That Sugar Water Moment

When your career-defining opportunity comes, will you notice?

In 1983, the 28 year-old cofounder of a small 7 year-old company hired out the President of PepsiCo, the world’s second-largest food and beverage corporation.

He did it by presenting his company, his plans, his vision, and then famously asking: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

The young man was Steve Jobs, and his young company was Apple Computer, Inc. Over the next decades, through that company and a pair of others, he would indeed change the world, many times over.

I’m no Steve Jobs. For example, I’m generally nice to people, and I wasn’t a millionaire at 22. But I have plans and a vision to present to you, my dear designer, mon semblable, mon frère.

The CustomerOS open-source project we are building at Openline is more than it seems. To the outside world, we are just helping fast-growing companies get a 360-degree view of their customer. That’s what we claim, that’s what we deliver, and that’s what explains why Openline was recently rated #1 of the early stage Cloud SaaS European startups. But that’s merely the surface.

Below and beyond this mission is something deeper and broader. We aim to tear down the enterprise, and rebuilt it out of first-principles-thinking, from the customer experience up.

Today’s enterprise is the neurotic heir of an industrial-age mindset. Despite HR proclamations to the contrary, despite exhortations from Simon Sinek, despite all the well-intentioned TED talks being shown at team-building events, the enterprise treats its employees like replaceable cogs, sitting in their assigned silos, tightening bolts on the conveyor belt of arbitrary workflows and processes. Meanwhile, customers are being made to talk to robots.

In the age of AI, none of this makes any sense. Robots will soon be doing the jobs of operating machinery, of running processes, or moving information around, of sending emails and action items, of checking status and reporting results. All of this repetitive, formulaic, predictable workflow will not be human work much longer. And that’s fine, because it never was meant to be. It’s robot work.

Humans will be able to focus on what they do well, what they’re made for: Being human with each other. Talking on the phone. Listening, caring, reading between the lines. Understanding, empathising, helping, innovating. Making and keeping promises. Trusting and being trustworthy.

The work we’re doing with CustomerOS will empower every employee to take care of every customer, as personally, as kindly, as patiently as humans are meant to. When any employee can help any customer, then silos crumble, distrust evaporates, absurdity abates. The mind is clear, the heart is kind.

CustomerOS will enable sales, marketing, customer success, operations, billing, legal, and management to forget their labels, and just do whatever’s right for the customer. Instead of replacing the human-facing side of your business with chatbots, it will give a new job to all those displaced: The job of building deeply rooted relationships with your customers, by being human, being there, and being informed.

We’re in the beginning of this adventure. Like the nascent personal computer in the early 80’s, we’re holding in our hands a technology that means tomorrow will be different, profoundly. We have the plans, we have the vision, we’re building apace.

What we’re missing right now is a visionary designer, passionate, obstinate, generous, with the caliber of a Jony Ive. The kind that large enterprises keep in gilded payroll cages, for decoration.

My friend, I may not be Steve Jobs, and you may not be Jony Ive, but neither of us will really know unless we try. So please understand that it’s a gift when I ask you, big-shot designer in a prestigious position, this simple question:

Are you going to sell sugar water, or NFTs, or coffee capsules until you die?

Or are you going to come with me and change the world?