Elepath is a young company. We don’t know what we are, yet, so there’s not much to write down. But there are a few principles I think are relevant to the modern practice of software development. In the company’s early days, these principles will focus us on building trust and momentum as a company of software developers:

Improvisation

Great ideas erupt constantly from the subconscious, and should be implemented, not explained. When this happens in a group, it’s like a band jamming and producing something amazing that no individual could have predicted. When you blurt out something stupid, I will Yes, and… you.

Evolution

For software to have significant cultural impact, its builders must have the discipline to develop incrementally. Human-directed growth is a conscious walk through a space of possibilities. By starting humbly and iterating persistently, we will discover something truly great.

Symbiosis

The word for computer programs that thrive through parasitic relationships with their environment is virus. A website engineered to deplete human willpower and create addicts is nothing to be proud of — even if a billion people use it. To make great software, we must honor our users, creating mutual profit. To make great software is to make people’s lives better.

If this sounds interesting, please introduce yourself! I'd love to meet you.

Founder, Elepath
December 16th, 2011

This allows me to begin the day with a bird’s eye view. It reveals the system as a whole and forces an intuitive perspective, which balances out the monomaniacal goal-focused mentality I usually wake up with.

I’m choosing the words within Elepath very carefully. Things have a way of becoming what their names mean. The workspace, for example, is Elepath Studio #00001. It’s a studio because I don’t want to work in an office. It has four leading zeros because as the company grows, we’ll add new spaces instead of leaving our old ones — think 10,000 studios with five developers each. Elepath is like elevated pathway, like, a better way to go.

The little tagline I’m using is, The Next Great Tech Company. When it first popped into my head, I was scared to accept it, because it seemed too ambitious. But every night while I sleep, it becomes more plausible. It’s like any grand plan: it seems crazy to your in-the-moment mind, but every day sands down a few more excuses and exceptions, and eventually it’s simply your new reality. That’s my role, economically: to take responsibility for the weight of such a plan.

Most of my energy goes into its design. It basically has two parts; a philosophical part and a practical part. The former is like a software version of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. It starts with an assertion that the purpose of software is to improve the lives of its users. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of popularity, but to me, user engagement does not justify anything. To love my job, the work must be good for the users before it can be popular. I will not make my living as a dopamine harvester!

The practical side is a framework for the intuitive, chaotic process of finding projects to work on. This is a poorly understood part of app development. Most attempts to build websites are unequivocal failures, even among people who have launched something great already. To an extent, this is due to chance, but most approaches allow for way too much of it. My goal is to mitigate that risk by building a relentlessly Darwinian system for killing ideas that aren’t meeting certain thresholds of symbiosis.

I’ve built two things I still use regularly: NowDoThis and Vimeo. In each case, I was struck by inspiration and built a working prototype in a few hours.

The prototypes were not complete, but living software is never complete, like humans, gardens, and companies. Vimeo was just a subdirectory on my personal site, blumpy.org. It only had one person’s videos. But the point is that I deployed it, and woke up the next morning not with an imaginary vision, but a live website I could observe and discuss.

I’m not writing this to boast — I’m saying, ideas are impossible to pre-analyze; you have to build them to evaluate their value, and it’s really easy to build a tiny version of something. You can do it the same day. The reasons people don’t do it are overwhelmingly emotional and irrational. But we don’t want to eradicate passion entirely; we just need a safe container for it, one that won’t waste small fortunes in developer salaries. We pick projects we would desperately love to exist, and we mercilessly kill them if our love is unrequited — if we don’t get anything in return.

The exact parameters of the system are undefined, but the basic structure is there. I think I’m going to wait until I have my first employee to start fleshing it out, in part to entice them to join such a weird company, but also because I think it’s irresponsible for a single individual to write the DNA of a company. It doesn’t take a collectivist to see that a system for thousands of people requires more than one person’s input.

The first hire will be a visual designer. I’m hesitant to say artist, as it's become something of a cliché. But when I browse dribbble, the people who really jump out aren’t the guys who just know how to make stuff look pretty. It’s the people who additionally have a style belonging only to them, like some visual extension of their personality. Examples would include James Scott and Nate Luetkehans. There’s no better word for these people than artist; they just happen to create on-screen interfaces and not paintings of horses. I need to hire someone with skills like that even if it takes all year.

Founder, Elepath
January 5th, 2012

It’s hard to build great technology products without a muser. The muser not only adds emotional motivation to the developer’s work ethic; she serves a cognitive function of focusing his mind on the one thing that truly matters: what using the thing is like. Without her, projects disintegrate into scattered bundles of individual features, appealing to the intellect but not the heart.

Some of the best and most popular products were built by developers who were their own muser. Working on ideas that you passionately want to use is a good strategy because, in addition to the work being high quality, you will continue to work on it through the inevitable hard parts.

If your muser is a nonexistent theoretical person that your CEO insists will one day emerge, or your muser is an “enterprise” or a bureaucracy, you will never do your best work because only part of your organism will be devoted to the vision. One of the benefits of working at Elepath is that we build many projects in parallel, each project is led by its own muser, and new products can come from anyone.

Some people had a laugh when I started a company without “an idea”. In reality, my idea is to slowly build the next great tech company. Products are cheap and last for years, but companies exist over decades (or longer). Our first few muser-led products might be failures, but I believe that, as a long-term strategy, a few winners are inevitable.

Founder, Elepath
February 8th, 2012