What's the most important asset for tech companies? Hint: it's not the codebase
Google's original codebase would likely be worthless today - François Chollet
I don’t know about you - but usually when I think about breakthroughs and imagine what does it take to build something successful with the power to transform society, I think about the ‘thing’ that was built and the person (or the small group of people) who built that thing. One article, and in particular - one sentence from François Chollet (AI researcher at Google and creator of the famous deep learning library Keras) has given me a new perspective:
The 2005 Google codebase would be largely worthless today. It is Google’s staff and Google’s engineering culture that have made it a trillion-plus dollar company today. And it is them that will keep steering the ship over the coming years -
The thing that was created, was not a singular event that magically took over the world. It couldn’t have been. According to Chollet, the real hierarchy of importance follows:
people → culture → architecture → implementation → code.
How does this influence the way one might go about creating something of value to society?
After a few months of data science consulting earlier this year and over the past year, I became disillusioned by the idea of starting a company, and scaling it up - for a few different reasons. It’s not that I was lacking customers or potential. I kept increasing my rates on XYZ platform and customers would gladly pay: from $50→$100→$150/hour.
I could have gone further, but I started to burn-out not because of too much work - but solely because the work was no fun. Imagine people who don’t have a clue about rocketry asking to land on the moon. I just didn’t gain any knowledge or relevant expertise running ML models in Jupyter notebooks, cheaping out on infrastructure, and sometimes teaching basic concepts such as how to plot a graph in matplotlib. For stuff like this, even $500/hr would not be worth it. Actually if a group of people consistently gave me that much - I’d rather open my own platform and share profits with others that do the grunt work.
My conclusions at the time:
I didn’t have the right startup idea. Maybe I should have a novel product - like an app that generates new personalized music that no-one has ever heard before. Or a blogging platform that incorporates creative AI tools.
I didn’t have the patience to start off with mediocre clients, build up a big practice, and then (hopefully) get bigger clients.
But that would mean that I must compete with big fish like Spotify, Medium and Substack all by myself in the beginning. Or I need to deal with mediocre clients and stomach upsets for many years. Both of which are unattractive.
But I’ve realized that my most memorable life experiences have been in sharing joy - with my friends, family, and sometimes even strangers. So why not follow Chollet’s hierarchy and apply that to creating something of value?
Start off with the people: have conversations over coffee, zoom, etc. These people could be those you have ongoing professional relations with, and potential customers to whom you have added value to at some point for free.
Then the notion of “startup” becomes very organic. It doesn’t have to be something that 1 brilliant mind comes up with. Creating value could be as simple as creating a new product line at your current workplace, after speaking with team members or customers. Or executing an idea that someone else has been thinking of and who knows the relevant people interested.
Focus on culture and implementation: Now that you have yourself, some collaborators, target customers all on board - start to ideate. Let the ones in charge of creating create. Act as a steward. Have fun!
Realize a product and iterate: This could be the codebase. But coming back to what Chollet mentioned - this is not the most important asset that you have created.
Think for a minute that someone managed to infiltrate your codebase and make everything public. Is your competitive edge completely gone? No! Because you have talented, hardworking people and have a positive work culture! So they can go right back to bootstrap mode and iterate a new product - and judging by how they already have come together to create and maintain something awesome, I’ll bet that next time around it will be even more awesome!
How is this very relevant for the current discussion surrounding Elon Musk’s Twitter?
Musk tweeted what looks like a very high-level overview of the Twitter architecture. But he fired more than half of the company.
Now one can only speculate what the impacts of firing these people would be. For someone who thinks that Twitter is just an app - they might be of the notion that replicating this entire architecture is all there is to Twitter, and that can’t possibly cost $50 billion right? So wouldn’t firing people be the smart move to reduce costs, especially since Twitter is already a mature app?
Apart from more detailed codebases, and additional costs including cloud subscriptions and other service fees - this goes back go Chollet’s point that tech companies are so much more than the entire codebase. If Elon ended up firing key personnel whose vision, skills, and attitudes are removed from the company - this could end up curtailing innovation in the long run and cause Twitter to lose it’s competitive advantage.
If you enjoyed this post, please share on social media or even just one person you think might enjoy holistic perspectives on the interconnections between technology and modern societies. Feel free to also post any comments in the post discussions on the cyber-physical substack page. This is a small, but growing effort and I hope that I can share in my journey in understanding and building resilient societies.