In 2009, there were a lot of bloggers out there and, amongst them, a few blogging superheroes: fast-talking Gary Vaynerchuk with all his tips and ‘how tos’; Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, who busted out of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, as a nineteen-year-old in 2005; Arianna Huffington and her endless sprawl of content.
In his 2006 book An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds argued that markets and technology empowered ordinary people to beat Big Media.
A platoon of people had formed online, and there they were, fighting the Goliath.
I’d heard of a certain 26-year-old who was valiantly wielding his keyboard.
Nalden was a blogger. If you were tech literate and interested in design (in Holland) you knew him. You knew his taste. He was young, he had boundless energy, but he didn’t necessarily know the ways of the world. He was green – nearly translucent – from spending too many hours in windowless rooms, bent over with the posture of Neanderthal man, his days of productivity spent staring at a backlit screen, hunched over a wireless keyboard.
He’d talk to you when he detached from the internet, but that crucial moment was rare. He wore a deerstalker, and because of his baby face, the outfit meant he shared a glowing resemblance to Elmer Fudd.
I was drawn to him. At the time, I had my own reasons for seeking out interesting people who wore deerstalkers, people who weren’t so embedded in my own industry. In the midst of what now seems a repulsive and unhealthy globetrotting phase, I was busy jumping on planes like they were buses.
Much to my wife’s discontent, I spent a few days each week away from Amsterdam, in Moscow and London.
The world of advertising had seemed dazzling and adventurous in the early days of my career when I was working for Stella McCartney and BBDO. But quick trips here and there, face-to-face meetings that didn’t go anywhere, and products I didn’t believe in, were beginning to take their toll.
If Nalden was green, I was starting to look a similar shade, and at the time had managed to lose 16kg from stress and lack of sleep. Not even the heavy Russian food helped. These days, even the slightest smell of dill in a soup or scattered across a plate will catapult me back to Domodedovo Airport in Moscow. My work–life balance had toppled to one side. It was a fortuitous time for us to cross paths.
Nalden poked his head into my office one day. He was wearing his deerstalker. I’m sure he said a few words, but he mostly laughed, or cackled, as that tends to be his preferred mode of conversation: a joyous cackle. We clicked. He was looking for something new, something bigger than his current projects, something more important. I told him I was feeling the same impulse.
We chatted about the internet, advertising, PR, his blog nalden.net, for which he was well known. We discussed a guy called Bas, who had started an interesting service called Oy Transfer. With the help of Nalden, the Oy had become We – a crucial tweak for the non-Dutch of the world – and WeTransfer had gone on to start disrupting the file transfer space, mostly because of one attribute: the simplicity of the design.
I don’t think either of us realized that this was a beginning of sorts. He was excited at the possibility of global travel, bigger problems to solve, more money, and growth. I was excited at the prospect of starting a project for myself again. I’d get to decide what got me out of bed each day. I’d get to choose where to spend my time. This might lead to taking fewer flights, but also to a more satisfying connection to the world, a chance to engage with the most important ideas of the time.
Trust was already one of those important ideas.