'Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind'
2024-11-03
I have been quiet for a couple of weeks. And I blame it on spam.
Two separate spam related incidents hit me. The first was that I was lazy in Bcc’ing the audience of this newsletter, and google decided I might be a future nigerian prince, and started sending some of my emails to spam. So I wrote a quick mail merge script to send this out (interesting that lots of companies want to charge me $20/mo to do mailmerge, and it took literally 20 minutes to write this)
The second was a much more frustrating spam related problem. I discovered my COBRA coverage was canceled after the emails from the provider were sent to my spam folder. Hours of stressful calls later, I had to switch to a Covered California plan, but the ordeal was draining. And it showed in my work, where I took some shortcuts and was not thinking clearly about some strategic choices.
The experience reminded me of a lesson from Robert Pirsig’s 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' The subject line - ‘ Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind’ - is from this incredible book - arguably one of the most influential and important books of the past half century. Pirsig emphasizes that 'peace of mind isn’t superficial—it’s the foundation of good work and, by extension, good results.’
The point Robert Pirsig - one of many incredible insights that he shares - is that
‘Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial - It is the whole thing. [,...] what we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. That which produces it is good maintenance, that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. If you don't have it while you're working, you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself. ‘ [..] ‘The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. If the machine produces tranquility, it is right. If it disturbs you it is wrong. The test of the machine is always your own mind’
As it is with japanese bicycles, so it is with software development. That is just another machine being created. Simultaneously solving for speed and creativity requires tranquility, not chaos. And the chaos caused by the insurance fiasco caused me to take some shortcuts and suboptimal decisions in some of the decisions and designs we were making Thankfully, Kumar and I have worked together and challenged each other for a long time, which allowed him to point out the flaws in my thinking, leading to a healthy argument which caused me to (fortunately!) reverse the choices
The last newsletter had people asking for more details no what we are upto. As we had shared, our focus is on HR Operations and compliance. These are difficult for companies to deal with, and ~50 customer conversations over the past 2.5 months have revealed a large number of problems for HR professionals. We are narrowing down to payroll as the problem area we want to tackle first . We looked at global payroll (an area Kumar and I are well versed in) but based on conversations with experts and potential customers, have redirected our energies to US Payroll. It turns out there are large problems in US Payroll. While there are existing solutions, we were astonished by how complicated, low margin and error prone they are.
Our thesis is that we can build a significantly better payroll machine and offer it at a much lower price point than anyone in the market today. There are sections of the payroll market which work as inefficient monopolies, and there is ample opportunity for picking those off. Of course, all this is being done with the disadvantage of being a startup - but the advantages of not having the burden of legacy software (There are incumbents who still run code on COBOL and mainframes). And of course, we are using all the AI buzzwords in building this.
We believe that we can quickly build the product - the challenges really like in the GTM and sales side, which is where we are looking for partnerships and expert help (if you, or someone you know has expertise and is interested in helping, let us know!)