coming soon, I hope.

3 March 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Great read on VC, investors and the likes

“If you’re an investor, care. Really care. Don’t forget the blood, sweat and tears that we shed every day to make this happen. To you we’re just one investment. To us, this is everything.

If you’re an entrepreneur, don’t take money from investors who treat you like a pawn. You aren’t a toy for them to play with. This means the world to you — literally. They need to respect and appreciate that.”

Read @ http://www.founderdiaries.com/2011/03/when-investors-treat-us-like-toys/

20 February 2011
by Tiago Costa
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More on work/life balance

I just watched this very interesting point of view on work life balance on TED Talks.

If you are in a hurry just watch the video from minute #8 to #10, because it is brilliant.

I believe we, the always-on working class, should give it some thought.

19 February 2011
by Tiago Costa
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My favorite kitesurf wave rider out there

Mitu Monteiro is currently my favorite kitesurf wave rider out there. He is sponsored by F-One and he is from Santa Maria – Sal Island in Cape Vert.

There are really excelent kitesurfers in Sal since they have very good conditions either for learning (with very stable winds on the east coast) or for advanced wave riders. For those, Ponta Preta is *the* spot, with huge perfect waves (2 to 4 meters) although with offshore winds.

Just have a look at Mitu working his magic:

17 February 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Offroad Adventures

Since I can remember I was always a big fan of offroad racing. More than speed like F1, Le Mans or NASCAR, what always kept me really interested were the great offroad adventures like the legendary Camel Trophy, the Rainforest Challenge in Malaysia or more recently the Dakar (or Dakar series).

The thing I like about offroad versus speed, is that you must have a more tactical approach to driving and it seems like you are in a more uncontrolled environment than you are on the race track. The race track always reminds me of the surgery room where most of the things are all tidy and clean, while the offroad brings the unknown into the equation.

If you are too young to remember the Camel Trophy, just have a look at the video below and you will get a sense of what is was about:

Regarding the Dakar I followed at the terrain all the events that recently started out of Lisbon and although the Race Toureg’s or BMW X Raid are certainly great vehicles, the most impressive ones are the trucks.

If you have seen the Kamaz (or any of the other trucks) passing by 10 meters from you on a sandy forest like the ones near Lisbon (Comporta), you surely know how impressive that is. I can only imagine the huge skill needed to keep those 10 ton beast within 4 meter wide track. When it passes you can feel the strong sound of the engine shaking the ground and boy, those trucks are fast.

In this 2011 edition of the Dakar Series in South America, the trucks were almost as fast as the leading cars on some stages and that is quite a feat, considering all things.

I do hope some day I will save enough money to make it at the Africa Race which emulates the old Paris/Dakar course for both professional and amateur teams.

15 February 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Are we born to run?

This is a great story on running by Cristopher McDougall. In this TED Talk he tells us why the human’s started running and comes forward with a theory about the “hunting pack”.

If running means anything to you I’m sure you will want to spare 15 minutes for this video.

Thanks to Marco Gonçalves from bringing it up.

13 February 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Sunday running… bad weather

Today as usual I went for a nice training run in the morning. A few minutes after waking up the weather changed and it started raining with lots of wind (I was already expecting that because I keep tabs on Windguru to plan my kitesurfing sessions ;-))

But unlike kitesurf which can be really dangerous with stormy weather, in running you can at the most get all soaked up to the bones and face some extra effort because of the wind, but that won’t hurt you.

And as they say what doesn’t kill you just makes you stronger so there’s no reason to skip a nice run since I had the time (which is always difficult to find especially for more than 10km run) so I did went and I believe that never I had been so soaked up, because it really rained a lot.

In the end I believe running in this weather brings even more satisfaction and it prepares you to endure a little more effort, which is something I need to go through my first marathon.

Here is a short video from this training run:

I would post the running length and time but my crappy Nokia decided to halt because of all the humidity so I only know I have run for about 2 hours, trying to get in sync with marathon pace which for me is somewhere around 5m40s/km.

5 February 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Recent reading: Rework & Ultramarathon Man

To start I would like to say that I read a lot less than what I would like. I can blame it on 1.000 things, but I won’t because I believe that we must find the time to do the things we really want to.

With that said, I would like to share some thoughts on the best two books I have read in the last 12 months and probably the best in the last couple of years (mainly because I have been reading a lot about investing and that is a completely different story – more on that someday).

Those books are without any doubt Rework written by Jason Fried and David Hansson from 37Signals and Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes. They are about completely different topics (as you might guess); while Rework is all about changing the way you do things while managing your business (or at work), Ultramarathon Man is about endurance running.

I really enjoyed Rework because I review myself a lot in many ideas there and I believe our company success is at least in part due to following some of its principles. Of course we don’t fully embrace all these principles but I know most of them can work, because I have tried them before. In the end I was happy and grateful to find that someone had similar ideas and took the chance to write all of that down. And they have really done that really well because the book is so engaging that it is hard to put it down once you start (I read most of it in 3 hours, the first time I picked it up – thank you Vasco for finding it). All of the book chapters are very short and focused, so every couple of pages they make a case for something. If you haven’t read it yet just read this excerpt and make sure you read it all, it is worth your time and money, even if you don’t run a business but have a work life.

Now the other book tells us the real story of Dean Karnazes, Mr. Ultramarathon Man. More than describing the technical aspects of running (most of those are never mentioned aside from the most trivial), Dean tells us about the amazing feats he has accomplished and how hard it was. The great thing here is that he makes it as real as it gets (you will know that if you have been into long distance running), telling you not only about the glory and satisfaction but also about how he overcomes all obstacles in his way, to hit the road for (!!) 320km straight. I found this book truly inspirational and since I was already very much into running it made me want to accomplish more and that is why I have been training to run Barcelona’s marathon by the beggining of March.

Two very different books but they share the wisdom of pushing you to go beyond your comfort zone and making you a better person at work (more productive and focusing on what really matters) and in sports (challenging you to never give up without a fight).

Some interesting quotes from his book:

– “Struggling and suffering are the essence of a life worth living. If you’re not pushing yourself beyond the comfort zone, if you’re not demanding more from yourself – expanding and learning as you go – you’re choosing a numb existence. You’re denying yourself an extraordinary trip.”

– “Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up. ”

– “You can’t be afraid to fail, but unless you fail, you haven’t pushed hard enough.” – I think this one is so true for running (or any other sports for that matter) as it is for business and life in general!

I will just finish this post with a short story Dean Karnazes tells us in his book:

“In junior high, Karnazes met Bernard Emil Weik II, a track coach who became Karnazes’ mentor and introduced him to the appeal of long-distance running. Weik’s basic running instructions were simple: “Go out hard and finish harder.” Using this motto as a basis, that season Karnazes won the one-mile California State Long-Distance Championship held on the Mt SAC track. At the end of the race, coach Weik commented: “Good work son, how’d it feel?” To this Karnazes replied: “Well, going out hard was the right thing to do. It felt pretty good.” The coach replied: “If it felt good, you didn’t push hard enough. It’s supposed to hurt like hell.” – Source: Wikipedia

Just writing about this make me want to go out and run.

29 January 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Please download yourself a decent a browser!

Running a web agency means I am involved in several web projects. One issue that frequently comes around is what browsers should we generally support .

Our current policy says we should support IE7, Firefox 2/3 and Chrome (or superior versions, for that matter); this is also to say that any user with Safari will most likely have good experience with the website as well.

But sometimes we still get that call “the website you created is all broken” and this rarely happens by other reasons other than the user being stuck with an old browser. The question is why don’t they upgrade (it’s free, you know…)?

And when we talk about old browsers, the picture of one of the worst pieces of software every written and major time consumer for web shops comes to mind. We start recalling all the extra effort that is was some many times put just to try to make it work (usually on the later hours of the night), just because it almost completely fails to support web standards. Yes, you probably already guessed I’m talking about Internet Explorer 6.

The other day I was thinking about how some people still use it, because as I recall this is a rather old version. I digged a little into it just to be sure of its release date and was happy to find that it was back in August 2001 when the first version came out.

Well the thing here is that besides providing a very limited and full of nasty bugs web experience together with its complete uselessness with some “modern” web applications, I suppose most of this same people are no longer wearing some clothes they bought back in 2001 nor are they using the same computer, why would they do it with a web browser which they can just upgrade for free and get an improved modern reality?

When you start counting how many people out there are still stuck with it, I still can’t understand why the numbers are so high. I can see this happening mostly on major corporations where the user is not allowed to install and upgrade his own software.

The thing is I don’t believe their IT personal is all dumb and they most likely have a reason for not upgrading. I have heard from several folks that they can’t upgrade because they still have some old web applications (mostly internal stuff) that won’t work with a decent browser! If this is the case, why don’t they just keep IE6 and install Firefox/Chrome/Safari-whatever on the side, so people can just browse the web normally?

This whole thing can turn into a snow ball, because imagine you now need to develop a brand new web application, sometimes they will just ask you to stick to things that work on that old browser and that is really putting the bar way too low.

Bottom line is that 10 years is probably more than a century for software, so they should just go outside the confort zone, deploy a new browser and fix the old applications so they are not continuing the cycle of poor and outdated web applications.

Updated 01-Fev-2011: an interesting link on this subject (thank you @numian).

24 January 2011
by Tiago Costa
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Sports are key to work/life balance

Finally after almost 3 months with no time to spare I finally had the chance to make a couple of decent runs. Among all the work that needed to be shipped during the weekend and even though wind chill was -4C, I still managed to run a bit more than 20km and squeeze in two very short kitesurf sessions with the guys.

It was impossible to ride for more than 10/15 minutes because of the chilling weather, but it was worth driving there and putting on the wetsuit just to ride for a bit. Yesterday I tried a 7m RRD Obsession and I really enjoyed it compared to my 7.5m F-One Bandit.

Sports really play a major role on my over stressed and overtime work, so it’s always good to find some time to go out and explore. It allowed me to start the week in full power, even if the weekend was not all fun and relax.

Kitesurfing - Lagoa de Albufeira