Re-Thinking the Startup - Inside going Out

In Silicon Valley - Scratching my Own Itch

We in the high-tech world tend to have high-tech itches. We write high-tech scratches, and we're proud of it. It might be fair to say we even look down on low-tech itches and scratches with a bit of disdain. "Your business would only have 20k customers per year? You won't need any petabytes of data to support that!"

I've been so deep in the large database cluster world for so long, my itches look like "I need to quickly deploy a set of 120 large databases with a complex replication topology that can be modified on a whim. And it has to work with those petabytes I so love." So I end up writing software that is a superset of (and integrates with) products like Jetpants to make that task easier for the 3 other people in the world that have that same itch.

Yes. I really did that. I spent months doing that. In the end, three people used it. And let's be honest, those three people probably could have just spent a few months writing it themselves as well.

Maybe I'm focused a little too narrowly on my itch?

I recently hinted to my family about my new startup. One of them cried: "Deal with people, not computers!" He knows the me of two years ago a little too well.

What Am I Good At?

I'm good at "building complicated automated large-scale distributed clusters and maintaining them for the long-term working with teams of brilliant tech professionals." But wait. Is that really what I'm good at? Maybe it's "dealing with complex logistics, analyzing and simplifying the processes to manage those logistics, and guiding a team to implement solutions?" Sounds like a more-general restatement of my skills.

What if the thing that makes me good at wrangling a team to coordinate thousands of complex components in a distributed software system would also make me good at wrangling a team to solve a complex problem that millions of people are having? Say... healthcare? Recall in a past post, I mentioned that healthcare (the system itself) has a mysterious disease, causing it to cost 5x (or 10x or even 100x) more than it should.

The reasons for that are... well... complex. Involving thousands of reasons, each of which need to be considered in an effective solution.

What Does the World Need?

Sometimes this can be obvious. Healthcare is problematic in the USA right now. It needs some help. My co-founder, Alex Newman, and myself, feel like we have the right set of skills to apply to this problem.

Like you, at first we assumed that doctors, legislators, and standards bodies were the only ones who had the right mindset, skills, and understanding of the problem. We assumed that software and distributed systems experts and SRE managers, like ourselves, would not be adequately equipped to solve the problems.

But the more we looked, the more we realised that, in fact, this is a problem we can solve. There are medical concerns. There are legal concerns. And compliance, standards, safety, travel logistics, and all manner of other concerns. But they are manageable. I might even go so far as to say that, after having administered some of the largest computer clusters in the world, that these concerns are actually a bit (not a lot) simpler.

Do you Know what you Don't Know?

This is the first objection I get from hard techies. No, you don't know what you don't know. Are Alex and I ignoring the vast set of challenges that exist, but we just aren't aware of? I don't think so, and let me tell you why not.

Alex has worked in the medical startup space for several years (albeit not exclusively). He's actually far more aware of the unknown-unknowns than most techies wading into the healthcare space. On top of that, we have together sat and talked to multiple experts who've worked exclusively in this space for decades. Doctors, medical facilitators, nurses, and lawyers.

We keep digging, searching, probing for the unmanageable mess that should finally discourage us from continuing further, and we keep coming up empty-handed. This problem really looks doable.

So we're going to do it. Look forward to great things from us in the coming months!