There’s quite some people who ask me the question “how is it to be in Belgium”, “is it not hard to adapt”, etc… etc…
The last 3 years I’ve been more outside of Belgium then in Belgium and to be honest, I don’t feel like I “returned to Belgium”. Yes, we rented a house, I bought a car and you structure some things. But every material good I buy gives me ‘friction’. You need printers, offices, cars, etc… for a certain degree of efficiency. But whereas most of my Belgian friends spend 90% of their time on those matters I learned i should force myself to make them ‘disposable’.
I’ve been reading the last weeks on what Pelle is up to and I want to meet him in Copenhagen or Brussels when he’s back from Boraca. I have a legal representation (read: a company) of myself in 4 countries, credit cards and bank accounts in each of those countries. Don’t try this at home, since our current world is made to pinpoint people and their finances to one place and every effort to break through that system is a bureaucratic nightmare most people probably will prefer avoiding. And next to that you’ll start realising how absurd it is seeing your Reals plunge when the dollar falls.
But once you’re crossing those boundaries, you realise there must be thousands, if not millions of people who are challenging our current legal and financial concepts which lost track with the day to day realities of an ever growing crowd of people who live beyond nationalities; quoting Pelle:
The problem is the ideas of what property, business, employment and contracts are changing. Not the concepts themselves, but the day to day realities of them. Try using your domain name that you and everyone else knows is worth at least $50,000 as collateral for a loan in a bank. Try getting credit in most countries, if you freelance for someone at the other side of the world. Just try to get the electricity connected in most countries without a local salaried job.
The concepts of credit, contract, corporations etc. were established a long time ago, now the main problem are the institutions we rely on daily to handle these concepts. If we rely on these established institutions we the people who actually live and work in this new world are quite literally screwed, following Hernando’s exact same argument above.
What we at ExtraEagle want to do is try to help provide a foundation for new institutions to sprout up and offer these same kinds of services, just modified to suit 2007 and beyond. This is not just a job for us alone. We will focus on some aspects and there will certainly be room for competition. But in the world of creating new institutions there are millions of opportunities.
Next week a new company in which I’m involved will be incorporated. In Belgium, because one partners found it not ‘clean’ to have our headquarters in a country which was much more suit legally and financially speaking.
Pelle and Michael are undoubtfull two people which are completely which are thinking and living on the same frequency with me. I’m meeting Michael next week for some joint future projects in Brazil, a country with bigger investment opportunities then China, because the barriers to entry are much bigger then China’s. And reading Pelle’s posts I realise I have to meet him shortly after to hear more on Extra Eagle.
