Photo by Sidereal

David Mandell took me under his wing at Techstars last summer, and we ended up spending a lot of time together. One day towards the end of the program he told me "Pete, you think by coding". That phrase stuck with me because it felt true, and summed up a lot of both my strengths and weaknesses.

I choose my projects by finding general areas that have interesting possibilities for fun and profit, but then almost immediately start hacking on code to figure out the details of the technical landscape. I find it intensely frustrating to sit and discuss the theory of what we should be building before we have a good idea of what's technically possible. Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, so no feature list on a technically innovative product survives the realities of the platform's limitations.

I've never been a straight-A student, and I'm not a deep abstract thinker, but I have spent decades obsessed with solving engineering problems. I think at this point that's probably affected the wiring of my brain, or at least given me a good mental toolkit to apply to those sort of puzzles. I find myself putting almost any issue in programming terms if I want to get a handle on it. For example, the path to sorting out my finances suddenly became clear when I realized I could treat it as a code optimization problem.

It also helps explain why I'm so comfortable open-sourcing my code. For me, the value I get out of creating any code is the deep understanding I have to achieve to reach a solution. The model remains in my head, the actual lines of code are comparatively easy to recreate once I've built the original version. If I give away the code, anyone else still needs to make a lot of effort to reach the level of understanding where they can confidently make changes, so the odds are good they'll turn to me and my mental model. My open-source projects act as an unfakeable signal that I really understand these domains.

This approach has served me well in the past, but it can be my Achilles heel. Most internet businesses these days don't require technical innovation. They're much more likely to die because no potential customers are interested than because they couldn't get the engineering working. Market risk used to be an alien concept to me, but the dawning realization that I kept building solutions to non-existent problems drove me into the arms of Customer Development.

I feel like I've now been punched in the face often enough by that issue that I've (mostly) learned to duck, but I'm also aware that I'm still driven by techno-lust. I love working in areas where the fundamental engineering rules are still being figured out, where every day I have the chance to experiment and discover something nobody else had known before. I can already feel most of the investors I've met shaking their heads sadly. I'm well aware that starting a revenue-generating business is almost impossible anyway, let alone exposing yourself to the risk and pain of relying on bleeding-edge technology. The trouble is, that's what my startup dream has always been. I want to do something genuinely fresh and new with the technology, and hope to be smart and fast enough to build a business before the engineering barriers to entry crumble.

I don't know if I'd recommend my approach to anyone else, but it seems baked in to who I am. Oddly enough, I didn't fully understand that until I wrote this post. Perhaps there's some thinking that I can only do by writing too?