Werd I/O

My future children, should I have any, will come from a tapestry of places. From my side of their lineage alone, they will come from three continents. They will have multiple passports. They'll share my sense of both coming from a specific place but also no place at all. I don't completely identify with my nationalities, and it's likely that neither will they.

It wasn't until well into my adult life that I understood how far the metadata of my identity diverged from most peoples'. Many people include a nationality in the fabric of who they are; I have multiple, and don't completely identify with any of them. Particularly here in the US, many people identify with a religion; I don't believe in any. For a lot of people, they have a deep, historical relationship with their communities that goes back for generations; mine goes back less than one.

People seem to be very worried about how their culture changes in the face of immigration. The truth is that culture has always been changing through the ebb and flow of populations.

In the 1300s, the Spanish began to drive out their Jewish population - once one of the most prosperous communities of Jews in the world. Continuing a pattern that has been repeated all over the world, they robbed and murdered them, ultimately forcing them to convert to Catholicism, leave the country, or die. Some found their way to Switzerland, where they became textile millers in an area of Zurich called Werd ("river island"). Eventually, they moved their home to the nearby municipality of Elgg.

In the 1600s, a group of English puritans moved to Holland in order to escape the volatile politics and religious intolerance of the time. After some time there, they became afraid of losing their cultural identity to the Dutch, so they secured investment to start a new colony in America. There, they had more control, and could live by their values.

In the 1800s, the Dutch established a system of indentured labor in Indonesia, under a brutal colonial rule and racist caste system. In the 20th century, they enacted some political reforms and invested in infrastructure in the country, allowing the indigenous population limited freedoms like education, but squashed the nationalist movements that began to emerge. The Japanese invaded during the second world war, placing many of the Dutch settlers in internment camps. When that war ended, the Indonesians fought for independence, seizing assets and infrastructure, and many settlers fled back to the Netherlands. Post-war life was hard there, and some found themselves seeking asylum in places like California.

In the early 1900s, between 30,000 and 60,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine over a three year period. Escaping was hard; many families failed. What was once one of the largest Jewish communities in the world was decimated. Some families made it to places like New York, where they changed their names and identities. Partially this was to culturally assimilate into their new home; partially this was because America itself harbored anti-semitic sentiments until well after the second world war.

This is a subset of the events that lead to me, and will lead to my hypothetical future children. I'm descended from Swiss textile merchants, who wound up having a hand in the Reformation; a Mayflower passenger who became the religious leader of the colony; a leader of the resistance against the Japanese in Indonesia whose whole family, including my toddler father, was interned; a major union leader in New England who had fled from Ukraine. My grandfather who served in the US Army and had to deny his Jewishness when he was captured by the Nazis (and survived to later meet Einstein, have tea with Sylvia Plath, and translate Crime and Punishment into English). My academically-inclined parents who moved to study at Oxford for a year and stayed for over twenty.

Growing up in England, I was ashamed of my identity. Teenagers leap on any difference, and my background - even in Oxford, a university city with an ever-changing population of visiting academics - made me feel like an alien. Because I had an English accent, people felt free to say how much they hated Europeans and Americans around me. At one point, I considered changing my last name to Ward, because whenever I had to tell someone my last name over the phone, that's what they would repeat back to me. "Werdmüller." "Ward?" "Werdmüller." "Ward."

As I grew older, I began to bristle against this more and more. "You can become a British citizen, you know," people would tell me, almost without fail, whenever they discovered I wasn't. It was meant kindly, I think: they were proud of their national identity, and they wanted me to be able to attach that metadata to mine, too.

What they missed was that it was an erasure of who I was. My identity really is wrapped up in all these migrations of people - not just hundreds of years ago, but right now. All of it is a part of me. If you asked me today, I wouldn't change my name for the world, and I wouldn't give up any of my history to be able to say I was from any one place. I'm an immigrant everywhere, and that's okay. I proudly come from a long line of immigrants and nomads.

I've learned, the hard way, that this is confronting for many people. They're proud of being British or American, and perhaps my rejection of that somehow reflects on those values. Nationality and religion are shortcuts to identity, in the same way the way you dress can be. In particular, the idea that I am not tethered to any one country - and don't want to be - is very difficult to accept. As one ex-girlfriend put it, "it's like you don't want to fit in".

Today, a growing percentage of the world's population - a little over 40% - is connected over the Internet. We have the ability to  speak to people virtually anywhere, instantly, which means relationships can emerge over greater distances, in greater numbers. The number of dual or multiple citizenships has been rapidly increasing during my lifetime (although no government officially keeps track), and it will continue as more and more people gain the freedom to easily travel and communicate globally.

Many people complain about how immigration is changing the cultural landscape of their country. In America, a country founded by immigrants relatively recently, this is ridiculous. But it's ridiculous everywhere: in a sense, the world is a country of immigrants. Borders can be seen as a kind of top-down attempt to inhibit movement in order to preserve resources, but people have always moved. The ebb and flow of populations is the heartbeat of human civilization.

Which brings me back to my hypothetical future children. I'm anxious that they not be forced to fit into someone else's cookie-cutter idea of what their identity should be. They have the rich histories of the two people who will lead to them; of countries and religion, persecution and immigration. Ultimately, they will have the privilege of deciding who they want to be, and how they define themselves. The usual metadata need not apply.

Prologue:

The first time I ever visited South Park, the tiny patch of grass in downtown San Francisco that the Matter garage would later back onto, Biz Stone bought me a coffee. We circled the park and talked about Elgg, our open source social networking product, and Twitter, the startup he was working on at the time.

The most important piece of advice he gave us was this: hold something back. It's fine to open source your code, to release an open product, but you've got to hold back the thing that will make you valuable.

This was the most important advice we received about Elgg. We ignored it completely.

Six years later: September 2014.

Erin and I stepped down from the Paley Center stage in New York, exhausted. Most accelerators have one demo day. Because Matter is so closely tied to both media and technology, it has two: one at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, in the heart of SoMa, and the other in New York, the city where most of America's media companies call home.

Known, we told an audience of media luminaries like Jeff Jarvis and industry investors, was a way for post-secondary students to save their coursework, notes and discussions on a site that they controlled. In a world where students are used to delightful apps and beautiful user experiences, the Learning Management Systems used by 93% of institutions are an abomination that actively hinder learning. Worse, when a course is over, all of the discussions and resources that were collaboratively made by the class are deleted forever. With Known, students can publish to their own site, and syndicate to these other platforms, allowing them to take control over their learning using a beautiful, mobile-first user interface.

Better yet, we told the audience, Known has an open source core. We know that one size doesn't fit all in education. With Known, every single feature has an API endpoint, and every single feature can be customized to fit both the needs of the institution and the student. The first pilot is happening right now, and we're getting great feedback.

Applause. Seven minutes later, we were done. This was day zero for our company: the next day, the hard work would begin.

Skip forward: September 2015.

I looked around the table at Garaje. Most of the alumni from Matter's third class were here, and had great stories to tell: Musey were thriving and building beautiful design apps; LocalData were helping to improve American cities; Louder were preparing their acquisition by Change.org. Over in New York, Stringr were delivering video to more and more news stations.

In some ways, Known was doing well. Our software was powering tens of thousands of websites. We had received great coverage at our launch, and continued to get fantastic feedback from educators all over the world. People were using Known to teach on five continents.

Yet at the same time, we didn't know how we were going to pay rent, and growth was linear. For a project, we were doing well. For a company, we weren't doing well - and there were still only two of us.

What went wrong?

First, you have to understand open source.

Open source is best defined by its four freedoms, which are inspired by Roosevelt's declaration of the four freedoms that every human should be able to enjoy. These dictate that you should be able to:

0. Run the program as you wish, for any purpose
1. Study how it works, and modify its function
2. Redistribute copies “so you can help your neighbor”
3. Distribute copies of your modified versions

The intention is that open source software is free as in speech: it grants you liberties over the code you run that you might not get with other products.

Unfortunately, the word "free" is overloaded: it has multiple possible meanings. In reality, open source has become synonymous with free as in beer: software that you can use without incurring any direct licensing costs.

Our strategy was to create an open core that people could freely distribute, and then layer premium services over the top. If you didn't want to worry about managing servers, we had an excellent SaaS product. If you didn't want to worry about managing APIs to third-party platforms, we offered Convoy. Finally, we wanted to provide access to a network of trusted consultants who could create customizations for institutional customers.

Our utopian vision was to have organic growth through sharing, leading to institutional customers. This didn't happen - at least, not as fast as we needed it to.

Second, you have to understand startups.

We have exact numbers internally, but a good rule of thumb in San Francisco is that, to break even, we need to bring in $10,000 per employee per month. This covers below market rate salaries, as well as all the overheads you incur when you're running a business (for example, taxes and moderate infrastructure costs). It doesn't cover some of the extra investment you really need to put into sales, marketing and product development.

To be relatively comfortable as a two-person company, we need to clear $240,000 per year. That's a tough ask for many businesses, which is one reason why investors are useful: they back your team and put money into your company, making a bet that you'll be profitable later on and will be able to pay them back and then some.

Consider, also, that most teams are not limited to two people. I've got a development and product management background; Erin is an analyst and user experience expert. We need to bring on a full-time technical lead and a front-end designer. I can't do either my CEO (sales! research! business development!) or web development jobs justice, and Erin can't do her user experience or front-end jobs justice. We also need to have redundancy on our staff, so if one of us is sick or out doing sales work, the company can continue to be productive. As soon as you start talking about building a real team, those numbers explode.

I don't believe it's possible to start a consumer startup as a full-time endeavor without significant investment. Unlike businesses, only a tiny minority of consumer users are willing to pay money. You need to have enough runway (the time left in your company before it runs out of money) to reach a mass-market audience, and then make sure you're either solving a problem that they are willing to pay for a solution to. Because it's so hard to get money from consumers, these businesses often make their money through advertising: reaching targeted, engaged audiences is absolutely a problem that advertisers will pay for a solution to.

Enterprise startups potentially require less investment, but the sales cycle - the time it takes to sell to an individual customer - is potentially much longer, and the total cost to acquire a single customer is much higher. You need to have enough money in the bank to make this work; investment is a useful vehicle to bring your company to the next stage of its development.

Investors protect their money by minimizing risk. In this context, open source is a liability: remember the free as in beer problem? By giving away the portion of your product that captures value, you're essentially devaluing your business to zero. Why would anybody invest in that? I'm sincerely grateful that Matter did invest in our team. In return, the least we can do is be a good steward of investor value.

That $240,000? It's a baseline. Biz was completely right: you need to hold back the thing that makes you valuable.

Feedback is a gift - and so is open source.

When they work well, open source communities are amazing things: collaborative groups of disparate people all agreeing to make software together for use by the commons. As a methodology, it's beautiful, and can showcase the best of humanity.

When you're building a product for sale, it's important that you've identified a problem that people will pay money to have solved for them, and that you're solving it well. That means talking to a lot of people, and both making and iterating a lot of rough prototypes. Your product has to be compelling, well-made and scalable. As it's concisely described in design thinking circles, you need to constantly be testing its desirability, feasibility and viability.

When your product is open source, you'll get a lot of feedback from the community. This is important to take on board, and the community is a hugely valuable part of your ecosystem - but at the same time, it's unlikely that open source community members are customers. It's possible that they're users; it's also possible that they're open source enthusiasts who are just happy to see another project join the movement.

Open source projects, as a whole, have famously bad usability. That's because their feedback loop is constrained to other developers. One recent example of this disconnect is a heated debate about using Slack vs Internet Relay Chat. To non-technical users, IRC is arcane and unfriendly (which also accurately describes many of the discussions that take place there), yet many open source maintainers couldn't understand the problem.

When you're building a compelling product, the license should be irrelevant. It should be compelling whether it's completely closed or released under the GPL: the license is how you distribute the product, not something that's inherent to the product itself.

Unfortunately, in the case of Known, I think a lot of people liked it because it was free and open source. This was a bad signal - and certainly not one that will lead to paying customers and a thriving business. (It's worth saying here that a consistent voice of real support has been the indie web community, alongside companies like Reclaim Hosting, which legitimately wants to see us succeed.)

I'm not Donald Trump, but ...

The biggest surprise I've had since starting Known is the amount of feedback complaining that we're trying to make money with it. Usually this comes with some kind of a complaint about startups and capitalism.

If you know me, you'll know that my politics err on the liberal side of liberal; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the US politicians who best describe the country I want to live in. I'm hardly a hardcore conservative capitalist. Nonetheless, I was taken aback to discover that we'd accidentally joined an anti-capitalist movement: we've been very open about being a business since the day we announced our existence.

In fact, I really wanted to show that it was possible to create a profitable, thriving business creating respectful software that gives users full control of their data. I think it's important.

Here are some real things I've heard about making money from open source:

• We should have a universal basic income so people won't have to worry about how they'll make money.
  A universal basic income is not money from the sky; it's a proven way to create a real safety net, but it does rely on taxation. It doesn't work if everyone relies on a basic income, and the idea that you should have to live at the lowest possible income if you're going to build respectful software is both ridiculous and kind of offensive. Welfare is important, but not as a way to pay for open source software.
• We should be striving to build a post-money society.
  I mean, to be fair, I'm a Star Trek fan too.
• We should just build software for the love of it and not worry about making money.
  Most egregiously, we've heard this from people who literally take our free product and sell services around it.

All of these are obviously detatched from reality.

This culture of anti-capitalism in open source is actively harmful. It's a reason why so few women (1.5%!) participate in open source projects, for example, and why people in disadvantaged communities are underrepresented. Having the ability to work on a project for free represents enormous privilege. At its best, open source can be a way for people to contribute to a global commons and freely exchange ideas; at its worst, it's exploitative and exclusionary.

It's devalued our time. I get personal requests on all channels on a daily basis - email, Twitter, Facebook, even unsolicited phone calls - asking for free help. (I no longer give free personal help, except on the mailing list, where it can be used to grow a commons of support information that everyone can use.) Sometimes these calls for free help come from people who are making money from our labor.

Open source doesn't need folk songs. It needs a way to fairly compensate the people who participate in it. I'm not at all against anti-capitalism - but it sure is hard to build a business on it.

But aren't there a lot of profitable open source businesses?

No.

We've most often been compared to WordPress, which powers over 23% of the web. Automattic is valued at over $1.1bn, has a huge team worldwide, and is widely held as the poster child for open source businesses.

In reality, the WordPress open source project is held by a non-profit foundation. Automattic concentrates solely on hosted services.

Ghost, another project we've been compared to, is a non-profit entity in its entirety. It made a lot of its money by crowdfunding as a WordPress plugin, before switching to becoming a node.js project. This technical change made it much harder to install, making their paid, hosted services an easy choice.

Ind.ie hasn't really launched Heartbeat, their distributed social network, but their project is significantly better-funded than Known. This is partially because they crowdfunded as a smartphone, before choosing to shift their attention to a more focused problem.

Mozilla has a long history that stems from Netscape. Their success is not something that a new entrant to the market could replicate.

Red Hat is held up as a model open source business: its current market cap is $14.8bn, or roughly 2.8% of a Google. It provides professional services and support licensing around its Linux distributions.

Infrastructure is a more profitable place for open source to thrive: MongoDB, CoreOS and Docker are all examples of well-funded open source startups. Each one sells better support, trustability and reliability - which makes sense to pay for if you're building a business on top of their technologies.

For these businesses, open source allows them to build a bigger market for their products, which they can then capitalize on. It's a smart strategy that has very little to do with freedom, and everything to do with growth.

What about other funding methods?

BountySource, the crowdfunding platform for open source projects, is one oft-mentioned funding method. It's actually a pretty great idea, that I think will wonderfully for hobbyists, and will encourage developers on distributed projects to work on smaller bugs and features. I don't foresee it covering our costs.

Similarly, Patreon works very well for personal projects, and is redefining how some artists make their money.

We currently make a significant portion of our income through professional services, but this isn't sustainable for a number of reasons. As Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint Ventures pointed out earlier this year in this excellent analysis:

The data suggests that customers are willing to pay 20%+ margins on price points of greater than $200,000. Less than that price point, the data shows it to be difficult to operate a professional services team at better than breakeven.

When you consider all of the overheads inherent to running a company, you would actually make more money just being a freelance developer. Professional services jobs are often one-offs, and while they sometimes lead to contracts, it can be an equal effort to go find the next one. It's not a great way to grow.

That also negates the common argument about making money by providing tertiary services like support and customization. These strategies add more risk to the business, and don't cumulatively add value. At lower price points, it's not even a lifestyle business: it's hand to mouth.

What's next?

None of this should be a downer. I want to open a real conversation about making money sustainably with respectful software. Between Elgg and Known, I've spent the majority of my career working on these issues. I think they're solvable, and I think the result will be a better software ecosystem.

Known isn't at all going away, and we continue to release new versions every single month. We're evaluating the services we provide around it, but we love how the community has rallied around it, and we love how it's being used. We expect it to live and breathe for a long time.

However, we're learning from companies like Automattic, and non-profits like the WordPress Foundation. We're thinking hard about how the project is supported. And it should go without saying that we're committed to building a valuable, growing business.

There's a strong movement around creating alternatives to software that tracks and spies on us. I think that's a fantastic thing. Building software is about empowering people to do things they previously couldn't. But a part of building empowering tools is to make sure they can be provided sustainably. If you're doing something good, you need to be able to keep doing it - and whether you like it or not, that means money.

We need to have a stronger conversation about money in open source, and about building healthy businesses on respectful software.

Conclusions

As either Milton Friedman or Alfred P. Sloan said: "the business of business is business". Build a healthy business; don't be led by ideology. You're not helping build a more open world if you're showing that being open is unsustainable or detrimental; show that you can do well.

And when you succeed, use the fruits of your labor to do good.

We'll be here, cheering for you.

I wrote a follow-up to this post: why we built Known.

September 11, 2001

I was in Oxford, working for Daily Information. My dad actually came into the office to let me know that it had happened - I had been building a web app and had no idea. For the rest of the day I tried to reload news sites to learn more; the Guardian was the only one that consistently stayed up.

The terror of the event itself is obvious, but more than anything else, I remember being immediately hit by the overwhelming sadness of it. Thousands of people who had just gone to work that day, like we all had to, and were trapped in their office by something that had nothing to do with them. I remember waiting for the bus home that day, watching the faces in all the cars and buses that passed me almost in slow motion, thinking that it could have been any of us. I wondered what their lives were like; who they were going home to see. Each face was at once unknowable and subject to the same shared experiences we all have.

I was the only American among my friends, and so I was less distanced from it than them. I remember waiting to hear from my cousin who had been on the New York subway at the time. I'm kind of a stealth American (no accent), so nobody guarded what they said around me. They definitely had a different take, and among them, as well as more widely, there was a sense of "America deserved this". It's hard to accurately describe the anti-American resentment that still pervades liberal Britain, but it was very ugly that day. On Livejournal, someone I followed (and knew in real life) posted: "Burn, America, burn".

One thing I agreed with them on was that we couldn't be sure what the President would do. America had elected a wildcard, who had previously held the record for number of state executions. It seemed clear that he would declare war, and potentially use this as an excuse to erode freedoms and turn America into a different kind of country; we had enough distance to be having those discussions on day one.

There were so many questions in the days that followed. Nobody really understood what had happened, and the official Bush explanations were not considered trustworthy. People brought up the American-led Chilean coup on September 11, 2003, when Salvador Allende had been deposed and killed; had it been symbolically related to that? Al Qaeda seemed like it had come out of nowhere.

Meanwhile, the families of thousands of people were grieving.

September 11, 2002

I had an aisle to myself on the flight to California. The flight had been cheap, and it was obvious that if something were to happen on that day, it wouldn't be on a plane. Airport security at all levels was incredibly high; nobody could afford for there to be another attack.

I had graduated that summer. Earlier that year, my parents had moved back to California, mostly to take care of my grandmother. They were living in a small, agricultural town in the central valley, and I had decided to join them and help for a few months. This was what families do, I thought: when someone needs support, they band together and help them. Moreover, my Oma had brought her children through a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia, finding creative ways to keep them alive in horrifying circumstances. My dad is one of the youngest survivors of these camps, because of her. In turn, taking care of her at the end of her life was the right thing to do.

In contrast to the usual stereotype of California, the central valley is largely a conservative stronghold. When I first arrived, it was the kind of place where they only played country music on the radio and there was a flag on every house. Poorer communities are the ones that disproportionately fight our wars, and there was a collage in the local supermarket of everyone in the community who had joined the army and gone to fight in Afghanistan.

The central valley also has one of the largest Assyrian populations in the US, which would lead to some interesting perspectives a few years later, when the US invaded Iraq.

Our suspicions about Bush had proven to be correct, and the PATRIOT Act was in place. The implications seemed terrible, but these perspectives seemed to be strangely absent on the news. But there was the Internet, and conversations were happening all over the social web. (MetaFilter became my go-to place for intelligent, non-histrionic discussion.) I had started a comedy site the previous year, full of sarcastic personality tests and articles that were heavily influenced by both The Onion and Ben Brown's Uber.nu. Conversations were beginning to happen on the forum there, too.

I flew back to Edinburgh after Christmas, and found a job in educational technology at the university. Dave Tosh and I shared a tiny office, and bonded over talking about politics. It wasn't long before we had laid the groundwork for Elgg.

September 11, 2011

I was sitting at the kitchen table I'm sitting at now. It had been my turn to move to California to support a family-member; my mother was deeply ill and I had to be closer to her. I had left Elgg when she was diagnosed: there were disagreements about direction, and I was suddenly reminded how short and fragile life was.

My girlfriend had agreed that being here was important, and had come out with me, but had needed to go home for visa reasons. Eventually, after several more trips, she would decide that she didn't feel comfortable living in the US, or with marrying me. September was the first month I was by myself in my apartment, and I found myself without any friends, working remotely for latakoo in Austin.

Rather than settle in the valley, I had decided that the Bay Area was close enough. I didn't have a car, but you could BART to Dublin/Pleasanton, and be picked up from there. The valley itself had become more moderate over time, partially (I think) because of the influence of the new UC Merced campus, and the growth of CSU Stanislaus, closer to my parents. Certainly, you could hear more than country music on the radio, and the college radio station was both interesting and occasionally edgy.

I grew up in Oxford: a leafy university town just close enough to London. Maybe because of this, I picked Berkeley, another leafy university town, which is just close enough to San Francisco. (A train from Oxford to London takes 49 minutes; getting to San Francisco from Berkeley takes around 30.) My landlady is a Puerto Rican novelist who sometimes gave drum therapy sessions downstairs. If I look out through my kitchen window, I just see trees; the garden is dominated by a redwood that is just a little too close to the house. Squirrels, overweight from the nearby restaurants, often just sit and watch me, and I wonder what they're planning.

Yet, ask anyone who's just moved here what they notice first, and they'll bring up the homeless people. Inequality and social issues here are troublingly omnipresent. The American dream tells us that anyone can be anything, which means that whens someone doesn't make it, or they fall through the cracks, it must be their fault somehow. It's confronting to see people in so much pain every day, but not as confronting as the day you realize you're walking right by them without thinking about it.

Countless people told me that they wouldn't have moved to the US; not even if a parent was dying. I began to question whether I had done the right thing, but I also silently judged them. You wouldn't move to another country to support your family? I asked but didn't ask them. I'm sorry your family has so little love.

I don't know if that was fair, but it felt like an appropriate response to the lack of understanding.

September 11, 2014

"I'm Ben; this is my co-founder Erin; and I'd like to introduce you to Elle." Click. Cue story.

We were on stage at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, at the tail end of our journey through Matter. Over five months, we had taken a simple idea - that individuals and communities deserve to own their own spaces on the Internet - and used design thinking techniques to make it a more focused product that addressed a concrete need. Elle was a construct: a student we had invented to make our story more relatable and create a shared understanding.

After a long health journey, my mother had finally begun to feel better that spring. 2013 had been the most stressful year of my life, by a long way; mostly for her, but also for my whole family in a support role. I had also lost the relationship I had once hoped I'd have for the rest of my life, and the financial pressures of working for a startup and living in an expensive part of the world had often reared their head. Compared to that year, 2014 felt like I had found all my luck at once.

Through Matter, and before that, through the indie web community, I felt like I had communities of friends. There were people I could call on to grab a beer or some dinner, and I was grateful for that; the first year of being in the Bay Area had been lonely. The turning point had been at the first XOXO, which had been a reminder that individual creativity was not just a vital part of my life, but was somethign that could flourish on its own. I met lovely people there, and at the sequel the next year.

California had given me opportunities that I wouldn't have had anywhere else. It's also, by far, the most beautiful place I've ever lived. Standing on that stage, telling the world what we had built, I felt grateful. I still feel grateful now. I'm lucky as hell.

I miss everyone I left behind a great deal, but any time I want to, I can climb in a metal tube, sit for eleven hours while it shoots through the sky, and go see them. After all the health problems and startup adventures, I finally went back for three weeks last December. Air travel is odd: the reality you step out into supplants the reality you left. Suddenly, California felt like a dream, and Edinburgh and Oxford were immediate and there, like I had never left. The first thing I did was the first thing anyone would have done: I went to the pub with my friends.

But I could just as easily have walked out into Iran, or Israel, or Egypt, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Those are all realities too, and all just a sky-ride in a metal tube away. The only difference is circumstance.

Just as so many people couldn't understand why I felt the need to move to America, we have the same cognitive distance from the people who live in those places. They're outside our immediate understanding, but they are living their own human realities - and our own reality is distant to them. The truth is, though, that we're all people, governed by the same base needs. I mean, of course we are.

My hope for the web has always been that getting on a plane wouldn't be necessary to understand each other more clearly. My hope for Known was that, in a small way, we could help bridge that distance, by giving everyone a voice that they control.

I think back to the people I watched from that bus stop often. You can zoom out from there, to think about all the people in a country, and then a region, and then the world. Each one an individual, at once unknowable and subject to the same shared experiences we all have. We are all connected, both by technology and by humanity. Understanding each other is how we will all progress together.

Known, the company I founded with Erin Jo Richey, is the third startup I've been deeply involved in. The first created Elgg, the open source social networking platform; I was CTO. The second is latakoo, which helps video professionals at organizations like NBC News send video quickly and in the correct format without needing to worry about compression or codecs. Again, I was CTO. In both cases, I was heavily involved in all aspects of the business, but my primary role was tending product, infrastructure and engineering.

At Known, I still write code and tend servers, but my role is to put myself out of that job. Despite having worked closely with two CEOs over ten years, and having spent a lot of time with CEOs of other companies, I've learned a lot while I've been doing this. I've also had conversations with developers that have revealed some incorrect but commonly-held assumptions.

Here are some notes I've made. Some of these I knew before; some of these I've learned on the job. But they've all come up in conversation, so I thought I'd make a list for anyone else who arrives at being a business founder via the engineering route. We're still finding our way - Known is not, yet, a unicorn - but here's what I have so far.

The less I code, the better my business does.

I could spend my time building software all day long, but that's only a fraction of the story. There's a lot more  to building a great product than writing code: you're going to need to talk to people, constantly, to empathize with the problems they actually have. (More on this in a second.) Most importantly, there's a lot more to building a great business than building a great product. You know how startup founders constantly, infuriatingly, talk about "hustling"? The language might be pure machismo, but the sentiment isn't bullshit.

When I'm sitting and coding, I'm not talking to people, I'm not selling, I'm not gaining insight and there's a real danger my business's wheels are spinning without gaining any traction.

The biggest mistake I made on Known is sitting down and building for the first six months of our life, as we went through the Matter program. If I could do it again, I would spend almost none of that time behind my screen.

Don't scratch your own itch.

In the open source world, there's a "scratch your own itch" mentality: build software to solve your own problems. It's true that you can gain insight to a problem that way. But you're probably not going to want to pay yourself for your own product, so you'd better be solving problems for a lot of other people, too. That means you need to learn what peoples' itches are, and most importantly, get over the idea that you know better than them.

Many developers, because they know computers better than their users, think they know problems better than them, too. The thing is, as a developer, your problems are very different indeed. You use computers dramatically differently to most people; you work in a different context to most people. The only way to gain insight is to talk to lots and lots of people, constantly.

If you care passionately about a problem, the challenge is then to accept it when it's not shared with enough people to be a viable business. A concrete example: we learned the hard way that people, generally, won't pay for an indie web product for individuals, and took too long to explore other business avenues. (Partially because I care dearly about that problem and solution.) A platform for lots of people to share resources in a private group, with tight integration with intranets and learning management systems? We're learning that this is more valuable, and more in need. We're investigating much more, and I'm certain we'll continue to evolve.

Pick the right market; make the right product. Make money.

Learning to ask people for money is the single hardest thing I've had to do. I'm getting better at it, in part thanks to the storytelling techniques we picked up at Matter.

Product-market fit is key. It can't be overstated how important this is.

Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

The problem you pick is directly related to how effectively you can sell - not just because you need to be solving real pain for people, but because different problems have different values. A "good market" is one that can support a business well, both in terms of growth and finance. Satisfy that market, and, well, you're in business.

We sell Known Pro for $10 a month: hardly a bank-breaking amount. Nonetheless, we've had plenty of feedback that it's much too expensive. That's partially because the problem we were solving wasn't painful enough, and partially because consumers are used to getting their applications for free, with ads to support them.

So part of "hustling" is about picking a really important problem for a valuable market and solving it well. Another part is making sure the people who can benefit from it know about it. The Field of Dreams fallacy - "if you build it, they will come" - takes a lot of work to avoid. I have a recurring task in Asana that tells me to reach out to new potential customers every day, multiple times a day, but sales is really about relationships, which takes time. Have conversations. Gain insight. See if you can solve their problems well. Social media is fun but virtually useless for this: you need to talk to people directly.

And here's something I've only latterly learned: point-blank ask people to pay. Be confident that what you're offering is valuable. If you've done your research, and built your product well, it is. (And if nobody says "yes", then it's time to go through that process again.)

Do things that don't scale in order to learn.

Startups need to do things that scale over time. It's better to design a refrigerator once and sell lots of them than to build bespoke refrigerators. But in the beginning, spending time solving individual problems, and holding peoples' hands, can give you insight that you can use to build those really scalable solutions.

Professional services like writing bespoke software are not a great way to run a startup - they're inherently unscalable - but they can be an interesting way to learn about which problems people find valuable. They're also a good way to bootstrap, in the early stages, as long as you don't become too dependent on them.

Be bloody-minded, but only about the right things.

Lots of people will tell you you're going to fail. You have to ignore those voices, while also knowing when you really are going to fail. That's why you keep talking to people, making prototypes, searching for that elusive product-market fit.

Choosing what to be bloody-minded about can be nuanced. For example:

Technology doesn't matter (except when it does).

Developers often fall down rabbit holes discussing the relative merits of operating systems and programming languages. Guess what: users don't care. Whether you use one framework or another isn't important to your bottom line - unless it will affect hiring or scalability later on. It's far better to use what you know.

But sometimes the technology you choose is integral to the problem. I care about the web, and figured that a responsive interface that works on any web browser would make us portable acros platforms. This was flat-out wrong: we needed to build an app. We still need to build an app.

The entire Internet landscape has changed over the last six years, and we were building for an outdated version that doesn't really exist anymore. As technologists, we tend to fall in love with particular products or solutions. Customers don't really work that way, and we need to meet them where they're at.

Non-technical customers don't like options.

As a technical person, I like to customize my software. I want lots of options, and I always have: I remember changing my desktop fonts and colors as a teenager, or writing scripts for the chatrooms I used to join. So I wasn't prepared, when we started to do more conversations with real people, for how little they want that. Apple is right: things should just work. Options are complexity; software should just do the right things.

I think that's one reason why there's a movement towards smaller apps and services that just do one thing. You can focus on solving one thing well, without making it configurable within an inch of its life. If a user wants it to work a different way, they can choose a different app. That's totally not how I wish computers worked for people, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's this: what I want is irrelevant.

Run.

Run fast. Keep adjusting your direction. But run like the wind. You're never the only person in the race.

Investment isn't just not-evil: it's often crucial.

Bootstrapping is very hard for any business, but particularly tough if you're trying to launch a consumer product, which needs very wide exposure to gain traction and win in the marketplace. Unless you're independently wealthy or have an amazing network of people who are, you will need to find support. Money aside, the right investors become members of your team, helping you find success. Their insights and contacts will be invaluable.

But that means you have to have your story straight. Sarah Milstein puts it perfectly:

Entrepreneurs understandably get upset when VCs don’t grasp your business’s potential or tell you your idea is too complex. While those things happen, and they’re shitty, it’s not just that VCs are under-informed. It’s also that their LPs won’t support investments they don’t understand. Additionally, to keep attracting LP money, VCs need to put their money in startups that other investors will like down the road. VCs thus have little incentive to try to wrap their heads around your obscure idea, even if it’s possibly ground-breaking. VCs are money managers; they do not exist to throw dollars into almost any idea.

Keep it simple, stupid. Your ultra-cunning complicated mousetrap or niche technical concept may not be investable. You know you're doing something awesome, but the perception of your team, product, market and solution has to be that it has a strong chance of success. Yes, that rules some ventures out from large-scape investment and partially explains why the current Silicon Valley landscape looks like it does. So, find another way:

Be scrappy.

Don't be afraid of hacks or doing things "the wrong way". If you follow all the rules, or you're afraid of going off-road and trying something new, you'll fail. Beware of recipes (but definitely learn from other peoples' experiences).

Most of all: get over yourself, and get over why you fell in love with computers.

If empathy-building conversations and user testing tell you one thing, it's this: your assumptions are almost always wrong. So don't assume you have all the answers.

You probably got into computers well before most people. Those people have never known the computing environment you loved, and it's never coming back. You're building for them, because they're the customer: in many ways the hardest thing is to let go of what you love about computers, and completely embrace what other people need. A business is about serving customers. Serve them well by respecting their opinions and their needs. You are not the customer.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but the more I embrace it, the better I do.

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Sometimes it's important to step out of your life for a while.

I spent the last week in Zürich, reconnecting with my Swiss family in the area. A long time ago, I named an open source software platform after a nearby town that my family made their home hundreds of years ago: Elgg. I hadn't been back to the town since I was a child, and visiting it stirred echoes of memories that gained new focus and perspective.

I grew up in the UK, more or less, and while I had some extended family there, mostly they were in Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States. I've always been fairly in touch with my US family, but not nearly enough with my European cousins. Effectively meeting your family for the first time is surreal, and it happens to me in waves.

Growing up as an immigrant, and then having strong family ties to many places, means that everywhere feels like home and nothing does. I often say that family is both my nationality and my religion. Moving to the US, where I've always been a citizen, feels no more like coming home than moving to Australia, say. Similarly, walking around Zürich felt like a combination of completely alien and somewhere I'd always been - just like San Francisco, or Amsterdam. My ancestors were textile traders there, centuries ago, and had a say in the running of the city, and as a result, our name crops up here and there, in museums and on street corners.

So, Zürich is in the atoms of who I am. So is the Ukrainian town where another set of ancestors fled the Pogroms; so are the ancestors who boarded the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth; so are the thousands of people and places before and since. My dad is one of the youngest survivors of the Japanese concentration camps in Indonesia, who survived because of the intelligence and determination of my Oma. His dad, my Opa, was a prominent member of the resistance. My Grandpa translated Crime and Punishment into English and hid his Jewishness when he was captured as a prisoner of war by the Nazis. My great grandfather, after arriving in New England from Ukraine, was a union organizer, fighting for workers' rights. My Grandma was one of the kindest, calmest, wisest, most uniting forces I've ever known in my life, together with my mother, even in the face of wars, hardship, and an incurable disease.

All atoms. Entire universes in their own right, but also ingredients.

And so is Oxford, the city where I grew up. Pooh Sticks from the top of the rainbow bridge in the University Parks; the giant horse chestnut tree that in my hands became both a time machine and a spaceship; the Space Super Heroes that my friends and I became over the course of our entire childhoods. Waking up at 5am to finish drawing a comic book before I went to school. Going to an English version of the school prom with my friends, a drunken marquee on the sports field, our silk shirts subverting the expected uniform in primary colors. Tying up the phone lines to talk to people on Usenet and IRC when I got home every day, my open window air cooling my desktop chassis. My friends coming round on Friday nights to watch Friends, Red Dwarf and Father Ted; LAN parties on a Saturday.

In Edinburgh, turning my Usenet community into real-life friends. Absinthe in catacombs. Taking over my house on New Year's Eve, 1999, and having a week-long house party. Walking up Arthur's Seat at 2am in a misguided, and vodka-fuelled attempt to watch the dawn. Hugging in heaps and climbing endless stairs to house parties in high-ceilinged tenements. Being bopped on the head with John Knox's britches at graduation. The tiny, ex-closet workspace we shared when we created Elgg, where the window didn't close properly and the smell of chips wafted upwards every lunchtime. And then, falling in love, which I can't begin to express in list form. The incredible people I have been lucky enough to have in my life; the incredible people who I have also lost.

And California too. We are all tapestries, universes, and ingredients. Works in progress.

If we hold a screen to our faces for too long, the world becomes obscured. Sometimes it's important to step out of your life for a while, so you can see it in its true perspective.