Remo's Blog

My Friend Mike and two of his friends produced the Baywatch Basel shortmovie and have been featured in 20min today. Congrats to this cool movie!

I recently invested in 6 more Kiva-Entrepreneurs. Now I’m focusing on Loans with repayment terms of less than 12 months to accelerate the reinvestment cycle.

Since February 2007 I have invested in 17 Kiva-Entrepreneurs, and already 6 Loans have been fully repaid. I still believe that Kiva is one of the most-valueble services the web has to offer today and I plan to keep increasing the number of my investments over time.

Recently I listened to this very interesting MBA-Talk with Warren Buffett (there are 10 parts):

• Warren only invests in stuff that he understands
• He doesn’t trade, he invests!
• His main decision making source are Annual Reports
• He only buys at a “good price”
• He only buys things with the intention to hold them forever (no rule without exeption)
• He holds 8% of Coca-Cola and is absolutely certain that the value of Coca-Cola will increase substantially over the next 20 years, i.e. there is no reason to sell
• He only invests in simple business models (beverages, sweets, chewing gums, insurances). If he doesn’t understand the industry, he doesn’t invest. E.g. he doesn’t invest into technology/internet companies.
• He can make a purchase decision in 5-10 minutes. He doesn’t overanalyize companies. He doesn’t negotiate very much. When the price that is offered to him is okay, he buys immediately. When he offers a price, it’s often non-negotiable and he expects very fast decisions.
• He recommends not to listen to stock recommendations. If you do that, you’re playing, and not investing.
• He still lives in the same house he bought as a 25 year old (see also his bio)

Conclusion:
I will definitely read and listen to more stuff of and about Warren! There are some very important lessons to learn!

PS: The article What Warren thinks… is also quite interesting! (via Morten)

Thomas (CEO of Spirofrog) has launched a Startup-Special (worth 1590 EUR):

Alle Unternehmen in der Startup-Phase ( Dauer 2 Jahre ) , erhalten die Möglichkeit, auf Anfrage, kostenlos Stellenanzeigen auf Spirofrog zu schalten, sowie sich mit einem Unternehmensprofil zu präsentieren.

Kontakt: startup@spirofrog.de

If you’re looking for new employees, go for it!

Recently I read this article about Alibaba.com‘s European Market entry. It summarized the very interesting Alibaba.com case:

• Alibaba.com is the largest Chinese B2B Marketplace (matchmaker between buyers and sellers of all kinds of goods, from T-Shirts to Trains or Factories) and rapidly growing worldwide (28M Users)
• In November 2007, Alibaba.com raised $1.7B in an IPO
• Revenue for 2007 was 200M EUR and profit was 87M EUR
• Alibaba.com recently opened an office in Geneva to push the Swiss and European Market Entry