Luca Hammer

• I want to change the world.
• I am bad at working for others. As a freelancer and as an employee.
• If I think something needs to be done, I prefer to do it myself than to ask others to do it.
• I don’t care for money as long as there is enough to not worry how I will visit the people I love.
• I like to be responsible for my actions and be able to right the wrongs.
• If I fail I will feel better than if I haven’t tried.
• If I succeed we all win. 
• I believe.

The first twenty years of my life were focused on education. My time horizont ended with the next term. When I moved to Vienna I had no clue what to study. I was registered for informatics, started economics and ended in communications. I read a lot about different jobs and got some insights at university. Most of them from people who tool a completely different path but said it should be possibly with our degree too. I knew that my degree won’t limit what I will do. Most stuff happend through contacts. From talks at events and companies to appearance on television. I made some money from blogging. Over time I stopped worrying about what I will do with my future and started to let it happen. I got in contact with interesting people and tried to help them. I worked for some. I never thought I will end up with one occupation. Startups always fascinated me. Those people who jumped on an unsolved problem and gave it a try. Failing and trying again. They need to adopt fast enough to new circumstances. Data helps but doesn’t solve. Decisions are neither wrong nor right, but need to be made. One more step and you could fail. Stay still and you will fail for sure.

Over the last months I troubled myself often. I stood still and risked the bets of the whole team. It’s time to move faster.

[Longer german version]

Path and hundreds of other Apps upload the iPhone adressbook without asking. I think it’s stupid to question this behavior as long as the data isn’t used to spam the people. 

Asking someone if it’s ok to upload someone elses data is pointless. Asking the people of whom the data is would be spam. 

Contact information is normally public (phone books, websites, facebook,…) to make it easier to contact someone. Making it private only makes it harder to get in touch. 

As soon as I give someone my contact data and don’t explicit state that it should stay private I can’t expect it. I give away contact information if someone asks me if I know someone who does X.

I see adress books not as private phone books but as a list of favorites. The data itself can be found somewhere else. With whom I am connected is public on facebook, twitter and many other networks. The only use of my adress book is to make it easier for me to get in touch with someone. It doesn’t matter if this is over phone, mail or Path.

If I type in every name from my contacts or upload a file makes no difference but in convenience. I will give every app access to my contacts as long as they don’t spam them. You can’t stop me from doing that. 

See also Andreas rant that phone numbers are stupid. 

Longer german version of this post.

Don’t judge the things your cofounders/coworkers do by your own terms. It may seem unnecessary to spend several hours on thinking how to integrate share buttons if you have all the uncoded code before your eyes. But it makes a difference for the person who implements it and for those who uses it. 

If everyone does it’s best in their area, all is great.

(Don’t be a perfectionist.)

Today I had a little telephone conference with Bruno and Andi. I prepared a roadmap of social media integration in work|i|o for the next three releases and wanted some feedback. 

Long story short, if we were in the same room, after I put all my documents on the table and explained my thoughts, he would have thrown them on the floor, put one clean sheet on the table and told us to focus on this single problem.

At the moment the developers do their best and we come closer to launch date. At the same time I am motivated but don’t feel to be able to do much. Therefore I tried to think about stuff that comes later. Problem: As a startup we work on assumptions and every additional feature makes it more complicate to recognize the core problems.

As Andi said, it is good to think about the possibilities but we shouldn’t implement too much in the beginning as long as we haven’t verified our assumptions. I will keep on planning and making concepts but they will stay documents for the moment.