In September of 1990, while attending the NAB conference in Boston, I met a recent college graduate named David Gerstmann who had developed software to capture and manage wire service data on a personal computer. He called it WireReady. On a recent visit I asked David to talk about the early days of his company. (10 min)
That is how Ricardo Pessoa — the founder of Cool & Vintage — decides which cars to restore. I found several interviews and articles about Ricardo and his company.
“We are a couple of creative guys that have marketing/photography/fashion/filmmaking backgrounds and this is our take on cars. We were already dealing with restorations since we were driving mainly classic cars in our everyday life. We try to create the environment that will inspire people to use the cars, whether you buy it from us or not. The concept behind the company is to enjoy life through experiences and cars do that for us because we love to travel by car.”
That works for me. As does this:
“The new generation doesn’t want to buy from big, mainstream companies — they’re selective and look for small businesses who really care about their product and have a brand they can connect with”, comments Founder Ricardo Pessoa.
I’ve found lots of photos of the cars and the workshop but none of Ricardo yet. I’ll see if I can get one of him and the boys with “my” Land Rover.
UPDATE: (May 17, 2017) After two weeks of struggling to get email and phone calls returned, I’ve decided to look elsewhere for my Land Rover D90. The folks at Cool & Vintage are talented marketers and they’re probably pretty good at restoring Land Rovers, but I found their communication skills wanting.
Regardless of how it ends, I’ll probably mark today as the beginning of my Land Rover D90 adventure. It really started last week when spotted a nifty looking vehicle on one of the websites I frequent. They had linked to www.CoolVintage.com’s photo spread of a restored vintage Land Rover (D90). I’ve always liked the looks of these but never gave a thought to owning one but that day I filled out the webform (“Will I have to rob a liquor store to purchase one of these?”)I promptly received an email from Francisca, the Product Manager at Cool Vintage.com.
Turns out the Land Rover with the hot model is not available for export to US but they were restoring a few D90’s that would be ready in September. I fell in love with the 1993 D90 in Nardo Grey with Rugged Interior Trim. I finally got the company founder, Ricardo, on the phone today and while “my” car is still being restored, he promised to send me some photos next week. (This is where you take a few minutes to limber up your eyeballs because you’re gonna want to roll ‘em in a few seconds.)
According to Francisca, I send them 60% of the money up front and the remainder when the car arrives. If this goes down it will probably be my largest online purchase for a while. I’ve already answered a few questions from friends: Can’t you get one of these in the US? Can’t you get one cheaper? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you thought this through?
No to that last question. Total impulse buy. I fell in love with the look of this car and the idea of some some guys/girls in a garage in Lisbon, Portugal, restoring a vintage Land Rover from the ground up. (“Everything either restored or new down to the last bolt. Probably better than new.” Says Francisca.)
I’ll chronicle this adventure here if you want to following along. Photos next week. And I’ll try to find out a bit more about Francisca and Ricard and CoolVintage.com
UPDATE: I’ve never tried so hard to send a bunch of money to strangers in a foreign country. It is not certain I will be able to purchase one of these. A very “tough ticket.”
When I share something here, I try to include a paragraph or two to give the reader a sense of what the piece is about and some feel for what I thought was interesting/important. It’s difficult to know what to excerpt with this… I don’t even know what to call it… “explainer” by Tim Urban. At 38,000 words it is the longest thing I’ve ever read on the Internet (not counting books). He explains the brain. Where it’s been and where it might be going. That I was able to read such a long piece is a testament to a) the subject matter and b) his writing style. I said I wasn’t going to include any excerpts but here’s a couple:
“Die Progress Unit (DPU) – How many years one would need to go into the future that the ensuing shock from the level of progress would kill you.”
“Putting our technology into our brains isn’t about whether it’s good or bad to become cyborgs. It’s that we are cyborgs and we will continue to be cyborgs—so it probably makes sense to upgrade ourselves from primitive, low-bandwidth cyborgs to modern, high-bandwidth cyborgs.”
Good piece from last year on the people who curate playlists for streaming music services:
“As streaming has gone mainstream, these curators, many of whom began their professional lives as bloggers and DJs, have amassed unusual influence. Their work, as a rule, is uncredited — the better for services designed to feel like magic — but their reach is increasingly unavoidable. Spotify says 50% of its more than 100 million users globally are listening to its human-curated playlists (not counting those in the popular, algorithmically personalized “Discover Weekly”), which cumulatively generate more than a billion plays per week. According to an industry estimate, 1 out of every 5 plays across all streaming services today happens inside of a playlist. And that number, fueled by prolific experts, is growing steadily.”
“All the signs point to playlists being the dominant mode of discovery in the near future,” says Jay Frank, senior vice president of global streaming marketing for Universal Music Group, the largest of the major label conglomerates. “When it comes to trying to find something exciting and new, more people are going to want to go to trusted playlists.”
I hope these folks always have a job and I sort of think they will. Not convinced an algorithm can do the voodoo they do.
Driverless cars could become a reality in five years, and will profoundly affect real estate within eight or nine years. A few possibilities: