Engineering my life, to live better and more consciously

I left Google in July this year, where I worked for over 6 years. Around the same time, we were expecting a third child, and all the changes in my personal and professional life was forcing me to think about my future career in a much longer term than I have done before.

It’s a difficult thing to do, being in an industry where speed is constant, and people change jobs every few years. However, that short-term thinking was exactly what had been bothering me in the past, so I’m glad that I had a chance to step back and rethink what work means to me, and I’m grateful to Taj Campbell for initiating the journey we’ve been taking together over the past several months.

At a really basic level, I know that I want to continue hacking stuff and making cool things; it’s been programmed in my DNA from the early days, when I was sneaking into my father’s room to use his PC-9821. But I also wanted to avoid my tendency to locally optimize. After leaving Google, I obviously felt a sense of discontinuity, because a lot of assets that I have collected and accumulated are strongly tied to the corporation and mean less outside. I also felt that I’ve been focusing too much on a particular aspect of software engineering, even though my curiosity and passion for creation seem to be much broader. So, it was becoming clear to me that jumping from a tech startup to another one was not the way to continue the journey, and that I wanted to think of a framework a level higher and with perspective to my entire lifetime.

I’m not yet able to precisely describe what that framework should look like, but I’m starting to formulate a few principles that I strongly resonate with:

Network of talented people

It’s really the people that matter. Google’s amazing environment was solid proof of that. Moreover, I was surprised to learn that, even among Googlers, there are a handful of even more exceptional people who can actually produce >> 10x faster and better than others. I’d like to keep raising my creative standard through working with these kinds of talented people and their extended networks. And I want that professional network to be untied as much as possible from companies in a traditional sense, so I am part of it as I continue to hack things for different projects at different locations, and even after my so-called retirement.

Repository of shared resources

The culture of sharing and reusing has drastically reduced the cost of incubation in the software industry. This was very true at Google, powered by a huge repository that contains the code of almost all products, software, and services it created so far. We need to be sharing so much more among the startup community in Japan. I dream of building a repository with a similar spirit, at scale, that is well organized and curated, that is rightly protected for sharing beyond companies, and that contains much more than just code: know-how, tools, assets, templates, schemes, inspirations…

Culture of generalized reciprocity*

I want to find myself in an environment that is culturally mature, where giving and sharing is justified instead of worrying about conflicts. That’s how I can be fully functional. The network and the repository matter significantly less if people are speculative and driven by the wrong form of individualism and short-term thinking.

*Generalized reciprocity: “I’ll do this for you without expecting anything specific back from you, in the confident expectation that someone else will do something for me down the road.”
Bowling Alone, p21, Robert D. Putnam.

I’m taking the launch & iterate strategy, as I learned at Google, while I continue to refine my thinking. I’ve been recently working with Taj Campbell and Alisaun Fukugaki to start implementing some of these values more formally, so we can start testing them. We named our venture Straylight. It is the beginning of what we, and hopefully some of our children, will happily call “home.”