While 2006 was a year of transition with the break after Zingy and the creation of OLX, 2007 was a year of consolidation. I put my disagreement with the acquirer of Zingy behind me. I made two new Internet investments. OLX continued to grow slowly but surely – we now have over 80 employees and are present in 40 countries in 12 languages.

I continued to travel far and wide for OLX and hope that there will be less business travel in 2008. On the personal side, my life has been more boring, though I did manage to go heli-skiing in British Columbia, kite boarding in Cabarete (Dominican Republic) and hiking, biking and rafting in Costa Rica. I am also continuing to (very slowly) work on my tennis game, open mindedness, patience and humility.

The best books I read in 2007:

• The Black Swan by Massim Nicholas Taleb
• The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford

My best blog posts in 2007 were:

• Passion and love at the end of the age of innocence
• “Loving” versus “Being in Love”
• Happiness and the dangers of belief in the written word 🙂
• The Theory of Social Obligation
• The nature of entrepreneurship: randomness, trial and error, and how intelligence can get in the way
• Ethics, spirituality and religion: a debate on torture
• Fear and uncertainty in the time of prosperity
• Capitalism and Democracy
• Macro Perspectives on Global Liquidity: How Chinese Farmers and Oil Sheiks are Subsidizing American Consumption and its Implications
• A Different Perspective on the Global Economy
• Facebook: the next Google?

I predict 2008 will be a year of slow growth:

• It will continue to be too early to tell whether OLX will be a success or not – given the non viral nature of online classifieds, this project is going to take years.
• Two of my Internet investments will enter the Alexa top 50 – one is Badongo.com, the other I will talk about when the investment officially closes in January 2008.
• One of my investments is likely to fail.

I have not yet decided whether I will be foolhardy enough to make predictions on the global economy and the US election. Stay tuned 🙂

Happy New Year!