Relevance, Inc. | Agile Software Design & Development

Relevance Welcomes Mike Nygard to the Team

It is with great pleasure that I get to publicly welcome our newest team member, Mike Nygard. We've known Mike for a long time, and have been attempting to brainwash him into believing we deserved to have him join for nearly that long. After years of #hbb, too-smoky-to-drink-Scotch, and adopting a new language to play with, we finally managed the task.

Mike's bio:

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Somewhere in the mid-90's, Michael went from "young hotshot" to "grizzled veteran". He's still not sure quite when or how that happened. It might have been the beard.

It might also be that Michael has worked in many different kinds of software development across many different domains, starting with assembly in the 8-bit micro days up through Java, Scala, and Clojure for massive distributed systems. That experience includes massive companies like Unisys, Best Buy, 3M, and Target, along with two startups that grew from 30 to more than 100 people, plus three terms as an independent consultant. He's always looking for people who know they can do anything, and that describes Relevance.

His desire to teach others shows in daily work, in speaking engagements, and in writing. Michael wrote "Release It!"---about building large scale systems to survive the real world, rather than just passing QA---and has contributed to several other books. These days, he is devoted to improving the odds that a client's system will make money for them, through a deep understanding of time, uncertainty, risk, ignorance, and architecture.

He finds it astonishing that the most buzz-worthy technologies of the past two years are Emacs, Vi, Lisp, and batch processing (Hadoop).

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We were unable to convince Mike that we were really LivingSocial during his "interview". We did, however, convince him that we understood how to use parentheses appropriately when coding, and this seems to have done the trick.

Welcome aboard, Mike!

When You Start, Define How You Will Behave

When you are starting a new company, there are a lot of things you are asked to announce at the start. What are you going to do? Why are you doing it? What makes you so special? Why is your social coupon FPS better than LivingDiscountKillzone? Exactly when do you reach the magical $12B valuation?

By all means, answer these questions. Each is important to some constituency, be it the employees you will try to attract, the investors who are clamoring to get in, the customers you hope to target, etc. The great thing about the modern world of “lean startups” and “the pivot” is that you are expected to throw each of these answers away after three months. After all, the purpose of a startup is to discover a sustainable business model. Your first guess is going to be wrong.

I’d suggest that, in addition to these ephemeral things, you also consider strongly announcing to the world how you are going to behave while you build this thing. This, however, is not ephemeral. It isn’t something you should pivot away from. It can’t be subject to A/B testing, and it can never be diluted through Series DD financing. It is the absolute statement of what you should expect of yourself, in normal times and in the face of crisis.

I recently had to craft a document for a new venture, and it includes the following paragraph:

I expect that we’ll create a company dedicated to the idea that you can be a capitalist, and still be a decent person at the same time. That we will treat employees, customers, investors and vendors with fairness, honor and dignity. We will empathize before we criticize, but criticize when it is important to do so. We’ll endeavor to understand our company’s externalities, minimizing the negative ones, accentuating the positive ones. We will, in all ways, act as if people actually matter.

Whenever the organization faces a tough decision, whenever it operates under stress, whenever it asks itself “what do I do now?”, it will have this statement as a guide. I guarantee that such a statement will eliminate a world of possibilities from the choice it has to make, and will draw a big Skitch-style red arrow at the right choice. You can pivot away from what you do, but you can’t pivot away from who you are.