Stéphane Ducasse <stephane.ducasse@...> writes:
Hi guys
I do not like to do that but in the past we got problems with Merik Voswinkel.
So I would like to warm you against
him. Several of you got approached and my advice is run away. Here are some simple facts that happened to us.
Stef
From Lukas:
Starting in 2007 Merik contacted various people from the Smalltalk community offering them to take part in his startup. His projects and goals constantly changed and nobody quite followed what he wanted to do. When he discussed with me it was a mash up of Pharo, Seaside, Pier, Cola, and Croquet all running on some custom cloud hardware ...
Merik was working together with a "fake" research institute that only existed as a website. I also learned that Merik is broke and lives from support of the dutch government. Merik aggressively applies for venture capital and writes huge proposals with weird ideas. On some of these proposals (that I found on the web) he added Avi Bryant and myself as key team members (with picture, bio and all), even if we both never accepted to do anything with him.
From marcus: We got a note from the local organzier that a "Venture Capitalist" wanted to attend ESUG and we could even use his Boat for the social event. But strangely, this Venture Capitalist was not able to pay 400 EUR to attend. But he was not able to say that. (we later learned that he is living of social wellfare... so it would have been no problem to get him a free entrance). So he offered to make videos. With very expensive "Professional" equipment.
Later it turned out this kamera was actually the one of the guy organizing the remote croquet talk, and he got somehow pissed too because Merik promised him something for the camera use...
Of course, Merik did have to operate the "Professional" Camera himself (not often, maybe a day he did?). We had to threaten him violently to get the completely useless tapes. (which are in some strange format and unprocessed).
so, that's Merik.
He was sending around "Business Plans" to people using team members that never agreed. For example Lukas was used like that. If Lukas does not object, I can send these "professional" business plans.. so you can ROFL, too. (Lukas an me did a course right at that time about venture funding: http://venturelab.ch/, so we know a little bit about these things...)
Then people could hack his machine on his seaside hosting because the ports were open so :) No, he was running seaside with development tools enabled. He is completely clueless.
So pay attention.
Stef
Please send me an example of one of his businessplans. It seems he is trying to start something up in the Netherlands and I would like to make my own assesment. best regards