This podcast stimulated many thoughts that I wanted to discuss with the DEV community. Let's listen to it and engage in a constructive conversation from the POV of our industry and experiences.
Feel free to share meaningful take-aways, raise questions (that folks in community might be able to help clarify), or state areas where we may disagree with the speakers POV.
To kick things off These are 3 things that stood out to me:
1) 7:35 His Ideas on slow and meaningful growth, i.e."sometimes you grow strong, other times you grow fat". What do you think about this, does it apply to our industry as well?
2) 7:24 Creating the product you wish you could buy and demand coming organically from others in the community wanting them also. He makes a statement similar to "we were our own first customer, if you wait for customers to tell you exactly what they want you are too late". There is something to be said for being/having a domain expert on your team to refine your efforts. But I'm a big fan of market research/user testing to identify what users actually value over what I would guess they do so am unsure if I agree with this, but think it's worth consideration.
3) 18:14 Progressive Work Environment that was way ahead of it's time.
It blew my mind that 40 years ago in the 70s Patagonia was offering their employees maternal and paternal leave, a child friendly office and daycare on-site, and flexible work schedules. Benefits that are frequently offered in software engineering (with the exceptions of child care considerations), but to this day still are often not offered in other fields, even other fields of tech like IT.
If you have suggestions of other interesting recordings of talks or podcasts with some application to tech and that would be interesting to try this with feel free to run with this theme and make a post or leave it as a suggestion in the comments.
I'm a huge fan of the "How I Built This" podcast, and this is a great episode.
I think the concept of "scratching your own itch" is incredibly powerful, and is the genesis for many successful products. Yvon's story of "growing too fast" is also relevant in this era of excessive VC funding for early startups. He describes "going for growth" and hitting 50% year-over-year for a while, but hitting massive problems that near-killed the company when they did well, but underperformed expectations (only growing ~25%). Settling down and focusing on a sustainable model with longevity certainly paid off, but it's tough to "go back" when startups take VC funding, as those investors will push for a strategy that maximizes the possibility of an outsized return.