It is Amazing, is it not

On the beach of Cap d'Antibes

 Today I was sitting at the beach of Cap d'Antibes (that is in France by the way) with our Pajamanation manager of Austria, Markus Schuller.  We joked about the many directions we took with PajamaNation.  It is quite extraordinarily, when you come to think about it, that we still exist!  That is probably the most astonishing fact of our endeavor; we seem to survive against odds.  And while we are debating that we need a better site and better systems, customers come and go, they are not bothered, not even conscious about our problems.  They just post microjobs (which is not easy, believe me, I tried it), they do microjobs for others, they leave their profile, they register.  My God, they have guts and patience!  This is certainly the best proof of our future success, that with such a lousy site and such whimsical management (I target myself here), we grow every day.  Amazing.

But actually we did the same as our customers, while some of us were debating, others worked on it and when the workers stopped and started debating, the debaters started to work and this is the result, let's sum it up.

1.    We have companies with VAT numbers, with shareholders, with bank accounts
2.    We have a great mission statement which makes me feel proud and a good positioning too as Entrepreneurship 2.0.  Open the source code of entrepreneurship to the world (difficult?  Of course this is difficult!  Changing the world has never been easy)
3.    We have 84 trademarks worldwide and a great name (which makes people smile when you say it)
4.    We have more than a hundred second-level domain names in these countries (and for the Spanish-speaking countries we have an alternative name –pyjamanation- because pajama seems to mean masturbation which could trigger the wrong sort of 'microjobs'
5.    We have more than 60 country managers (as Yosi says 33% are doing their best, 33% are doing something and 33% are doing nothing).  Fair enough, that is a reflection of the world as well.  We are human, not superhuman.
6.    We have customers, more every day, hits in more than 50 countries (Venezuela and Kenya on top, which means that we have rescheduled the world as we know it), microjobs from a lot of countries (I have not seen this in any site) and 3000 people who registered and left their profiles.  We even had to pay money back to people who paid mistakenly, how about that!
7.    We have the best architecture in the world (our new system works with catalyst and Mason- not that I really know what this is, but Chris tells me it is the Bentley of programming) and we paid the top guy at Amazon to work that out for us.  We only had him on our payroll for two months, but God that hurt!
8.    We have a great management team who work for free
9.    We have a blog (which I write every day and I love to read it too, it is actually one of my favorites), a wiki, a group on Facebook, several movies on Youtube in two languages; we have been on TV in Portugal and Venezuela and shortly in India (I love the way Ricardo sat their in pajamas, that is the kind of brand we need, it should be in the contract that all our managers have to wear pajamas during interviews)
10.    We have closed great partnerships with www.lulu.com, www.bitwine.com, www.paltrust.com, www.worldlawdirect.com, and some others are in the make
11.    www.Wolframscience.com  has a three-year job for 1000 microworkers for us which will get us global press when our new system is out.  It is a great assignment believe me.
12.    In September we will have our own server farm in Sweden and a series of new contracts made by our lawyers, which will solidify our positions towards licenses and option agreements.

Amazing, is it not, that we sometimes think, that we do not really exist, although even a passing thought, it is a wrong one.  We are changing the world, but our pace could improve.

I would like to end with the lyrical words of a Skype email I got today and it made me think of all of you, so here it is:

When the unexpected happens, it's important to remember the people who stuck behind us and whose loyalty humbled us.  I want to thank everyone for their support, patience and being part of the Skype community.  And for those of you who missed out on using Skype last week - I want to especially thank you as well.