Showerthoughts on Max Halford

The owner isn’t here

I’m in Copenhagen with my mother and we’re hungry. We’re just looking for something simple so we can get back to our walk.

Dhdjfjf

Nostalgia for a time I didn't experience

Our everyday vocabulary fails to capture subtle emotions. Some languages developed to fill in these gaps. An example that became popular is Schadenfreude, which means taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. It has an opposite in German, Fremdscham, which is the vicarious embarrassment you feel when witnessing someone else’s humiliation. Its Finnish equivalent myötähäpeä is slightly more well known.

I like these words that capture complex feelings. When I was in high school, Wittgenstein made a lasting impression on my very naive mind. He argued that language can only picture facts about the world, and that ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical lie beyond what language can express. I think this is fascinatingly true. I’m convinced that a share of our daily sorrows come from our inability to put them in words. It reassures me when I stumble on a word that expresses a feeling I can’t explain.

John Koenig published The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of invented words for emotions that lack a name. There’s a word in there that resonates with me deeply: anemoia, which is nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

There are books and movies that make me feel this way. It’s stories where you follow someone’s life over a long period of time. When the story ends, you look back and think “what a life”. For instance, I just finished watching Our Friends in the North, a British TV series that follows the lives of four friends from the 1960s to the 1990s. The characters go through so much, and you see how the world changes around them. When it ends, I feel this deep longing for their era, even though I never lived through it. It’s like I wish I could have experienced that time, with all its struggles and triumphs.

The first time I recall having this sensation was when I read Any Human Heart by William Boyd. The book is written as the diary of a fictional character, Logan Mountstuart, and it spans the entire 20th century. If I recall correctly, there’s a passage towards the end of the book, where Logan is sitting down in Hossegor, and looks around at the youthful crowd that contrasts with his own age. He reflects on the passage of time, and I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of nostalgia for his life, even though it’s not mine and Logan is fictional.

I have a lot of these examples in my mind. Hell, I even remember where I was when I finished watching Prison Break, and feeling this nostalgia for everything the characters went through. It’s a strange feeling, but I think it’s beautiful. It shows how powerful stories can be, and how they can connect us to times and places and people we’ve never experienced. This being said, I know it’s important to stay grounded in the present, and move on and do things. This way I can have nostalgia for my own life when I look back at it one day.

No pain no startup

I’ve been working at Carbonfact for close to 4 years. Two other people and I were the first hires. I got to build a large share of the initial systems. I’ve been involved in many business decisions, but I’ve mostly actively contributed to technical aspects.

I had to decide on a lot of things at first. What data warehouse to use, the internal data models, how to organize our Python code, our definition of self-serve analytics, and even seemingly mundane things like Pandas vs. Polars. There was a lot to do and it was fun. There were no pushbacks because there was nobody else to push back. I could just build what I thought was best. I even pushed to the main code branch, because nobody else had to review my code. There was always something to build as the startup garnered traction. It felt painless, in a naive sort of way.

The Carbonfact team is bigger now, and we have many customers that keep us on our toes. There are other people in my team, and I definitely don’t push to main – I did get told off several times! There are code reviews, design discussions, and more formal processes. This added friction is intended. It forces me/us not to rush into decisions, and do some thinking through. This quote from Brad Pitt in the F1 movie really summarizes it:

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Anyway, I realized that building a startup means getting used to managing pain. Customers complain about existing features. Prospects are asking for missing features. People internally have very good ideas that they are advocating for. There is an internal interface revamp that is long overdue. Et cetera et cetera. There are more things to do than there is bandwidth. There are also several features that were shipped without much polish, and generate bug reports. There are caveats that we are aware, but which we purposefully delay on solving, waiting for when to become a bigger problem. This is all ok and normal.

You just have to be really good at triaging pain points that come to the surface. There are biases to be aware of. The most obvious one is that recent pains are freshest in memory. They get an undeserved amount of attention when it’s time to decide what to work on. But some pain points are only triggered once, and they never come back. Occasionally, it’s ok to ignore a pain point, and bet on the idea it will not come back. You need to be ok saying no to people from time to time. Sometimes you need to keep the wound open in order to collect more feedback. It takes great timing when it comes to deciding when to soothe a pain. You also have to manage expectations with customers and internal stakeholders, by clearly communicating on timelines.

A corollary to this point is that if you’re not solving pain points, you’re probably not building something people want. So it’s a good problem to have. You just need to be good at managing it. Because it is necessary that anything you work on goes through an initial phase of pain/frustration, before it becomes a beloved feature.

It really helps to be in a healthy and adult environment, where people don’t take things the wrong way. At Carbonfact we assume good intentions, and we try to share our good vibes with our customers. We are aligned on wanting to build the best product for the majority. We also want to cater to specific needs when it makes sense. But we are also ok saying no, in a kind and reasoned way. I think we are quite good at managing pain.