In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal wither away.
How do you learn to run a company at 21 with no business experience?
Throughout the years in business I found something, which is, I’d always ask why you do things, and the answers you invariably get are “oh that’s just the way it’s done.” Nobody knows why they do what they do, nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That’s what I found.
I’ll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is in the garage we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, accounting had this notion of a “standard cost.” Where you’d kind of set a standard cost and then at the end of the quarter you’d adjust it with a variance. And I kept asking, “why do we do this?” And the answer was just “well that’s the way it’s done.” And after about 6 months of digging into this what I realized was the reason you do it is because you don’t really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don’t know how much it costs is because your information systems aren’t good enough.
But nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts, and know exactly what something costs, to the cent. And so in business a lot of things are what I would call “folklore.” They’re done that way because they were done that way yesterday. And so if you’re willing to ask a lot of questions about things and work hard you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.
macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit.
In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe.
And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks.
One question that is still hard to answer after 10 years of working on Are.na is “what is the long term vision?” This is difficult for a few reasons.
One reason is that we have to calibrate our definition of long term with the person who is asking the question. Are.na is a lifelong project. Our ideal outcome as a company is not becoming the next Facebook (god forbid), it’s becoming the next Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot spring hotel in Japan, and one of the world’s oldest businesses (founded in 705 AD).
Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values. They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist. Otherwise, the person will not only be frustrated but also will not produce results.
More than ever, people are choosing how to spend their time based on the amount of attention they can garner—and you and I are no exception. Everyone is susceptible to this logic. But what I want to argue in this piece is that tech startup founders are particularly susceptible to this tendency.
Working at and around startups for several years, I’ve noticed many founders prioritizing culture, visibility, and perception over product, customer development, and strategy. Maybe this is to be expected in a time where culture moves faster and is perceived as more important than ever. But I find it unusual that the tech industry seems unaware of a whole class of typical mistakes founders make in pursuit of cultural relevance.
I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.
It shows us that print ad budgets were doing just fine all the way though the first decade or more of the consumer internet. There was even a little spike upward for the Dotcom bubble. Then the financial crisis and recession of 2008/9 caused a step change down, but when the crisis was over the budgets didn’t come back. Instead, the market had been reset, and budgets have been falling steadily ever since.
You might call this the Will E Coyote effect - you’ve run off the cliff, or the cliff has disappeared from under you, but there’s a brief moment while your legs windmill in the air before gravity kicks in. It can take a while for the inevitable to happen, but then, as Lenin pointed out, you get a decade of inevitable in a week.
Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.
Two different kinds of farms can grow vegetables. One is a factory farm built for scale, and the other takes the time to grow more expensive but healthier plants without pesticides.
Will everyone appreciate the difference? Of course not, but the latter plants are labelled ‘organic’ to give us the information and the choice, so that those of us who do care can make better decisions.
So maybe we should have ‘organic’ software as well, made by companies that:
Are not funded in such a way where the primary obligation of the company is to 🎡 chase funding rounds or get acquired (so bootstrapping, crowdfunding, grants, and angel investment are okay)
Have a clear pricing page
Disclose their sources of funding and sources of revenue
Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?
It's easy to have strong opinions about stuff only developers see since user validation is just asking people like yourself. It's much harder to name something consumer facing. Here are some useful rules I gleaned from Apple:
Two syllables max
Familiar English word - literal 5 year olds can spell and pronounce it right
Starts with A - useful for alphabetical sort. Amazon did this too
Increasingly, I think UX doesn't live up to its original meaning of "user experience." Instead, much of the discipline today, as it's practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.
The CYCLE OF GOODNESS® is the corporate philosophy established by YKK’s founder, Tadao Yoshida, who believed that “no one prospers without rendering benefit to others.” It expresses the basic belief of the YKK Group. Tadao Yoshida firmly believed that business belongs to society. As an important member of society, a company survives through coexistence. When the benefits are shared, the value of the company’s existence will be recognized by society. When pursuing his business, Mr. Yoshida was most concerned with that aspect and would find a path leading to mutual prosperity. He believed that using ingenuity and inventiveness in business activities and constantly creating new value would lead to the success of clients and business partners and make it possible to contribute to society. This type of reasoning is referred to as the CYCLE OF GOODNESS® and has always served as the foundation of our business activities.
Metrics come up when we’re talking about A/B testing, growth design, and all of the practices that help designers get their seat at the table (to use the well-worn cliché). But while metrics are very useful for measuring design’s benefit to the business, they’re not really cut out for measuring user experience.
A case study of the working methods of one particularly successful designer in a highly competitive design domain - Formula One racing car design. Gordon Murray was chief designer for the very successful Brabham and McLaren racing car teams in the 1970s and 1980s. His record of success is characterised by innovative breakthroughs, often arising as sudden illuminations, based on considering the task from first principles and from a systemic viewpoint. His working methods are highly personal, and include intensive use of drawings. Personality factors and team management abilities also appear to be relevant. There are some evident similarities with some other successful, innovative designers
Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, ‘Given the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.’
In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he ‘used to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.’
That's what is great about race car design, because even though you've had the big idea - the “light bulb” thing, which is fun - the real fun is actually taking these individual things, that nobody's every done before, and in no time at all try and think of a way of designing them. And not only think of a way of doing them, but drawing the bits, having them made and testing them.
Gordon Murray insists on keeping experience 'at the back of your mind, not the front' and to work from first principles when designing. For instance, in designing a component such as a suspension wishbone, 'it's all too easy - and the longer you're in design the easier it is - to say, I know all about wishbones, this is how it's going to look because that's what wishbones look like.' But if you want to make a step forward, if you're looking for ways of making it much better and much lighter, than you have to go right back to load path analysis. It is like designing things for the first time, rather than the nth time.
Working from first principles, and working in a highly organized way seem to come naturally to him, but his personal design process is much less structured than the results might suggest. Although he can tightly organize his team and run a complex racing organisation, his personal ways of designing are relatively unstructured, based on annotated, thumb-nail sketches. ‘I don't sit down and say, OK, now I've had the idea, let's see, this is a solution, these are the different ways to go, if I do this, and do that; I do lots of scribbles just to save it, before I forget.’
Gordon’s design process is based on starting with a quick sketch of a whole idea, which is then developed through many different refinements. ‘I do a quick sketch of the whole idea, and then if there's one bit that looks good, instead of rubbing other bits out, I'd put that bit to one side; I'd do it again and expand on the good bit, and drop out the bad bit, and keep doing it, doing it; and end up with all these sketches, and eventually you end up throwing ninety percent of these away.’ He also talks to himself - or rather, writes notes to himself on the sketches; notes such as ‘rubbish’, ‘too heavy’ or ‘move it this way 30mm.’ Eventually he gets to the stage of more formal, orthographic drawings, but still drawing annotated plans, elevations and sections all together, ‘Until at the end of the day the guys at Brabham used to call them “Wonder Plots”, because they used to say “It's a wonder anybody could see what was on them”!’
Although Gordon Murray carried immense personal responsibility for the design work of his racing cars, inevitably it involved a lot of teamwork. Clearly he has been successful in inspiring others to work with him. He likes to involve team members in the design problems, and for that reason prefers to recruit all-rounders to his team; ‘I never have engineers that aren't designers.’
He also likes to work collectively, standing around a drawing board discussing problems and trying ideas.
For this kind of teamwork, and especially for conceptual design work, he finds computer aided design systems too restrictive. For the McLaren F1 super-car, he installed a five-metre long drawing board in the design office, so that the car could be drawn full size. ‘The problem with CAD for this sort of stuff is that you can never have a full-size drawing, unless you do a print, and by the time you do a print it's out of date in the concept stage.’ He also does not like the one-person emphasis of CAD screens; ‘You can only ever talk to one person at once - you stand behind and look over somebody's shoulder, which is not very good for a boss-designer relationship anyway, to have somebody standing behind you is never a good thing. To look over somebody's shoulder at a tiny little screen, it's just wrong, it's totally wrong.’
(On the other hand, he fully acknowledges that tasks like a complex suspension plot to determine the wheel envelope are ideal for CAD.)
Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’
The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool.
The innovator has a systems mind, one that sees things in terms of how they relate to each other in producing a result, a new gestalt that to some degree changes the world.
The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.
The working methods of the innovative designer are, for the most part, not systematic; there is little or no evidence of the use of systematic methods of creative thinking, for example. The innovative designer seems to be too involved with the urgent necessity of problem solving to want, or to need, to stand back and consider their working methods. Their design approach is strategic, not tactical.
An important feature of their strategy is parallel working - keeping design activity going at many levels simultaneously. The best cognitive aid for supporting and maintaining parallel design thinking is drawing. Drawing with the conventional tools of paper and pencil gives the flexibility to shift levels of detail instantaneously; allows partial, different views at different levels of detail to be developed side by side, or above and below and overlapping; keeps records of previous views, ideas and notes that can be accessed relatively quickly and inserted into the current frame of reference; permits and encourages the simultaneous, non-hierarchical participation of co-workers, using a common representation.
The drawing of partial solutions or representations also aids the designer’s thinking processes, and provides some ‘talk-back’. As well as drawing, innovative designers frequently like to undertake practical work related to the design solution, such as building models or mock-ups, or participating in construction.