Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Guy Kawasaki's fun email signature

I just got an email from the famous (and with respect to his Twitter activity, some would say infamous) Guy Kawasaki. His email signature is really hilarious, which is why I want to share it with you:
Sent from a MacBook not an iPhone.
--------------------------------------

Guy Kawasaki
Nononina, Inc.
360 xxxx Street, Suite 100
Palo Alto, CA 94301
http://alltop.com/

xxxx@xxxx.com (best way to get in touch)
650-838-xxxx office (you'll never get me here)
650-387-xxxx cell (Spinvox will convert voicemail to email so I don’t have
to listen to people ramble)
650-853-xxxx fax (what's a fax?)

http://twitter.com/guykawasaki (if you have no life)
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/ (if you want to see why I have no life)
http://holykaw.com/ (if you want to see how I have fun in my life)
(Replaced some details with Xs to protect his privacy in the unlikely case that he has any.)

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Zendesk - Help Desk 2.0

Following my long-due update on Pageflakes here’s an update on what I’ve been doing since I’ve left Pageflakes. After spending some time with my family at a beautiful place in the sun, I started to look for new opportunities (to be perfectly honest I of course couldn’t resist researching new ideas while we were still on Barbados. Caribbean beaches and a DSL connection, what more can you ask for?). For various reasons I wasn’t yet ready to start my own thing again so I started to look for existing early-stage companies where I could come in as an angel investor and advisor. To some degree I “went to the dark side” (of funding) as it’s sometimes referred to but I’m really trying to be worthy of the term “angel” investor by really trying to help my companies in many different ways.

The first company I’ve made an investment in is Copenhagen-based Zendesk, founded in 2007 by a rock-star team around CEO Mikkel Asger Svane. This is no new news since it was announced last June and covered by Om Malik and others but I still wanted to blog about it here. If you don’t know Zendesk yet, the company offers a beautifully simple yet powerful on-demand help desk solution. You can buy and operate the system online and never have to worry about downtime, upgrades, security, backup or training. Setup is extremely easy and you can be up and running in hours.

Any business that serves more than a handful of customers needs a help desk solution in order to handle customer questions and support requests. Existing solutions are expensive, painfully difficult to set up and hard to use. Zendesk combines a professional-grade feature set with a beautifully simple Ajax-based user interface that resembles everyday web applications. If you want to have more productive and happier customer agents and want to save money along the way, check it out!