Uit ons archief. In 2011 had AtMostTV een fraai interview met Amerikaans-Amsterdamse piraat Mike Lee over zijn ‘Appsterdam’.

De  transcriptie van het interview met Mike Lee

Patrick Petersen: …here with Mike Lee. Mike, why are you dressed up like a bee?

Mike Lee: So, in my talk, I talk about marketability. Marketability is one of the things that determines whether your product, whether your app is going to be successful. And a big part of marketability is having a hook, is having a story that gets people’s attention, that people can tell each other and that people will remember.

Patrick Petersen: Is your future just about apps?

Mike Lee: Well, I don’t think that the future is just about apps. I think that the future is about people, right? And it’s about people interacting with technology. The idea of an app is to have a bit of technology that is productized, that is made to be a bolus, if you will, of technology that you can consume, that you can understand, that you can wrap your head around. An app is something that takes a piece of hardware like an iPad and turns it into an experience. It’s the software that is the other side of the hardware coin that makes our everyday technological lives possible.

Patrick Petersen: So it’s not about apps, but it’s just about instruments that make the ultimate experience?

Mike Lee: It is about making the ultimate experience, that’s right. And the instrument to make that experience is hardware. That hardware is a platform, and in order to turn that sort of dead, lifeless piece of hardware into an experience, that’s where the software comes in, that’s where the apps come in. That’s what we do, that’s what we do here in Amsterdam.

Patrick Petersen: Okay, you live in Amsterdam now?

Mike Lee: Yes, I just moved to Amsterdam from Silicon Valley.

Patrick Petersen: Could you make this link between being a pirate and Amsterdam?

Mike Lee: Well, I think the VOC is probably the best example of linking the nautical theme to Amsterdam. But you know, the whole idea of the pirate, it runs through our industry, right? Steve Jobs said early on: “It is better to be a pirate than to join the Navy,” right? Everybody wants to join the Navy, everybody wants to go to Silicon Valley and do what everybody else is doing. What I’m saying is, let’s do something differently. We already do things differently. We have a different kind of capitalism that we practice in this community. We have a different way of dealing with each other that we practice in this community. We have a different way of looking at technology in this community. Let’s bring all of these people together in one place here in Amsterdam. Let’s make Amsterdam the world’s center for a new kind of technology.

Patrick Petersen: What kind of apps will make our life better?

Mike Lee: Well, there’s all kinds of apps to make our life better. For example, consider Keynote, which makes my life better all the time. When I have to give a presentation, when I have to share information with a group of people, I have to have some kind of visual because it’s awkward to stare at me up on stage. I have to have a visual. Well, when we look at something like PowerPoint, we see a lot of very boring, very information-overloaded visuals. Keynote makes it easy for me to make a visual that will not be boring to people, that will be interesting to people, and that will actually work to engage people in what I’m saying, and so it becomes a communication tool.

Twitter is a communication tool. Twitter on your mobile phone is the ultimate communication tool because you can speak to your friends in a very sort of controlled way.

Patrick Petersen: Because of the ease of use as well?

Mike Lee: Because of the ease of use. Because what makes Twitter very successful, I think, is that it looks at the way humans live their lives, at the way that human communication works, and it seeks to replicate that and to give us the tools necessary to become effective communicators. You know, to be able to say—unlike the web where you’re just blasting the message out there—with Twitter, you can blast a message out there, but only the people who are interested are listening, right? And so you can make very distinct lists of, you know, “these are who my friends are,” “these are the people who I want to communicate this message to.” And you can say something like, “Hey, you know, we’re all getting together at this place,” and everyone who’s around there can then jump in on that.

It’s not too complicated, because I think too many people try to make it very complicated and make the whole thing very formalized. It still leaves most of it up to us, most of it up to the people who surround Twitter. It just becomes a medium to help us to communicate better and to live our lives better.

Patrick Petersen: Okay, final question: could you define Appsterdam?

Mike Lee: So, Appsterdam is the idea… it’s two things that come together. First of all, I’ve just finished this huge world tour and I’ve discovered that Amsterdam is the most livable city in the world right now.

Patrick Petersen: Why?

Mike Lee: There’s a number of reasons. You can’t just look at a city for one thing. You can’t just say, “Oh, Paris has the best food.” Paris has fantastic food, but if you speak English there, you’re going to have a lot harder time. You have to play this game with the French to get them to want to speak English with you, right? London: wonderful city, people speak English there obviously, but very, very, very expensive, right? San Francisco: great city, very overcrowded, very expensive, and very, very difficult to immigrate to the US for Europeans, right?

When you look at Amsterdam, it’s easy for Americans to get to, it’s easy for Europeans to get to. It has just wonderful infrastructure, a lot of culture, the museums, the Central Library… I mean, when you bring people to Amsterdam and you show them the city, they fall in love with it. I’ve never had somebody say, “Yeah, it’s okay.” When I show somebody Amsterdam, they know immediately why I want to live here. They want to live here too, they want to bring their families here. And so it’s a great place to live.

If we bring everybody together in one place, everyone in our industry, then we can turn Amsterdam into Appsterdam, and it will become the center of our industry. The way that when you want to make movies you go to Hollywood, when you want to make musicals you go to Broadway, and when you want to make apps, you come to Amsterdam.

Patrick Petersen: Thank you, Mike Lee.

Mike Lee: Thank you.