Winter Reflections [4]
A New Vision
Previous installments presented a series of arguments:
[Part 1] Startup success is a long art (“Ars longa”)
[Part 2] The future is shaped by waves bigger than us
[Part 3] The time to start making life worthwhile is now
This part is the grand synthesis where everything connects and makes sense, and presents emerging possibilities to create a new kind of startup ecosystem.
Undeferred Living
If we’re prepared to get into a long working life for many years — as success would often require — we should structure work in a way that it forms a meaning-giving and enjoyable part of life. What’s inside and outside of work should not be opposing objectives — we should make it so that life is more fulfilling and complete with its productive, collaborative components.
When Baptiste Lagarde visited me in Palo Alto, he mentioned there’re three questions to consider:
- What you work on: having interesting, stimulating work
- People you are with: my interpretation is of the true sense of the word “company”, people who enjoy working with each other
- Where you live: events, activities, etc. outside of and surrounding work, access to “quality of life” items, for example, culture
On a personal note, the experience after moving to Aalto has been a constant stream of parties, meetups, company visits, events… being active should be more than yet another senseless party cruise. I’d also like these activities to lead somewhere, I’d like to discover some kind of “productive socialising”.
Company as a Banquet
In Finland, tech and consulting firms have a rather unique recruiting convention called “excursions”, where graduating students are invited to get wined and dined while learning more about the company.
It is different to say, in Sydney, Atlassian would lend office space to a Python meetup and provide pizza and beer — here, in the more impressive cases, students are taken to a fancy venue with glowing ambience to have sit-down courses of wine tasting and tapas, just to start the evening.
This is an opportunity for the company to show what it’s like to work there, and to learn more about potential candidates (e.g. by working on a “business case” in groups). There’s always more social mingling, and sometimes sauna.
The drinks, catering, and sauna form an important element of these visits —the spirit of hospitality suggests an admirable vision: that one of the goals of a company can be to provide an enjoyable experience for the people who work there.
Company as a Workshop
The ideal company is not only a place to produce work, but also a place to grow and build skills. Consider these facts:
- Many students don’t go work in their field of study
- Not much learned during early studies is used at work
- A lot of “learning on the job” happens at work to make you productive
- At work you acquire a large body of internal or specific knowledge
The company should be a “learning environment” with a pro-social culture of being good at teaching and learning, and building collective knowledge ownership (cf. Bill Scott’s thoughts on Lean UX). Imagine the labs and workbenches and colleagues giving a demo on how to use a VR headset, or filming equipment, or centrifuge — this kind of hands-on knowledge transfer has the most direct impact on skill growth and productivity.
Company as a Fellowship
Another ingredient of my impression of the smaller Finnish firms is their “welcome to the family” approach to recruiting — in contrast to opening headcounts to address an imminent need (with Bay Area startups)— they look to expand by seeking out and bringing on-board people with versatile backgrounds and analytical, critical thinking skills, with the prospect of working on an evolving variety of future roles. In a sense, they see the recruitment not only as filling a gap, but adding to the firm and making it greater than the sum of its parts.
The ideal company is also a “collegiate organisation”. It has ongoing missions to “solve the mysteries of the universe”. It carries out a lot of research, and develops a lot of knowledge that is shared. It recruits people who will grow in the company, to “carry on the torch”.
Astronomical Odds
Oliver runs a site for finding potential co-founders, he has met some of these people and knows of their stories. We talked about how forming a good team is against astronomical odds, you need to a) be awesome, b) cross oceans to meet, c) share a common vision, d) like and trust each other, and e) have complementary skills, all these besides the regular perils of startup life.
Even for a “startup simulator” — Aalto and EIT Digital run a lot of these, where students form teams and develop a business case and pitch the idea — the winning teams need good dynamics and good composition: someone good with visual design, with driving the schedule, with words, with stagecraft, and overall with business sense — even from a already selective population, only a few teams have these winning characteristics.
The astronomical odds against forming a good team can be a bottleneck, a blocker for creating businesses. Oliver and I joked sociologically it’s harder than dating, because there at least you don’t need the hard skills to match.
Start Doing It
Then at some point Oliver mentioned maybe the solution is to “just start working on what you are interested in”, and forget about the imaginary prerequisites of team formation, leverage of funding, etc.
This is a breakthrough idea in two aspects:
- People: there’s an interview of Philip Rosedale and the question was “How did you find all these amazing, talented people to come work for you on Second Life?” His answer was “I didn’t, they found me.” He just started pursuing this vision of building a virtual world, and people came to him.
- Capital: startup success is a game of time, you don’t even have to work on one specific product — companies pivot anyways — you just have to be in a field for many years. Know-hows, connections, customer base, all the business capital accumulates. Therefore the important thing is to get started in that field, to get in the game. Also, the starting point can in most cases be earlier than we thought..
Living Museums
Reflecting on Nieminen’s design course on rethinking how people spend their free time — in many cases we investigated museums and how visitors interact with them. There’s a lot of academic work into this area: how to design a museum space, how to use installations to tell a story, to educate — can we learn more from these ideas and the discipline of “curating”?
After all, building a long-lasting company is almost like a process of curation, of values, of processes, of people who carry out the activities. Cells and atoms in the human body get gradually replaced over time — Oliver and I questioned whether we are still the same people as when me first met 6 years ago — can companies or ventures or ideas or industry categories be like living organism?
What if companies are not like silos? What if the entity of the company is not the sole vehicle of carrying the cause forwards? Instead of ending up with people sitting in a fluorescent-lit cubicle, trying compete on a Kickstarter level, they are enabled to be “one with the ecosystem”?
What can we learn from designing museums? Or from design exercises in general? For example, a “gallery wall” showcasing ideas and topics to allow people to gravitate towards their areas of interests, to learn more about what they can add to that idea by applying skills, supported by props (artifacts) of architecture (e.g. co-located working space) and processes to get people to meet and work with one another.
A New Ecosystem
Maybe the solution to the astronomical odds and the silo dead-ends is a new kind of startup ecosystem. Consider these reference points:
- Urban Mill is trying to create a knowledge-economy utopia in Otaniemi by bringing together startups, research power, and capital activities to create gravity centers through co-location.
- The Finnish consulting companies span across a spectrum of modes of operation: Eficode or Futurice bring projects “inside the house” and build something to hand over; whereas Netlight (with 1K+ people) at a glance resembles a placement agency, with a distributed, exocentric model of knowledge sharing within a community of hyper-connected individuals — which illustrates the feasibility of symbiotic organisations that expand with a peer-to-peer model (account executives sell consulting, recruiters find consultants, consultants work at client site) without adding hierarchy.
- Tech giants often function as a “mothership incubator” for their internal project teams — public institutions could do the same, providing office admin, legal services, bookkeeping etc. — EIT Digital’s Co-Location Center already offers some office space for students… Architecture alone can do wonders: enjoyable workspace, proper ergonomics, good monitor setup, desk, chair, warm lighting…
- EF Fund, for example, has been experimenting with methodologies for team (re)formation — if those work, why not try them elsewhere
Perhaps it’s possible to cultivate a vibrant base layer of startup culture without even forming companies…
The Role of Education
So what can universities offer?
- Hard skills: providing workshops, as a gathering place, Homebrew Computer Club, makers’ lab, a tech playground, like the course we have teaching Unity, computational methods, visual design, video making
- Uni therapy: work on attitudes, personal development, learn how to do the hard but important things, the art of rain-making (chasing business and making things happen), becoming resilient, etc.
- “A scholarly mind”: cultivate humanity and gain perspectives, think about accelerometers and gyrospoces, how a keyboard works, how sparks of energy transform to signal, to some systems that serve the human will. When specialisation creates isolation and a sense of alienation where only a small number of people understand your specialty and have a common language, we have to invent ways to build a shared community of the mind, where we are brought together again by some sense of wonder or curiosity about the world, like “why does it glow under black light?”
