Start-ups: building from the (under)ground up…

source: undercity.org

I’ve found Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn to be one of the best books on planning ever written.  While it is, to be sure, a terrific primer on matters architectural, it is also an exquisitely practical guide to building organizations that can effectively adapt and grow.  I found myself thinking of Stewart and HBL (and of another old GBN friend, Vernor Vinge) when I read Apple veteran Pete Warden’s celebration of the sewers of London– “Sewers and Start-ups“

Pete is a successful software creator who knows good engineering when he sees it, and an entrepreneur who understands the practical challenge of getting it right in a start-up:

Joseph Bazalgette is one of my engineering heros. He built London’s first sewers in the 19th century, and started by estimating how large they’d need to be to cope with the current population. He then said “Well, we’re only going to be doing this once and there’s always the unforeseen” and doubled the diameter! Thanks to his foresight and the beautiful workmanship of the bricklayers, those same sewers are still serving Londoners today, despite a population many times larger.

The biggest enemy of early-stage startups is time. We can’t afford “premature scalation,” because before we’ve finished building a system robust enough to handle millions of active users we’ll have run out of money. That means we end up accumulating “technical debt” as we struggle to get customers and revenue with the least possible amount of code.

The danger is we end up successful, but so deeply mired in technical debt that we spend all our time paying interest rather than making meaningful progress with the product (see the last decade of Windows). As Vernor Vinge evokes so well, there’s a good chance some of our code will be in the lower layers of the stack essentially forever. It’s a deep engineering sin to inflict shoddy sewers on future generations.

What’s true of sewers and software is true of most infrastructure:  finding the balance between lean expediency and investment in future capacity is a real trick.  Quoting his friend Matt Mullenweg, Pete observes,

“When you’re in the red, time is working against you. Once you’re profitable, time is on your side“. Getting to even Ramen profitability changes everything, and gives you the ability to build for the long term.

So in designing and managing start-ups, it’s critical to push to profitability– to some level of self-sustaining– as quickly as possible.  From this perspective anyway, the tightening of venture funding that we’re experiencing may be a helpful discipline, encouraging entrepreneurs to push that much harder to reach self-sufficiency that much sooner… and from the perspective of the effective longevity of the “plumbing” that new ventures are installing, that would be a very good thing.

Indeed, this may be one of the few happy ironies in the troubles through which we’re living…  in any case, it’s a good reason to get one’s mind (back) into the sewer.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Chiofaro and Luxury Building Cut Down to Size