Surface of the wind.

21 min readJan 12, 2020

20 lessons for 2020, and beyond.

Rollercoasters.

This year has been incredible! It sucked! It was smooth. It was the hardest. It was a rollercoaster of godly bliss and munching on glass while staring into the void, at the same time.

Horrible losses and setbacks — and we hit 150% of our target for the year at HKEK — and I have less savings than in a while — and we built 2 new companies and 2 organizations — and this was a year of immense disappointment — and of what feels like perhaps best year yet. Go figure.

My last year’s thoughts were titled States of Flow for how promising things seemed. Felt right, but I was so naive there. That’s why there were only three lessons I listed perhaps 🤷‍♂️.

This year taught me a lot more, so you can find more below too. Come wander.

Surface of the wind (apply on back)

To use the ancient metaphor, at times it felt like having all the wind at my back, and then like facing relentless storm ahead, for months at a time. Wind kept changing, spinning, pushing me ahead and then back. Riding a storm for a year, however exciting, can be tiring.

See, when you do wind sports like kitesurfing or sailing, you want to go up-wind to go downwind. Last year had plenty of upwind.

I felt beaten up, mangled and at times a bit lost. And also perhaps grew like not one year before.

Below are my 15+ biggest lessons of 2019. For me. For you. Don’t make my mistakes. Let’s see how we can position ourselves against the weather of 2020, what can be our best Surface of the Wind. Let’s hope for the back, prepare for the face. My lessons from 2019.

You go tell them ❤️.
Flow needs focus. Focus needs focus.
Linear growth done badly needs exponential effort. Linear effort done well makes for exponential growth.
No such thing as multi-tasking.
FU*K *ALLS
Gamble if you dare…
Target profit, not revenue.
Less control brings more contribution.
To give up control two things need to be assured: common framework and alignment.
Cutting costs can increase costs. Respect minimums.
Keep going and you’ll get there.
Expect more disaster.
New cool isn’t manufactured.
A good spreadsheet is worth 10,000 problem solutions.
Dots connect when lines are long enough.
Purpose is friends with karma.
Flights are cheaper on 13th. So you can offset them 3 time over.
…gamble, but take care.
The future of work is here.
Follow your heart, just let the head pick the ride.

Below you will find all about these.

What comes, goes.

I originally drafted this in a car over Christmas trip, to post it before New Year’s eve.

But on the second last day of the year my dear friend, and the mighty warrior who started production discipline at HOO KOO E KOO, put simply, died.

You can’t count a year over before it’s over.

She was diagnosed with cancer just a month before and still worked with us back then, almost daily on calls with me, and then suddenly she is not here, with us. At all.

Yukiko was an incredible beautiful mind, full of energy, smile and advice. She was working towards saving the environment, towards a new life, empowered everyone she met.

I loved Yukiko as a friend. I was lucky to be in touch with her often and had the chance to tell her that. Perhaps that made the loss that much bearable.

2 days ago was her memorial service. We are now planning a lasting environmental action in her name, she she can be remembered forever. I now also feel I can post my lessons of 2019 finally.

My first lesson may be a fat chunk of truism, but we forget it so often, while chasing our dreams and demons:

Lesson 1:
You go tell them ❤️.
Be in touch with those who matter. It’s so important. Reach out to 10 friends right now and start a chat, about anything. Invite them to a dinner, tea or a call. It takes 1 min. You never know what comes for them tomorrow. For any of us. Don’t wait for others to reach you. Call your mom.

This is a long post, dig deep. Or skip to quotes like above, just for the lessons.

Earlier on, my little sisters came to visit in NY this year, which was an upper.

And now to the staple.

HOO KOO E KOO

If you read any of my past posts you’re probably familiar with my company HOO KOO E KOO, formerly a “Digital Product Studio” and now — a Future Studio.

This year we changed the way we describe it as HKEK has started offering design of physical products, then a lot of product strategy, then also brand and communication strategy, then overall deeper strategy and before we knew it we were much more than a “product studio”. We focused heavily on projects that build a better future for people & the planet.

We reached our revenue goal for 2019 by April already! So we upped the goal by 50% and started feeling a bit cocky and also devoted 20% of all our resources towards non-profit projects and organizations. This way we helped create a coral planting organization and built a platform to immutably certify education for displaced refugees, designed a brand and apps for a massive charitable giving micr-donation platform, among others.

I’m saying cocky, as the 20% Project, with multiple discounts for new partners, together with all else described in this post below were a bit too daring. This all caused so much distraction from actually making profit, that despite reaching even our extended revenue goal, I nearly ran the company to the ground. The weather was too stormy second part of the year, and we were not ready.

One of our recent projects for Galaxy Interactive. See more on our site! 10s new projects added.

Some of it was good. We have reinvested back into HOO KOO E KOO a lot. It will probably bear fruit this year.

We reconfigured our production process again, learning from some of the best in the industry and improving on it. I seriously doubt any agency in the world can now have better and more efficient process than HOO KOO E KOO. If there is one, I’d be happy to hear — and learn from them!

We hired some amazing people too and will keep hiring.

And yet, the company was cruising on the verge of bankruptcy by the end of the year 👀.

This wouldn’t be, if I had my lessons before. So here are some for you!

Learnings:

Lesson 2:
Flow needs focus. Focus needs focus.
This is the big one. In 2019 we entertained gigantic never starting projects in Africa, for large futuristic Californian companies, for a bunch of people working with Lady Gaga and planning to plant a trillion trees, for NGOs and even helped design a bus… and that’s beyond everything else listed in this post below (come back here when your read all).
We’ve been all over, tackling tens of projects that never really took off and that stole a lot of precious time away. This year will be all about clearly defined goals, boundaries and hopefully full of focus on the right thing. The startup world lives by the mantra of “fail early, fail forward…”. We will live by “choose early, choose forward…” and hope the renewed focus steers in the right direction. So whatever you do, ask yourself — do I need to focus on it right now. Or at all?

Lesson 3:
Linear growth done badly needs exponential effort. Linear effort done well leads to exponential growth.
Process is key. With gaps in process we were drowning in tasks and despite HKEK was not growing incredibly, I quickly ran out of time in the day and night.

Lesson 4:
No such thing as multi-tasking.
It is scientifically proven humans cannot multitask. Focus on one thing at a time and then move to the next. This helps me handle 10+ projects during one day. Without multi-tasking. We even created an app that helps you do it, https://getslash.co/ — more on this below!

Lesson 4:
FU*K *ALLS
The joke is I live on a Caribbean beach, yet I often spent 9h+ a day on calls indoors. With clients, my team, employees, partners, random people who just wanted to chat… Last year I have not yet learned to be assertive. I first cut 45+ min internal calls to 30 mins. Then to 15 mins (too short, btw). Now I’ve got a no-calls day (Wednesday) and if things go right, I will be saying no to more and more of these. Calls suck your life away. I love you, Wednesday, I can do so much actual work now.

Lesson 5:
Gamble if you dare…
Organizing the BM camp and other initiatives took up so much time I nearly killed the company. Had to let people go, restructure, refocus. On one end it was silly, on the other I have a feeling this will lead to even greater things. Irresponsible perhaps, but HKEK is a 100% private owned company where no one else’s money is on the line and so my biggest lesson is perhaps that a bit of risk and trying new things can pay off much more than keeping it safe. Next year will show if I was right here 👀🤷‍♂️

Lesson 6
Target profit, not revenue.
Up until now I measured HKEK by revenue, it’s the more impressive sounding number. For 2020 I’m changing the strategy and will measure it by profit. Simply because over $1.5M revenue in 2019 brought us little net profit.

That’s some lessons from my Future Studio adventures. Somehow HKEK alone was just a sliver of what happened this windy AD 2019! Read on :)

Our first team retreat!

We had our first HKEK retreat to celebrate 3 years of the company! We surfed, worked, had ceremonies, released hundreds of sea turtles, dropped acid, talked till morning, bonded and worked towards finally turning this beautiful mess into a “real company” (and I feel like we did!).

Safe to say, our retreat was epic.

Lesson 7:
Less control brings more contribution.
This is not a new lesson, but confirmed by our retreat and the camp. When you setup a framework and general direction, but leave a lot of questions unanswered in hands of aligned group of people, amazing things happen. The retreat was truly amazing. Slide! like would the penguin say in Fight Club.

→ See much more in the dedicated post.

The first HOO KOO E KOO Tribe gathering!

This year we also hosted our first HOO KOO E KOO Tribe gathering in New York. The evening took place at Gospël, a venue that is centered around friendship, music & art. Throughout the night we heard the performances of some truly unique musicians and after our family feast, we listened to five featured organizations that are moving mountains with their initiatives.

Lesson 8:
To give up control two things need to be assured:
common framework and alignment.
We co-hosted our NYC event with a non-profit organization, which was amazing, we learned a lot and got to meet some incredible people they introduced. However, this also took the event we produced of the tracks due to some of their behavior and going off script with large part of the programming. This resulted in a far less impactful event and made us learn the lesson to make sure we execute the vision and all partners are clear about it. I learned that to give up control two things need to exist: common framework and alignment. We had trust, but didn’t assure its application.

→ See photos and learn about the tribe!

Slash

This year HOO KOO E KOO also got a new arm of sorts: a (adulting!) a Venture Studio.

Together with my good friend Jordan Lejuwaan (co-founder of Futurism, ZeroSpace, Gravity Blanket & more) we launched Slash — an app we designed to help optimize everyone’s work days, so that the most distracted young generations can truly focus and achieve more in their day.

The concept is simple: if you don’t spend time context-switching and choosing what to do next, you can be more than 50% more productive.

I have been using Slash for nearly a year now and the amount of sections in this post would be much shorter, if it wasn’t for the app. It really works.

We launched it on ProductHunt in November and got a tonne of great feedback and traction 🔥

Slash was Product of the Day and lost the week to Tesla Cybertruck 📐.
By 20 votes.

Ok, Elon. You got us this time 🤷‍♂️.

Check Slash here: https://getslash.co!

There is a waitlist right now, but shoot me a comment or email and I’ll invite you right away ⚡️

Slash receives major updates every few days, and a B2B/teams offering and more are coming.

We are now raising a round. For investment opportunity send me an email 🚀

Lesson 9:
Cutting costs can increase costs. Respect minimums.
I get lean startups and all, but because Slash is our internally funded (so far!) project, we initially used cheaper developers, less project management, worked on it only when not busy with major projects, so unliked projects we do for clients. This all — you guessed it — ended up costing more than if we treated it just like a client project and went with our primary forces. We learned from the failed experiment and gave our own products more prominence and structure, but for a moment the stumble costed us months and thousands. We could afford the experiment since project was internal, but never again.

BOXY

We are currently launching our other product of the year — BOXY Music. It’s a rethought music streaming experience, that brings the best of radio, DJing and algorithms to create a seamless experience where to simply listen to great music you won’t even need an interface. Also focused on focus — where you don’t need to dig through searches and interfaces. It just plays music and you pick by ear. Imagine how well will this work in your gym, car, home, with your Alexa, Hey Siri, Ok Boomer.

Boxy will feature some top talent selecting music and instant playback across 30+ stations.

Lesson 10:
Keep going and you’ll get there.
On a very small budget we built a fully functioning Android app, iOS app, streaming servers, music portfolio management tool, reporting, brand, got boxy.app domain and much more, in just a few months. HOO KOO E KOO has the power to create a digital product faster and better than ever before now. This was the plan since the beginning! Just a lesson that if you push in some direction, eventually you start getting there :)

Global Coralition

This year I also became a founding partner of Global Coralition, an organization uniting art, science and communities to save coral reefs.

We are building a new coral reef in Dominican Republic! First structure will be finished in March, during our Future Horizons event.

→ Learn more here: www.globalcoralition.org

You can come see the reveal in March if you… just see Future Horizon below.

But first!

F

This year we organized the second outing of my brainchild Burning Man camp, the F (for future, friends & family). F2019 was our “Build:One” where we actually built a beautiful camp and even a small art car, for the first time, officially.

Organizing a Burning Man camp is hard. Mad hard. Harder than you’d ever think really. It’s few months of preparations, few weeks of pre-building, 2 highly active weeks on the desert and a week of organizing things after. All in all, a couple of months of pretty hardcore work, just to build a beautiful home for our incredibly community for their 7 days of stay on the desert.

Murphy was born on the playa. Everything that can go wrong, goes wrong. Things that can’t go wrong, go wrong.

There are endless problems to solve from exploding car engines to programming to kitchen to personal issues — and it’s all volunteer-based and makes for quite a different management model, when things need to be steered in some direction. Talk about letting go of control from Lessons 7 & 8.

Luckily our Family is incredible and the camp turned out a beautiful, chill and thoughtful oasis of badass.

We hosted ceremonies, workshops, future talks, incredible piano concerts, meditations, fed people elixirs and most of all, discussed issues of the world, potential solutions and ideas for the future —including those we are starting to execute now.

Lessons from organizing a Burning Man camp 2nd year in a row:

Lesson 11:
Truly embrace “expect disaster”.
Be even more ready that things will go wrong, than you think you should. Assume the worst and add 50%. Then you’re ready for anything.
Expect Disaster is one of my Rules for Living — now I know I to take it seriously, and not worry when shit really goes down.

Lesson 12:
New cool isn’t manufactured.
We are getting more and more interest in the F and other initiatives. When I originally made a concept deck for F back in 2017, the cover said “F — the future camp.” and on the side “We’ve all tried E before”. Many people are getting tired of dropping pills and raging without a cause. Gen Z don’t even party that much. People care about purpose and meaning much more now, not just empty hedonistic escapism of yesteryear. Now is time and opportunity, more important than ever, to help turn this disillusion into a movement for better. We’re on a good track I think. Even when we mention that we helped design a supersonic airplane, and help plant reefs, people are more excited about the latter.

Lesson 13:
A good spreadsheet is worth 10,000 solutions.
As a designer I hated to look at any kind of spreadsheet for most of my life. I love them now. The camp and a tonne of other things would not happen with crunching some numbers. Here I need to bow my head to Mike Stevens, my F co-founder who setup a system that runs the entire camp. Some of his queries are pure Google Sheets sorcery. Over preparation makes you avoid problems and solving them.

Take a breath. In. Out. In. Out. ✨🧘🏽‍♂️

70% there. Let’s continue ⚡️

Future Horizon

By the end of the year the separate ideas started intersecting and seeming more and more aligned lately, and by the chance of serendipity we starte talking with some friends and Susi Mai (of kitesurfing, ocean preservation and MaiTai fame) about starting a new incredible cyclical event in the Caribbean.

Future Horizon will be focused on:

Envisioning better futures
Implementing these visions
Supporting organizations whit thrive to turn things around for the planet
Broadly described sustainability
Sea/paradise activities
Retreat & Wellness
Some good party time, but not without meaning

In a way this is a synergy of the HKEK Team, HKEK Tribe, the F, GlobalCoralition and other initiatives that truly brings the communities together with an incredible chunk of time by the beach.

Future Horizon Inception Retreat 2020 location! 💛

We rented a beautiful location and will host around 50 invitees over 5 nights, 11–16th of March. If successful, this retreat will be followed by a bigger event in March 2021 and every year onwards.

Spiritually it’s a descendant of F, the camp, and MaiTai, the series, and will carry out our future-thinking agenda and allow the community to gather 2x a year — on the playa and in the paradise. Each time with a cause and real, tangible impact.

→ Learn a little more here: futurehorizon.to

For details and to get involved, comment or email me :)

Lesson 12:
Dots connect when lines are long enough.
I didn’t start F to be ever connected to HOO KOO E KOO. When I started the Burning Man camp, my father, my girlfriend, my friends, my co-founders all had the same question: What the fuck are you doing?
My explanation was… I don’t know why, it feels like I should. (they will confirm that if you ask :D).
Nor did I move to Dominican Republic thinking of bringing the camp, the company and other activities here, and yet here we are.
Items listed above in this post are starting to intertwine and who knows, perhaps will result in something that really helps build better future for people and the planet, on a large scale.

Necker Island & Davos 2020

All we’ve been doing last year brought me invites to World Economic Forum in Davos and to the Ocean Summit on Necker Island. They overlap, so I naturally chose the one on the sea :)

I feel incredibly humbled by both of these considerations and the direction we’re embarking on, I think so new fun grounds lay ahead!

Visiting Necker Island has been a dream since my teenage years — one of those dreams I didn’t really pursue, because it was otherworldly, and I guess, when it happens, it happens. Humbled & excited to be able to stay on the island for those few nights and talk future of the oceans. Pics to come! ⚡️

Lesson 13:
Purpose is friends with karma.
I wouldn’t score an invite to either of these, was it not for pushing to ideate better solutions for a sustainable future, with increasing interest and investment. Do good things, and good things will happen to you.

Investing 🙀

It took me a while to (nearly!) recover from the coup 4 years ago, but I finally got to the place that perhaps closes the loop for an “entrepreneur” label and I invested some (smallish) money in startups in 2019 🙂 It felt really good, I’ll wait to see first results before doing this more but I can definitely see where the fun is. For counter-measure I also dropped more money into crypto and in retrospective, not even sure why 🙈

Lesson 14:
…gamble, but take care.
This is a follow up to Lesson 5. Overall in the past year I might have over-invested. I hoped to buy a new home, but ended up with barely any savings. Time will tell, but if all my investments and efforts fail, I’d be left with pretty much nothing. Many people try to convince me to shut down HOO KOO E KOO and focus on a high-growth startup, and I won’t do it. HOO KOO E KOO is a bakery, a machine that makes the machine. If I need, it will always make some money to pick me up, and meanwhile, it will build digital products for my and other people’s ventures as efficiently as it is possible. So I will keep on risking, but more mindfully this year.

Dominican Republic

And yes! I now live on the beach in Dominican Republic…

…right on a beach, in a penthouse which costs as much as a bedroom in Williamsburg, NY.

The internet is stable and fast and overall I can focus even better here than in NY.

My only distraction really is kitesurfing, which I keep getting more and more into and find extremely meditative and helpful in making decisions, letting go and re-focusing.

After all, kitesurfing is all about choosing the right direction against the wind. Sometimes in the back, sometimes in the face, but as long as you keep the balance you stay in place and enjoy the journey like few things can give.

Lesson 15:
The future of work is here.
I’ve been working remotely for 15 years so probably have more experience than many and I can assure — there has never been a better time. In fact that future of work we were building for when we started table.co, really is here now —you can be free to be almost wherever now, even when you handle gigabytes on the daily. Imagine what will be once 5G is there.

Personal

Following we fairly tumultuous year of passion, love and wilderness, we parted ways with my partner with one last trip around the island.

I’m grateful for all the moments of incredible, smiles and dreams, but time has come to turn the page, if for nothing else, for true better focus.

Now, back to single life, let’s see how that goes 👀

Lesson 16:
Follow your heart, just let the head pick the ride.
I have a 2D/3D tattoo right in the middle of my chest which, when seen in 2D is a compass between my heart and right brain hemisphere. This is to point me to use logic less, to feel, to flow. With that direction set, I might have listened to heart too much. The 3D viewing of the tattoo points to balance, time to head back there. Here is to a year of balance between heart and mind!

To summarize

Phew. You made it here mighty Medium consumer! Just for this I think can call you my friend I believe. Thank you for your time friend, drop me a comment or email and let’s be in touch. I’d love your thoughts.

To round up, these are the lessons from this year that I picked for you and myself:

You go tell them ❤️.
Flow needs focus. Focus needs focus.
Linear growth done badly needs exponential effort. Linear effort done well makes for exponential growth.
No such thing as multi-tasking.
FU*K *ALLS
Gamble if you dare…
Target profit, not revenue.
Less control brings more contribution.
To give up control two things need to be assured: common framework and alignment.
Cutting costs can increase costs. Respect minimums.
Keep going and you’ll get there.
Expect more disaster.
New cool isn’t manufactured.
A good spreadsheet is worth 10,000 problem solutions.
Dots connect when lines are long enough.
Purpose is friends with karma.
Flights are cheaper on 13th. So you can offset them 3 time over.
…gamble, but take care.
The future of work is here.
Follow your heart, just let the head pick the ride.

May the wind always be at your back!

Says the old wish.

But it will not. So be ready, be focused, flow and expect more disaster :) Just take care as you adjust your surface against changing wind. 💛

2020. We’re in the future already! Let’s just make sure it’s not Mad Max.