Andy Singleton

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:45

So, who is Andy Singleton? How did you get started? And maybe what are you up to these days? It’s been a couple of years since we talked.

Speaker: Andy Singleton  00:58

Yeah. I got started in computing at a very young age. I was about 14 years old, and I picked up programming at a local college. I actually couldn’t get the software accounts I wanted, so I wrote a virus to send me other people’s passwords, and I eventually got in trouble for that. I may have been one of the first people to ever get in trouble for writing viruses. And I ended up building my own computer, because I couldn’t afford an apple two. So that was a long time ago, but even then, there were computer geeks. And I’ve made a living as a software entrepreneur. So, I’ve never worked in a big company, in a big enterprise, it gives me a little bit of a different view of things like agile, that are really described in words for big enterprises. I have been for a long time very interested in distributed teams, and that’s a hot topic now. So, in 1999, I was running a company called power steering, an enterprise software company that I started. And we couldn’t get the programmers that we wanted; it was the last round of bubble, and it was very difficult to find people. So, I experimented with a practice that I called inspired by open source. Open-source projects have always been globally distributed. 

So, I experimented with recruiting people to work on globally distributed teams. And I eventually turned that interest into a company called assembler, which makes workspaces for distributed software teams, code management and task management. And in doing that, in running a SASS company, I became very interested in the process that Sass companies use. That was, think of it as 2010, 2012 era. Everybody was experimenting with continuous delivery and cloud-based web services. That was new stuff in those days. And I became very interested in continuous delivery as a better way to run a distributed team, where you’re not having meetings. So, you take the meanings out, replace that with software builds, that everybody can see that you can do it any time. And that seemed to be very effective. I also noticed that it was an effective way to manage a big company. So, it’s now obvious that the huge winners in our economy are companies like Google, and Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba. These are companies that use an architecture that I called matrix of services. They actually run their company on the idea that it’s run by software, and the software is composed of web services. And if they need to make a new product, they are rapidly expanding product lines. Amazon, Amazon is by far and away the best example of this and the most successful. If they need to make new products, they can reassemble those services, and they can run continuous delivery on the services, and also on a lot of different products. So, Amazon has their products, their retail delivery, but they also have warehouse fulfillment. They also have web services. They’re all using the same underlying process of continuous delivery and continuous improvement. 

 So that’s actually what got me interested in the Agile culture, is that, here were big companies doing something that I thought was important. They were innovating better, really, they were getting better as they got bigger. And as a small company, it’s actually hard to compete, right. I’ve always run smaller startups with them. When they use this matrix of services process, and I thought that, that might be something that the corporate and the Agile community would be interested in. Weirdly, that was back in 2015, if you look at the winners now, almost no one has crawled into that winner’s circle. Yeah, ever more of the economy and sort of stock market cap is going to these now trillion-dollar valuation companies that run this devastatingly effective process.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:28

When you say big companies, you’re really referring to the big tech companies that are dominating the markets, right?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  05:35

Yeah. And there were some companies that tried to do it, like General Electric. They went through various phases of agility, they tried to go to this more, you know, service architecture, technology architecture. It didn’t make it. Goldman Sachs, they’re better, they’re more successful, but they never crawled into that sort of, they haven’t yet crawled into that winner’s circle of software, service driven companies. And in fact, that’s what I found when I went in and talk to companies, that they would say things like, yeah, that you’re right. That’s the way we should do this if we want to beat Amazon, but I have 10,000 people, and they’re the wrong people. So, we’re not going to do that. 

So, I actually washed out at the agility business, I haven’t been working on it for a couple years now. And I’m back to running startups. Actually, multiple startups now with a what I call adventure studio, and Maxo square. It’s a crypto project. We’re addressing something called decentralized finance. And decentralized finance is software that you run on a blockchain that essentially replaces banks. So instead of giving your money to a bank, you send it to some software. And instead of borrowing money from a bank, you can borrow it from some software and 98%, of the sort of the overhead of a bank is just vaporized. And what’s interesting about defi is that enterprises are not involved. It’s got some regulatory challenges. It’s new.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:10

What are some of the regulatory challenges in that instance?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  07:14

Well, you’re competing against financial institutions that are heavily regulated. A simple example is that, banks have to do what’s called know your customer, and AML, anti-money laundering. So, they have to make sure that before they send money or accept money, that it’s not money from some illegal activity, or money going to some illegal activity. And actually regulators, it’s just one small aspect of their regulation. Regulators have put a lot of controls on what they can do just to make sure that they do those checks. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:50

Make sure that Miljan is not sponsoring some guy in Montenegro that’s running for president or something like that, right?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  07:58

Well, if he was on a sanctions list, right. That’s the kind of thing that they check. But in the world of blockchain, you know, do those checks, right. So, banks feel like, well, we could get in trouble by doing blockchain transactions. That’s just a simple example. They’re much more complicated examples, where really, the advantage of blockchain is that it can be innovative, because it’s not regulated. And actually, it’s much safer than the regulated market in terms of, you’re less likely to lose your money, because it’s carefully programmed, so that everything is collateralized. If you’re borrowing money, you have to have even more money to back it up. And because people are dealing with counterparties that they don’t know from all over the world, that careful structure of collateralization is something they put in place. And it’s actually very effective, a lot more effective than trying to get a regulator and people to do the right thing. So, it’s like very different approach. But the point that I’m making to you and sort of the Agile community is that, this is not a case where startups are doing something, and then the big companies are learning from that. It’s actually a case where the big companies are just being left out entirely. So that might be something to think about. As for the future.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:23

So, this is how and what’s interesting to me is like, this is how, you know, big companies go out of business, right. This is just something for them, it’s on their radar, but they don’t think that it’s that disruptive, or maybe sometimes like you said it, we don’t have the resources to deal with this right now. Maybe just as a follow up question to that out of curiosity, because this is the future in my opinion. If you’re working on it too, you probably believe in it. How far away, you know, decades, years, till this becomes something that’s real. That’s how we…

Speaker: Andy Singleton  10:03

Well, what do you define as real? So, it will cost you a market share.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:07

The fact maybe the majority of people are actually using this and it becomes the norm of how I…

Speaker: Andy Singleton  10:18

But right now, crypto is something that’s pretty much reached the mainstream. So, the idea that you can own something like Bitcoin, I think there are 57-million-coin base accounts, that’s reached a large portion of the US population. What I’m talking about decentralized finance, which is where you don’t get coin base to do it. You actually have your own crypto wallet, and you can deal with these scripts. It’s much smaller, probably a couple of million people right now. I call it a wholesale market, because there’s really only about 20,000 wallets that control about $40 billion worth of assets. So, it’s about $2 million per person. These are hobbyists that you see on the street, but they’re actually controlling a lot of money in this blockchain market. So, from that, is exactly the problem for a big company. If you look at it now, it’s just too small, and there’s too many regulatory risks for you to get involved. The problem, but it’s the classic problem of disruption. 

The defi market grew about 40 times last year. 40x in one year, which is something that is almost never been experienced in business. It’s very difficult to imagine what would happen if you had businesses that were expanding 40x in a year, and yet, that’s what we’re facing. So, it grew from about 1 billion in assets to about 40 billion in assets. And it probably grew from about 2000 participants, to about 40,000 participants. That’s much smaller than a bank in Portland, Maine, a single bank, right. It’s a tiny, tiny piece of the financial services market. So that’s actually the problem that you have as a big company, you can’t get involved in these small markets. The problem is, that it’s growing 40x a year. You only have to go get a coffee and come back and you’ll be wiped out at that pace. So that’s where we are.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:18

Awesome. It’s just interesting that this stuff is really, because I think we’re due to like in the next 10 years, we’re due to some of these, like disruptions that I think, are going to be probably, you know, the biggest disruptions of our lives. And things like that are waiting to burst, because there’s in my opinion, it’s just doesn’t make sense. Some of the way that we bank, some of the way that we do things, it just doesn’t make sense. I think it’s ready for some major disruption. But maybe coming back to the distributed teams, I really want to kind of expand on that a little bit. In today’s like, you know, context, how are you seeing distributed teams? What are some of the things that you think maybe Agile community, because you’ve been doing this for a while, distributed teams are not new to you. What could Agile community and anybody for that matter learn about what you’re doing with distributed things? How are you putting distributed teams together?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  13:20

Well, I think a year ago, everything I said was new and fresh, because most people had not tried running distributed teams. And I have to say, I told you so. Because that I always told people that the reason, they didn’t run distributed teams was just because they were uncomfortable with the management practices, not because it wasn’t a great idea. And then that they should just take some time to learn some management practices. And in fact, now, the kinds of things I have to say might not actually be that interesting, because everyone’s doing it. Everyone had to do it. And it turned out I was right. It was just a question of getting comfortable with the management practices. After 20 years of doing this, most people only have about one year of experience. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I probably have been able to boil it down to its essentials in a way that might be helpful. 

So, for instance, for recruiting, you’re not going to bring people in for long interviews, you need to have trial contracts. We do one-week trials. You need to have a chat running, okay, it sounds simple. If you’re going to have a meeting, like a stand up meeting every day, every week, you should always do it at exactly the same time. That way, even if it’s an inconvenient time for some people, they can plan around it and they will effectively plan around it. And obviously the more that you can write down about your tasks and your work, the better. And finally, the killer app, remember our matrix of services continuous build. So, the thing that will bring a distributed team together is not that they have coffee together, or go out for beers together. It’s that they’re literally working on the same thing. They have their fingers in the same piece of clay. And that’s what the continuous build gives you. So that’s my capsule hint. I think a lot of people have gotten close to that over the last year. And, you know, maybe we’re going into a new era with distributed teams.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:17

When it comes to management, maybe of these distributed teams, how do you manage these teams? I’m assuming, I don’t know. But I’m assuming, knowing you, you know, there are some guardrails, but it’s pretty much self-organizing teams, right? How much hand holding or how much direction? Like, what is your style? Or what have you seen work really well, when it comes to helping them get stuff done? Like, how much direction do you provide?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  15:48

Well, you have to provide a lot of direction to teams. I build software products. So, it’s hard for me to talk about other kinds of distributed teams. But if you’re building a software product, the state that you want to get into is a state where they’re releasing frequently, daily or weekly. And they actually have metrics, they can see how people are responding to that. And if there’s a problem that shows up right away, and they have to fix it, in that state, you do have self-managing teams, because they’re getting the information they need to figure out what to do. It’s a lot harder in the time before you release a product. And I usually get on the daily stand ups, and I spent 20 minutes, you know, kind of beating people up, trying to herd the cats in the right direction, you know. Doing the things that you have to do as a product manager. And I think senior executives have to actually dive into that product manager role when they’re doing launches of things that are new. I think it really pays off.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:54

How much do you like at least, you know, you have technical background and you’re playing that role of a product manager? One of the things that I see is, a lot of times, product managers come from business, and they have no clue what they can do to help what IT is doing and what these developers are doing. Have you obviously given your situation, maybe you haven’t run into that many instances, but maybe you can talk about if you have or not like how important is it to understand how you can support developers and what they’re doing?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  17:28

I think anytime that you pay attention to the product, really look at it, really use the output, talk to customers, I think that, that shows a respect for developers, and it does provide really useful feedback. That said, we’re in a transition now, where a lot more people are programmers. And what we’re seeing is in the product businesses is that, programmers are pushing out the other business guys from those product management roles. Because there is a lot of creativity that you can exercise if you really know the technology. It’s like being able to fly a plane and knowing how the plane works. You can pull much tighter maneuvers. If you’re not a programmer, I don’t think there’s any magic to it beyond paying attention. The problem, I think is that, people assume, I mean, just to give you a small example, if you haven’t checked every single thing in a piece of software, it’s not going to behave the way that you think, right. Just remember that really simple rule, right. There are hundreds of degrees of sort of variation that you didn’t think exist, it’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do. And you have to check everything. And just remembering that simple rule and having the respect to do that, and taking the time. I think it’s what I would encourage people to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:58

What about the like, when it comes to distributed teams and some of like frequent challenges that you’ve run into? Like, what are some of the things that maybe piss you off, or maybe kind of get under your skin about distributed teams.

Speaker: Andy Singleton  19:17

The problem with distributed teams is, sometimes is hard for people to learn the domain, the stuff, the thing that you’re working on. So, for instance, decentralized finance. A decentralized finance app is actually a very structured kind of application. If you really understand how one works, you pretty much understand how all of them works. But I found it difficult to train people who don’t use defi apps to just the basics. How do you log in by connecting well? Where is the stuff right? It’s out there on the blockchain. These basic concepts which I thought would be easy to teach and maybe would be easier to communicate in a close-knit group, we’re not effectively communicating. So, I either have to figure out how to bring people through a series of exercises, make it much more structured. Or I have to get people that already are interested in it and understand it. So, I do have sort of fewer ways to bring people through learning about the domain.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:23

So, I want to talk a little bit about recruitment. How do you recruit people? I mean, you’re recruiting people, and you’re looking for top of the line developers, right. You’re looking for the best people across the world. What are some of the things that you do? How do you recruit? What are some of the things that you could maybe share with the community or others?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  20:44

Yeah. Well, I have a specific way that I recruit, which may be related to what I do, which is I build products. And products are complicated. So, what we don’t want in a product is you don’t want turnover. You want people once they’re engineers, once they understand it, you want to keep them on the team. Because they understand it. They know how to fix things [cross talk]. Yeah, so having retention is important. And for that reason, I don’t go to outsourcers ever, because outsourcers essentially give you two sources of turnover. One is that people quit, right, and they go to a different outsourcer. That’s actually a pretty high rate, there’s a high rate of that. But the other is, the best people get pulled off. So, you don’t keep the best people. 

They get pulled off to a hotter project. And that, you would get less of the first kind of turnover moving to a new company. And none of the second kind of turnover, just having the best guys get pulled for a bigger client. So, I don’t do outsourcing, I always do direct recruiting, I advertise. The other thing I don’t really like to do is referrals. I don’t like to hire somebody because my cousin knew them. That doesn’t seem like a very good way to get the best people. You should be out competing in the marketplace of ideas by tuning our message, you know, what are we writing on the job post? Where are we advertising it? And then making it easy for people to participate in trials, just having that be an organized process where we have some easy tasks set aside. Everything about how to get on boarded into the project is documented. These are things that you get naturally actually in an open-source project, that we have to work for in our more commercial projects. That we know how we’re going to pay them, you know. You work for a week; we can pay you in various channels. So, doing some work on our site to set up and explain the project and that the HR infrastructure is important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:49

Do you do any, like direct? So, you said you advertise. Is that the only way that you do it? And then whoever applies, or do you do anything else besides that?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  23:00

Well, we advertise. We post on social media. We tell people what we’re doing. It’s just marketing, in my mind. Yeah. And, one of the interesting things is, when I start to recruit for a new job, usually like, I don’t get very many candidates. And then I get the wrong kind of candidates. There are subtle changes in how you describe the job and in how you communicate, where you communicate, that, that starts to really add up over time. The result of that, is another trick. It’s much more efficient to recruit in batches. And this is tough for startups to absorb. But you know, because it’s expensive, but it’s much better to recruit five guys that are good at something than one guy, you know. You’re just going to get better at it, over the weeks that you’re doing that recruiting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:53

Yeah. And what is that, like you call it a trial. What does that look like? Do you do pairing? Or is it just, here you go and like, [cross talk].

Speaker: Andy Singleton  24:04

I try to find some jobs that are easy. First of all, it used to be two weeks. Well, you only need one week. Most of the time, if people don’t succeed in a trial, they just basically didn’t show up. So, that’s the important thing to know about distributed teams. And you have to work. Basically, the best way to do a trial is to have a project and a project team that’s already functioning. And then to set aside some of the easiest tasks. And people can join that team and work on a task that’s pretty easy, but it’s something you need. So, one thing to definitely avoid in trials is giving people a test task. Tasks that you don’t need. It’s not part of your product. Because then the trial is going to fail. You’re going to ignore that person. If you need help you don’t need the results, so you’re not going to help them. So that’s it. That’s just one trick to remember about trials.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:00

That’s a really good thing. Because it’s also you adding value and you’re paying this person, and they’re also adding some type of value to the team, by actually working on real initiatives. 

Speaker: Andy Singleton  25:13

Yeah. In adding the value is important for both sides. They’re adding value, and you appreciate that, but you also give them the attention they deserve, because the task is worth your time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:26

How do you deal with conflict, and maybe some of the things? I think, like when we spoke, you said, you know, there are people that are running from the law, there’s like different personalities, in a sense, you have people all over the world. How, like, when it comes to conflict, how do you deal with conflict, on team?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  25:47

One of my goals is not to enforce cultural similarity, you know. People are from all different places, and they have different approaches. And I’m willing to accept that a lot of programmers are a little weird, they’re on the Asperger’s spectrum. And, you know, it’s just part of the price of what I do, right. I manage programming teams, and some people are not willing to accept that some people want more cultural conformity, what I do find is that, everybody on my team tends to have the same outlook. So, the way I describe it is, we’re actually more homogeneous in our approach than two neighbors. Because we’re all geeks. We sort of searched around for people that have this geek mindset, for good or for bad. And we’re all kind of similar to each other that way. But that said, we run into two kinds of conflicts. One is that people are just erratic, you know. They have psychological issues, that happens a lot. And they’re erratic in their output. And eventually, I have to walk away from people that are very talented. Because they’re just not predictable. And sometimes there’s conflicts between people and I have to make a decision about who wins, but that’s less. There are different roles you can play in, some of them are more assertive, and some of them are less assertive.

So that’s less important. Probably maybe a more interesting thing to think about is, not when there’s conflict, right. When you have to sort of use your recruiting capability, just cut the people that are causing conflict and find new ones. That’s simple. Any manager can do that. A more interesting question is, what if there’s not conflict, and people are actually working together? How do you get everyone to have a voice? And there’s some subtle things that you can do there. Like, in classic agile, there’s retrospective, very helpful, right. What do we do right? What do we do wrong? And what do we want to do better going forward? Super helpful to go through that process. But the problem is that in practice, only a very small number of people actually step forward and tell you what to do. So, one thing I found that was useful is, the happiness survey. 

I forget who was promoting that a couple of years ago. They were having a survey, you send someone a note that says, or you ask somebody to fill out a form or just step forward, and you ask them, you know, what are you happy about? What are you unhappy about? And how could we make that better? And it sounds stupid, right, it sounds like people are going to step forward and say, I’m really unhappy about death and taxes, and then we’re going to be like, there’s nothing we can do about that. That’s what it sounds like. But actually, they step forward with really relevant things that you can fix about the product. And because about the process, because it’s from their point of view, they can give you their honest opinion, even if they’re not one of those kind of like, aggressive process people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:54

I think it’s one of the better metrics. I actually just did that with a client, then I actually use four categories. So, like, you know, I put it like, on scale one to five. One is like, I’m miserable, I want to get out of here. Five is like, I love it, I’m enjoying it, I’m highly motivated. And I asked like, how happy are you with processes, you know, and tools? And they can rate themselves. How happy are you with, you know, deadlines? And, you know, are they being imposed? Or do you have, you know, how happy are you with the people that you work with? Right. And what was really interesting is that they actually started discussing. So across three, four categories, they rate themselves, and they said; well, you know, we can’t really change this. This is outside of our control, but hey, we’re really good with teams and how we collaborate. The tools and technology like you know, it’s being dictated in a way to us, but it’s companywide policy. But what we can do is like with the processes, we really haven’t held ourselves accountable and helping out each other to improve how we work, so we can do that. And that happiness metric across those categories really creates opportunity for teams to be open with each other, vulnerable and talk about what they can do. So, you know, the happiness metric is simple and silly as it comes across, I’ve actually seen it work  really well. 

Speaker: Andy Singleton  30:22

So, you experienced the same thing I experienced, which it sounds like something that’s just going to lead to someone’s personal problems, but actually uncovers group things that people want to work on together. So, I don’t know why that works that way. But it’s one of those tricks to try to bring out the people that are less vocal and say, a retrospective.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:46

So, when it comes to, you know, I said, so, you know, to the community about distributed teams, where are things going? If you look at the trends, and assuming that, you know, the effects of COVID and distributed teams, now, you know, it’s a global workforce, as it was, you know, years ago, but now it’s becoming the norm. What do you think the next five years will look, as far as when it comes to distributed teams? What are some of the things that we can do?  Is it what you’re doing now? Do you have any insights into like, what else is coming, when it comes to distributed teams?

Speaker: Andy Singleton  31:29

Yeah, I mean, to me, this distributed team move, as you can see, it’s not a surprise, I always expected it. I feel like it comes from the open-source communities that have always worked this way. There’s now 20, or 25 years of experience behind how to do this. And certainly, people are going to apply those techniques to other kinds of jobs. So, the idea of a daily software build or continuous software build, maybe doesn’t work, if you’re a lawyer. But there’s an equivalent, you’re working on the same thing. So, I think people are going to start to use these tactics that we’ve refined in software, in other kinds of jobs. So that’s the first thing that’s going to change. But the second big change is something that we had discussed, which is people are moving beyond companies. So, I like to say that there’s sort of three good ways to organize people. 

There are governments, and that works really well, when you’re trying to do something big. There are companies, and that works really well, when you’re trying to do something specialized, right. You organize people into companies. But now there’s this third way, which is communities. That’s how the crypto guys organized. They’re not members of a company. But they are people that essentially share the same software, and they weren’t in the same software network. And they have their own economy, with tokens. So, there’s people who are actually making that work as communities that are organized differently from companies and governments. And I’m not sure we totally understand how that should work. But the technology and the technique of it are advancing very, very rapidly, under pressure from these coins, or these protocols that are organized that way, and allow people to make a lot of money by participating in these communities. And that’s, in fact, how defi products are organized. They’re open-source software, often maintained by a community.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:28

And if you think about it, you know, there’s a lot of references in Agile to going back to like natural world, right. Decentralized in many different aspects. And when you just said that, like, you know, both governments, both organizations are, most organizations, you know, are still structures as hierarchies. That’s very centralized. And what you’re saying that these communities are highly decentralized communities. And it seems like, it’s scary to think about the possibilities of these decentralized communities and what could actually emerge from that.

Speaker: Andy Singleton  34:07

Yeah.  And you have kind of two different effects. One it is decentralized, and people are all working on their own thing. So, it sorts of increases in scope. But the other is that people can step forward and actually cease a lot of leadership. So, you can get this kind of agility, where you have the benevolent dictator, right. Lioness that got Linux through all these stages to now where it’s the dominant operating system. So, you can have people step forward and exercise that benevolent dictator role in sort of accepting and organizing all the contributions from the community. And I think those are the kinds of things we’re going to become sensitive to as we see these community’s work. They have different management structures. And interesting things happened in defi where, small defi projects were designed to be very focused like uniswap. Very small teams that could build software, it doesn’t take a very big team to build software. But then what happened is they ended up with a lot of money because their software was successful. And it started paying coins into a treasury, you know, they charge a portion of each. It’s like SASS software. They charge a portion of each trade, and people started doing billions and billions and billions of dollars’ worth of trades, using their software. And so, money started piling up in this treasury and they had to sort of retro actively come up with this idea of divisions, you know. Ways to break up work and fund it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:51

I don’t know if you’re familiar with like Kuhn cycle, Thomas Kuhn cycle, no. But essentially, he’s the one that introduced the term paradigm, right. So, in a sense, he talks about that there is a cycle to paradigms, right. And I think, you know, what you’re describing as a community is this next paradigm. And usually, at the beginning of the paradigm, there’s a lot of unknowns, and we’re figuring things out, but eventually, you know, the new paradigm becomes what’s called normal science. And I think, you know, if I think in that term of Kuhn cycle, the communities are almost the new paradigm that we’re seeing slowly emerge. And it just makes me think about just possibilities for innovation. And that’s why I mentioned that in the sense that, yes, we’re dealing with all of that there’s possibilities, this thing could go, you know, like you said, depending on architecture, depending on you know, where things go. But do you think there’s more opportunities in these communities for innovation, than in, you know, like government in large organizations? And I know, you said you didn’t spend a lot of time in large organizations, but what I see in large organizations, they are struggling to innovate, right. They are really struggling to innovate.

Speaker: Andy Singleton  37:17

Well, I have a little bit of a different opinion on that from most people. So, I think innovation happens at many scales. And actually, at the largest scale, if you want to send a man to the moon, you need governments. They’re the ones that are willing to put money in over the long term. And the US government used to take that role. We built a semi-conductor industry, we build the internet, we for many decades funded drug companies. And now we’re seeing the private sector is claiming that they’re having all these inventions, but actually, they’re just building on tools that the government has funded over decades. So, I feel like government has a very important role to play in innovation. It’s obvious that companies have a very important role to play in innovation, they can dive down deep into products, and build them. The disappointment that I’ve expressed is that big companies are so bad at it. It’s important to complain about that, because big companies can do big things. 

So, remember, innovations happen at different scales, startups do small stuff. In theory, big company should do big stuff. IBM used to bet the company, you know, they would be on the verge of bankruptcy every five or 10 years, as they came out with a new kind of computer. Now nothing, right. They’ve given that roll up. Intel, they used to bet the company. Well, you know what, now they’re getting crushed, because they stopped doing that. They fell behind Moore’s law. And they’re just not investing in new product. So, what happens when these companies get to the, what’s happened with big companies, they’ve stopped doing their job of doing big innovations. And they’ve tried to outsource that. They’ve tried to get startups; oh, I have incubators, I have small startups that I sponsor, I have corporate VC. You know what, if you’re Intel, and you’re responsible for building a chip that has 4 billion transistors on it, you can’t outsource that. You have to do it. As a big company, you have to do the big thing. So, what’s maybe going to save us is these communities, because they’re very scalable. You know, they can organize a Linux which would be beyond even IBM to build. And that may, you know, that’s scalability may save us. It is going to create a certain kind of a conflict because these communities, they’re global. They’re not under the jurisdiction of any one government. 

So, it makes governance a lot harder to think about, at the governance level, right. Essentially, they’re their own volunteer governments. And I knew a guy 30 years ago that proclaimed himself, the admiral of oceanis. He claimed dominion over all [unclear 39:58] the utopian thing, where people could join this utopian government that would protect the oceans. And, in fact, that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re doing with blockchains, right. We’re creating those little global voluntary governments. But I don’t believe that. I believe that there’s lots of different layers to innovation. And each organization has a responsibility to innovate in their area. And where we’ve seen the economy lag and, you know, whole society being dragged down, is when these big companies walk away from their responsibility to do big things. And you can see how stupid that is, when you look at Elon Musk. He’s a crazy guy, but you know what, he’s the only guy that’s willing to step forward and say, I’m going to put a man on Mars. And people line up behind him with huge amounts of money. So, we need more of that, you know. Why aren’t you doing that Mr. Big company? And if you’re not going to do it, then we’re going to organize 100,000 people around a coin, and we’re going to do it as a community.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:01

Yeah, it’s interesting, because like working actually, with these large companies, or some of these large companies, it’s almost like all the baggage that they’ve accumulated over the years, including technical debt, including just the, you know, the culture itself. It’s very difficult. And like, when they start looking like you said, to startups. For instance, for banks, for insurance companies, for some of these other industries, to buy somebody else’s innovation. Like they really can’t innovate themselves, they’re looking what’s happening, what are the startups so we can buy, acquire or keep an eye on? It becomes demotivating inside the organization, and it also just keep the lights running. And you can only do that till either, you know, somebody disrupts you. Or, you know, you just get to the point where, you know, it’s not disruption, but you just ran out of business because of bad business practices.

Speaker: Andy Singleton  42:04  

Yeah. Although financially, it’s certainly a financial strategy. For instance, IBM is practicing that. Instead of investing in new products, they’re getting the most money that they can, out of their old products. And then presumably, the theory is that that money gets paid out to investors. So, IBM has given it out all of their product development budget, they’ve just cut that and sent it back to investors. The theory is that those investors will then go invested in startups, you know. So that works to a certain extent, but it doesn’t work if you’re Intel, and you’re responsible for actually advancing the technology that our civilization relies on. So, we can only hope that there will be more of these leaders, I think we’re moving out of a phase, they called it the great stagnation.

Really, very little new technology, except for computers that has come forward in the last 50 years, since 1970. I think we’re moving out of that; you can see progress on a lot of fronts. You know, we’ve had massive advances in biotech. We’re having advances in energy, which is really one of the cores, you know, we finally have renewable energy that works at huge scale. So, I think you’re seeing it as a breakout of this little box we were in with just computers and semi-conductors improving. And maybe that will inspire more of big companies to actually do their job. And not just be financial, you know, the private equity, extract, run out, right. It’s not actually a bad strategy as to run your company for the maximum profit and the minimum risk, right. It actually may be optimal for your shareholders, but we can only support a certain percentage of those companies doing that. Some of the companies have to be growing and investing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:52

Exactly. And I think that’s aligned with the bigger moment, right. Like, as far as like, you know, if we look at last 100 years, it was, you know, all, you know, more of like, smaller scale, you know, countries may be, you know, you’re looking at what’s good for the country, and you know, probably since 1950s 60s, to start look more like global economy, right. How the whole internet and technology made it a global economy. And I think what we’re seeing, and what’s at least interesting to me, is that whole kind of this communities and global view of things, and I think the challenges are going to be like, how do we figure out? How do we innovate, like you said, and scale? Like, how do we scale these things at a local level, like maybe within the company when it comes to innovation, when it comes to governance. And also, how global? How do we get better? Like, how do we get what you’re describing as these communities and decentralizing? How do we get better at a global scale? And I think that’s what I’m really interested in.

Speaker: Andy Singleton  44:56

I think that is what we’re going to discover right. You said that we were going to get better at it. I forgot the word you used. But we are already figuring out how to organize people in ways that I never expected. For years, we talked about what’s the business model for open source. You can have huge open-source projects. And now people are inventing this business model based around tokens. You use the software, you get the token, you contribute to the software. And that’s been a massively, a powerful force for scaling some of these efforts. So, we may find other techniques and tactics that allow us to do this. Essentially, voluntary governance and being built on things at a larger scale.