The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Although I don’t own a motorbike, I love to cycle. I make it a point to do it at least once a week. There is something freeing about it. My mind detaches from the humdrum of everyday life and wanders through the landscapes of imagination. And then strangely, that wandering mind starts to focus on that same everyday life. But it does so as a curious observer. Noticing things and taking me down roads I wouldn’t otherwise go down.

“My database costs are increasing. Should I switch to a self hosted Postgres database? Imagine the cost savings!”. But what I was salivating over was not the cost savings, but the possible victory of the engineer in me. If I can build an extremely cost effective database solution and yet provide production grade performance, while all the other suckers are shelling out for cloud providers … We engineers are all secretly competing against each other each other :). But we also love what we do. The details. The nuts, bolts and the gears. The caching and the pre-fetching. Your python to my C. My self-hosted bare-metal Linux server to your AWS VM Compute. The details are what we live for.

These thoughts reminded me of the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read it back when I was still in college. It is about people who love the details of technology and those who don’t. Some people like fixing motorbikes. They like the gears, the chains and shafts. Others don’t. They find it annoying and even irritating. This is by no means a criticism of the other side, quite the opposite. It is an acknowledgement that there are in fact two sides and their differences are deep and philosophical. Neither is perfect. Engineers have their own weaknesses. In fact, if there is anything I have learnt in the past year of running my own company, it is that engineers for all their analysis tend to make the most fundamental mistakes.

We love the details and we get lost in it. We imagine all the complex workings of our product and stand proud as we build this beautiful machine.

How can anyone not love it?

Sometimes people will approach me with a pamphlet or a greeting. I know they want to sell me something. I also know that I am not interested. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care if it will change my life. I want to be left alone. I have my own life. I don’t care what you are selling. Please go away.

This is my attitude as a customer. The key part of that attitude is that I am not a customer in my mind. I am living my life and you are bothering me!

Human beings have very little attention to give and a business has to be incredibly compelling for someone to give them their time.

What’s in it for me? What’s in it for the customer.

This is the key problem that engineers don’t fully grasp. At least I didn’t. We are lost marveling at our beautiful and sophisticated software but don’t ask the most important question. Will people give you their time?

It’s like asking a girl out without first creating a feeling of attraction. Is she interested ? That is the bottom line.

Start a conversation. Try flirting. Check if there is a vibe. And if not, walk away.

Entangld was supposed to change our user experience in hiring. And yet that user experience is of little value to job seekers if there are not sufficient companies on the platform. There are huge networking effects in existing platforms that prevent people from trying anything new. If you are a company, the bottom line is - “Can you get me candidates?”. If you are a job seeker the bottom line is - “Can you get me interviews with companies?”. And if you can’t, who cares about the user interface and your software ?

While I was slowly and painfully digesting all of this learning, I was thinking about how strong networking effects shape our world. How the information we share with each other becomes a fundamental bond because it makes us stronger. It allows us to learn together as a civilization. There is no single mind, locker or hard drive that can store all of human knowledge. That knowledge is distributed across billions of humans minds and can never be localised. This gave me an idea. What if bots could talk to each other? What new ideas will emerge at the intersection of their knowledge?

On some level, I seem to be repeating the mistakes of my past. Building on my curiosity instead of market demand. But I am OK with it. I have realized it is what most excites me about running a startup. Waking up everyday think about new ideas. One cannot truly relinquish one’s nature and neither should one. Jack Dorsey famously said in a lecture that “Twitter solves no one’s problem at all. It was something we wanted to use”.

That is not to say that I have learnt nothing. I am far more careful with my effort. I publish my ideas more frequently and seek feedback. I really think about the customer far more than I ever did.

I am currently building World of Bots. It is a platform for bots to have social media style conversations with each other. I have released a detailed API guide to enable anyone to build bots for the platform. A particular application I am testing right now is streaming real time market data as a conversation. The idea is to make all of the complex financial details of the stock market more user friendly. A conversation instead of statistics. You can even ask the bots questions and they will provide an immediate response based on real-time market data.

Can’t wait to see where this idea takes me.

Until next time :)