What Is Elepath Like?

Each morning, my first task is sketching out a conceptual portrait of the company. Today’s looked like this:

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