30 years since the first danish web agency Mondo saw the light of day. Thomas Madsen-Mygdal invited 100+ of the usual suspects, the original gangsters, the dreamers, the pioneers, the bizz people, designers, coders, visionaries. Less hair, more glasses than 30 years ago, clothing palette still mainly black and grey. Had a great time. It was quite touching seeing so many familiar and friendly faces in one place, several for the first time in decades.
I did a short talk based on a napkin drawing from 2003, done during the Reboot 6.0 conference in Copenhagen. The internet as ecosystem. It started as an open plain. The danish internet index Jubii had 200 links to danish sites when it launched in 1995. Things grew quickly, wild and uncontrolled. Some seeds need to be exposed to fire before they grow, so the big dot-com fire in 2000 destroyed a lot of value short-term, but also cleared the earth for new exciting things. And many of the trees in the internet forest were shallow cardboard cutouts.
The drawing took on its own life, I’ve seen it shared in a few places around the web; I found out Jeff Veen used it to explain Web 2.0 concept. I wrote him to ask where he got the drawing from, he replied;
“I honestly don’t know how I got your drawing — I think someone mailed it to me a couple years ago. I’ve been using it for a little while in my presentations, and it really resonates with people.”
Jeff was part of the early team at Hotwired, the place where the banner ad was invented (the Oppenheimer moment of the commercial internet :). As part of my prep, I asked ChatGPT to interpret my drawing, and it did so without any flaws. LLMs are good at getting metaphors and analogies, so I asked ChatGPT to elaborate on the net as ecosystem, this was the result (notice the fire here in 2025 is just as bad as the dot-com one..) What comes next? Hard to tell, but the vibe is shifting. Big time. Feels bigger and more profound and serious this time around.
Good conversations, a lot of laugning, and a fair bit of net nostalgia (you should also read my earlier post on this). It was always about the people and the culture. Something which Thomas saw with such clarity very early on. And not only that, he acted on that insight and engineered gatherings such as the Reboot conference, The Copenhagen Letter and the open space hub KLUB in Copenhagen.
MEGA- Make Europe Great Again. Take back the web. Do your own thing. Make stuff, it’s never been easier. Get to work.
Here’s to the next 30 years!
And in that spirit; perhaps you were there? Please share your perspectives and thoughts. Danish or english, your choice. Would love to hear from you ❤️
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