Since the fall of 2005 I’ve been working for CoreDial which was purchased by BCM One on November 17, 2021. I was one of the first two employees, along with the 3 founders we were always working toward an eventual exit just like the one that happened. This was a major success and I am glad that it happened. I’m glad at what I achieved working with the people there and excited for what’s next.
But it’s much more complex than that isn’t it? When I started working at CoreDial my oldest, Alli, was not even one year old, my second child, Ash, was not yet on the way. I had been married for just two years. Heck I was twenty nine years old. One of the reasons I’ve been drawn to startups and small companies is I enjoy learning, and I learn best and fastest by trying to do things uncertain of how I’ll actually do it. So over sixteen years I learned so much, in so many different ways.
During that time my purpose was to help make CoreDial a success in anyway possible. Since I worked on the technology systems this was mostly making it so things worked, so things could scale, so service would be reliable and predictable. I never thought about what was next or what I was working toward because it was obvious. Our vision was set and adjusted as necessary by Alan, my friend and the company CEO. I just had to figure out how to accomplish certain things, learn, and solve impossible problems. As an engineer these are the things I like doing most.
There were hard times, things I learned about myself, and things that made me hate the job sometimes. But I worked my way through it and found a way to negotiate with those around me to make it what I wanted and still provide value. I was never seriously tempted to leave and work anywhere else. You can tell this by my LinkedIn that is a there as a joke to satisfy some friends who said I needed to have a profile there.
After the purchase I must admit I felt a little lost. I mean the day to day work didn’t change much there were still impossible problems to solve and fun technology to learn but the core purpose was gone. There is a scene in the movie Forrest Gump during the time when Forrest is running back and forth across the US that encapsulates how I felt perfectly. A group of people started following him on his journey and he stops and turns to the crowd and says, “I’m pretty tired. Think I’ll go home now.” The crowd parts to let him walk through and one person yells in frustration, “Now what are we supposed to do?!”
I spent time trying to figure out my purpose and have some ideas and am continuing to this day. I am using ideas and techniques learned from Jean Moroney’s Thinking Lab to help me here. One of the things I’ve learned is that the more complex the work I’m trying to do the more I need to just dive in and try and figure it out as I go. This makes many people I’ve worked with uncomfortable but I’m more uncomfortable trying to rationalize a full detailed plan based on no information learned from trying. In my experience the plan will be proven wrong very early in the work and you will need to adjust. So I go in assuming adjustments will be needed and plan by doing.
This planning by doing is part of what’s going on here. I think in the years of my work I’ve proven myself as a technology troubleshooter. Digging in on impossible problems and finding the answer is something I love doing and I continually try to improve at it. I think something I can do as a 10 year style project is to come up with and write down objective principles of troubleshooting. Helping teach people new skills and ideas is appealing to me and learning how to communicate the ideas makes me learn them even more deeply.
Great so I want to try writing a book on how to troubleshoot. That seems like an objective goal that can be taken on. But how to start?
Well I have to improve my writing and communicaiton which means practice. I also have to explore my ideas and experiment to find good ways to find the principles. Also if I want people to know about it having an audience will be important.
When CoreDial started Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook wasn’t available to the general public, and I had been writing on a blog for around two years and fairly regularly. I enjoyed Twitter at first but I sort of hate it now. With notable exceptions the ideas shared are shallow and the reasoning specious but for some reason alleged pillars of the public discourse take these thought snacks seriously and everyone seems to like to pretend that by arguing here they’re doing something of substance. Also there is a new movement where complex and controversial topics are being “fact checked” by the platform and the government.
So trying to build an audience on the social media platforms to me seems like it would be awful. There is too much temptation to buy into the gaming of the machine to get likes or “eyeballs.” And I want to focus on the ideas.
Additionally part of what I lked about blogging and the web when I first learned about it in the mid 90s was that you could customize these things to be exactly what you wanted. To share the information how you wanted.
So what I’m planning to do is openly build my own personal platform for sharing information about my ideas and evolve it as I go and learn. This will have the added benefit of giving me more technology to troubleshoot, an opportunity to learn even more about modern web and other techonologies, and an excuse to write and share software.
Also I’ll own the output unlike the weird relationship where the social media platforms use your ideas to attract more attention and users and potentially revenue. I’m not opposed to this business model in general but I don’t see how it benefits me over years of playing with it.
So sure I’ll be missing the opportunity to have lots more eyeballs see my information but I think as it grows and becomes useful the people I want to see it will find it and engage with it. I’m not playing a numbers game I’m trying to learn and grow and if by writing these things out I learn then I’ve accomplished my goal. If other people see these ideas and engage and ask questions or point out errors then I’ll benefit even further.
I started this on May 21, 2022 and finished the core writing on May 22, 2022. We’ll see how long it takes before this gets publicly accessible.