Alexander Hoff ❍

my timeline has been full of reasons to leave austria lately. i'm austrian born, have lived in vienna for 10+ years now, and i see it very differently. vienna is THE package to have a beautiful life in a globalized world. the first thing everyone quotes is the 50% tax. taxes are high, yes. but living costs are comparatively cheap. it makes a difference what you have left all expenses paid vs just quoting empty tax numbers of gross salaries. and regarding the ever-lasting whining about bureaucracy: founding a gmbh (austrian ltd) as a solo founder is actually super easy and 100% digital these days. no need for a notary or anything like that. then there's "everything is closed on sunday". yes, and that's the nice part. the whole city is quiet and people just... enjoy. i feel like people just don't have a grip on how to organize their lives properly. just order your groceries if you cannot manage otherwise or go on saturday. what never shows up in these tax comparisons is the life around it. vienna is an amazingly beautiful city, extremely safe, with a super cool cultural program and nature all around. it's 60 min from my doorstep to the airport gate (yes really), everything is walkable, you can reach basically the entire city in under 30 min, and in summer you can go swimming everywhere. so no, i'm not leaving. i'm building my company and raising my daughter right here. @denisyurchak you're welcome to stay too 😏

turns out an incredibly lucrative business now is “consulting for consulting”. i was independently approached by two old-school software agencies. both have a very similar fear. they made very good money for 20 or 30 years and have some amazing customers, but they see the writing on the wall. something has to change or in a few years there might not be a business anymore. every software agency on the planet is scared of AI and ready to pay big bucks to cracked solopreneurs to learn how to build businesses that generate recurring revenue, are somewhat future proof and require low to zero maintenance. could be a very interesting thing to offer these guys what we're living every day already.

"i do hate some of my enemies. and i always will." somebody this petty should not hold this kind of responsibility. the lack of self-reflection needed to utter these words is staggering. and somebody his age will not materially change anymore. the vindictiveness and ruthlessness make you bitter. it's ongoing suffering for reasons that should not matter. i was wronged on a business deal a few years ago. things were promised and then not kept. i was, and still am, in a position to seriously fuck with that person's life. as in completely wreck it, if i wanted to. i would absolutely not do it. me thriving, waking up happy and balanced every day is worth more than inflicting harm on someone (and his family) that does not matter to me anymore. living in the past and harping over wrongs from past times never helps you in the future. you just end up a slave of your own demons.

working on something unreasonable.

.@Apple used to be the north star of quality, stability and design. look at it now.

most of you will never read aristotle. alexander the great was pissed that you even could. in the last few months i turned into a museum dad. we've been going to classical museums a lot lately and it has become my favourite family outing. i enjoy just strolling through, getting lost in the past for a few hours and learning from it. the other day i stood in front of this guy for way too long. when king philip of macedon was looking for a teacher for his 13yo son alexander, he picked aristotle. a few years earlier, philip had wiped out aristotle's hometown stagira and scattered its people. the fee they agreed on: philip rebuilds stagira and brings its people back home. and he did. years later, aristotle published the lectures he had only ever given his students in private. alexander was in the middle of conquering persia when he heard about it, and he was furious. so he wrote his old teacher a letter: if everyone can read what you taught me, how am i supposed to be better than anyone else? he'd rather beat people in knowledge than in power, he wrote. (ironic from the guy who was busy taking over an empire) aristotle wrote back that the lectures were published and not published at the same time. you'd only really understand them if you had been in the room. i think that's still true. you can read everything online today, and it still only clicks when you apply what you have learned.

just had an extremely scary walk through the crime and immigrant infested centre of vienna.

nobody warns you how freaking hard friendships become as an adult. at 20 you yolo your way through life, meet random people and spend a year with them after knowing them for 10 min. these days i usually have to schedule three weeks in advance to grab a coffee with someone. (not because of me that is) today i lost one of the friends from back then. we have known each other for more than 10 years, went through student life, heartbreaks and whatever we thought would be “difficult” at the time. but it did not survive my baby. after i wrote a casual “hi, thinking of you. hope you're fine.” i got the response that “our interests diverged”. and sure, my life right now is a baby, staying healthy and building a business. but i actively seek out people with different interests because they enrich my view of the world. to have a trusted friend tell me that's a negative disappoints me in more ways than i can explain. with how hard it is to make friends as an adult, it feels incredibly wasteful to throw away 10 years because of a stressful time or some divergent interests. a few days ago another friend told me that his best friend ended their friendship in the middle of his breakup. i was shocked. what kind of stupidity is that, i thought. i had no idea what was coming for me. this shit just… hurts. reach out to people you love regardless. it might not last forever.

weapons manufacturer shocked about the war? 🤔

i just tried upgrading my @bitwarden premium to a plan that allows me to use Secrets Manager with higher limits. BOY is that experience frustrating. if i was not such a fan of your product i would have bailed after email (!!!) number 3 with your sales agent. there is no way to simply click a button and pay for what i want. for the love of god people get your sales process in order. it's like you don't even want to make money. one of the main things i have learned in the last few months is that the product almost doesn't matter if the sales process is not dialed in. as soon as the product is fine, almost all of your attention needs to go towards making the sales process as good of an experience as possible. otherwise even your biggest fans will not buy what you sell.

just revived my linkedin because it makes a lot of sense to shill my b2b lead-gen service there but OH MY GOD is the content there exhausting. this atrocity gives me PTSD:

screw it. bought a billboard for outrep.cc on the side of mumok. vianna must PUSH AND PULL.