trapped in the technologist factory

We used HBase as our primary data store, because it was designed to scale, just like us. In the future, we would power a loosely federated Amazon, composed of independent online retailers, knit together by our software. If we built it, they would come.

But they didn’t. The only thing that kept us afloat was a bespoke product we had built for eBay, because our CEO knew an executive there. Later, after I left, that same executive moved to Staples and convinced them to acquire the startup outright. Nothing we had built was useful to Staples, it was just evidence of our ability to “innovate”. The resulting “skunk works” team has since been disbanded.

Hey look at that: business still very much works knowing people. Success, or rather the ability to bring in revenue, isn’t always about the ingenuity of the product but rather the personal connections of the owners.

I told myself...our business was data, not ads.

I was wrong, of course. The advertising side of the company was where all the growth was happening, and our product direction was whatever helped them close deals.

And:

Our product and pricing model both required unjustifiable levels of trust from our prospective customers, but none of us saw that as our problem to solve. We were downstream of the business model; our job was simply to wait and prepare for its eventual success.

And one last jab at the technologist mindset:

we’re conflating novelty with technological advancement