When life smiles at you, don’t turn your back
Today 10 years ago, I walked into my 5th job. Two of the persons I met there in the software dev team, I still work with today. The longest streak in my professional career. Without them, Satelligence (the company we work for now) wouldn’t be the company it is today. And probably I wouldn’t be the person I am today either. Let me introduce you to Urnst and Burto (names anonymised for privacy reasons). They are the nicest asshole (Urnst) and most pragmatic dogmatist (Burto) I have ever met.
May 15, 2013
First day at a new job. Excitement is struggling with awkwardness. Introducing myself to my new colleagues, blablabla, autopilot, until I talked with this new colleague who said, “so, you went to highschool with Urnst? You were in the same class right?”. As silent as possible I think to myself “I don’t know who Urnst is, but thank you God for putting him on my path”, so I reply: “That is correct, but then the teacher got caught doing cocaine so we got separated and lost track of each other”. I left her in puzzlement.
Burto, different story. He is a really good programmer and he got all these great visionary ideas about where we should go with our product at the time. Major impostor syndrome kicking in with me. In the early days I was very much intimidated with his skills, knowledge, experience and ideas. But when we sat with the boss, I saw him struggling to get his point across, locking horns with the manager.
I would nod along with that same manager, assuring him we agreed and we would build what he wanted. We built Burto’s vision, not what the manager said he wanted. The manager was happy.
In the end, Urnst, Burto and I completely changed the product development culture at that organisation. There’s the time before us and the time after us. We are still in touch with them. They are great people.
What matters is how well you walk through the fire
Then Satelligence happened. When our founder asked me to join in 2016, I obviously said no. I had a nice job, nice colleagues and it was 10 minutes biking from my home. Moreover, I knew the enormous amount of work to be done at Satelligence and I knew the people capable of doing the job. But they would not work with us.
But sometimes life smiles at you. At that moment, don’t turn your back but seize the opportunity. There was enough budget to hire 2 more persons. So I snake tongued Urnst and Burto into joining and we were good to go.
Without them, I wouldn’t have joined Satelligence. Because there is something special about startups that very few people realise: a startup is one huge paradox. It’s not about reading books & blogs or listening to podcasts about recipes for success. It’s not about getting funded. It’s not about having a revolutionary idea. It’s first and foremost about execution. To quote Roger L Martin:
It’s impossible to have a good strategy poorly executed. That’s because execution actually is strategy — trying to separate the two only leads to confusion.
More specifically, execution while constantly being confronted with paradoxes:
- You are working towards a scalable IT architecture while simultaneously keeping the legacy code alive;
- You are setting up a commercial team staffed with people without any commercial background;
- You are convincing candidate hires to join because of the greatness that lies ahead (which will only materialise if they join).
You have to be able to enjoy ambiguity, distil patterns from seeming chaos, stay calm on the brink of collapse and be able to laugh about your own misery. In other words, you need Urnst and Burto.
A portrait of the artists
Urnst has one of the sharpest analytical minds I encountered in my professional career. He can separate hype from trends like no other (blockchain, anyone?), explain why it is important and execute on it. Besides that, he is Dutcher than Dutch. He is very direct and intense and doesn’t hold back to discuss the elephant in the room. And if there is no elephant in the room, he will put it in the room.. He is the one that brought to my attention the cult of done manifesto and fuck-it-ship-it.
Some colleagues admitted they were scared of Urnst and intimidated by his intense debating style. Truth is, below the surface he is one of the nicest persons you will ever meet. If you’re in trouble, he will help you out. Not only will he relieve your pain, he will also dig down and fix the systemic issue that caused the pain.
Burto is the prototypical nerd that cannot deal with inefficiencies or broken stuff. Everything (everything!) needs to be understood, repaired and optimised. I put my broken record player in the office. One week later, Burto brings his soldering set and fixes it. He has the annoying habit of always thinking he has a fundamentally better solution for every conceivable problem. Even more annoying is that he is usually right. The challenge is his proposed solutions usually take inhuman amounts of person-hours sentencing his designs to utopian dots on the horizon.
Luckily, he is also the most pragmatic “let me fix this by ssh-ing into production” cowboy. In the early days of Satelligence I was still happily hacking along with the devs. When there was a problem on evenings or weekends, I would log into the server only to find Burto already hanging around fixing things on the fly.
Voila, two living paradoxes of persons, both with a hacker mindset (aka Macher mindset). To catch a thief, you need a thief. To solve paradoxes, you need paradoxes.
May 15, 2023
And here we are today, 10 years down the road. Some things changed, most stayed the same. Because, in the end, what matters is how we live our lives. There is no meaning to life itself. There are only your actions and interactions with other human beings. The only thing that matters in life is the quality of your relationships. Your family, your friends, your colleagues.
The secret of any healthy relationship is to find people who are smarter than you, who call you out, who call you bluff, who challenge you. The most dangerous scenario is when you start believing your own nonsense.
This, I realised lately, must be one of the reasons why I am so happy. The last couple of years I am really aware that these are some of the happiest in my life. I never really understood why but now I do: I’m surrounded by smart people who call me out, call me bluff, who challenge me.
Two of them I met 10 years ago today.
There are only so many people you meet that matter. Really not that much.
Cherish them.
I know I do.