Founder and CEO

When I started Knowledge Architecture I decided to take the title of Founder. CEO seemed overkill for a company with no clients or employees.

I liked (and still like) the word founder. For me it it evokes imagery of a foundry, the heat and noise of melting down scrap metal and casting it into gussets and beams.

While the 10th floor of a San Francisco office building is not exactly as chaotic as a shop floor in a foundry, the early days of a company are when fundamental elements like the name, purpose, and culture are forged. For the first few years, you are not only fighting for survival, but also to discover the soul of the company.

You spend hours debating questions like "What kind of people do we want to work with?" "Why does our company exist?" "What work do we most enjoy?"

In the beginning, we had dozens of ideas for products or services, but we had no idea which ones would be commercially viable, technically feasible, or even fun. So we ran experiments. We took on small projects doing a range of things, from technology assessments to custom financial reporting, before finding our niche in developing social intranets and integration software for architects and engineers.

Critical to finding our niche was asking the following questions after every project, "Can we make money doing this?" "Is this product or service repeatable and scalable?" "Will it be fun?"

Often times "Will it be fun?" was the deal killer. We took on several projects that were fun to do once, but none of could imagine doing regularly. So we moved on and tried something else.  With time it became easier to spot the signs of winning and losing ideas, and interestingly, it didn’t take much debate. The way an idea (usually one of mine) was vetoed was what I can best describe as a collective groan from the team.

That collective groan is actually kind of amazing if you think about it, because what it represents is intuition and culture wrapped up in one. It effectively says, "Chris, yes, perhaps we can make money at this, but even if we could, none of us want to do it, and even if we did, we’re not sure that our clients would even want this."

Something like that.

Last year, we moved out of startup mode and into company building mode. I’m using Steve Blank’s definition of a startup as a "search for a repeatable, scalable business model."  We know what we’re building and who we’re building for. The main challenge now is execution. Because of that, I have felt that my primary job shifting from Founder to CEO.

On the whole I’m spending more time probing the "who, where, when, and how" questions and less time on "why and what" questions. I can do this because most of the answers to "why and what" questions were embedded in our culture back in the founding phase. The answers are intuitive. Occasionally, I’ll even issue a preemptive groan of my own before taking a new idea to the team.

Yet sometimes the wrong idea slips through. We came up with an idea for a new product a few months ago. We’ve proven we can build it, we have validated the market for it, but in our excitement to bring the product to life, we forgot to ask a fundamental question, "Will we enjoy the success of this product?" After concentrated debate, we have decided no, at least not it in its current form, so we are seeking alternative methods to bring the product to market.

This has happened a few times in our past, and every time, the Founder part of me reached back to very basic questions about why we are in business and what kind of company we want to be. Luckily, the CEO side of my brain listens to the Founder side, who remembers the early days. The secret I believe, is the relationship between Founder and CEO. The CEO might be about building our future, but the Founder preserves our past.