The only run is the long run - building a great software company

If you want to build a great software company, you should only build it with the long term in mind. This may sound counter-intuitive, after all the software world feels very short term with it’s ever changing technology and trends; and this sometimes leads the people who start and run a software company lose the long term view that most other industries have. Yet this is a fundamental mistake, at its heart the creation of software is a craft and sometimes even an art. And like all creative industry, it takes time, patience and resilience to perfect the creative process and culture.

When you have the long term in mind your mindset changes. Every business decisions you take changes. And all these little changes accumulate to a culture, a psyche and a people who value their work and their creation. This is the time honored strategy for all organizations that trades in the creative output. You don’t need it in a factory or say in a product manufacturing plant but you need it in a software company. Solely because a software company is never a product manufacturing plant. You may have heard it differently, you may even have started to believe it as such but it never is. Many have tried to force the “engineering” into a software company and failed. Many will no doubt keep trying, but I believe until we have built perfect AI bots that write software with built in human empathy, they too will fail.

The moment you bring in the long term you bring in decisions like: “it is better to take in a project that will not burn out my people” or “let’s invest a little more on the team’s ability to gel”. All of these lead to happiness - the magic that brings out the best in humans. And you need that best, for them to find the best solution to a next to impossible problem, or the most subtle way to let the user of their software know that they left an entry blank. With happiness you find passion in your software projects, you find people pro-actively participating to make the product better, challenging themselves to strive even higher.

As we start a new year, our 16th as a company, these are the words we keep reminding ourselves. The long term has always been our goal, even when we started with just three people working in a small room. And 16 years later we are happy that we had always stayed with that as our guiding star. It has not been easy, and we don’t expect it to be easy, but the journey has been amazing and that makes all the difference.

Here’s to a great new year. May this year be your greatest. And may we meet years from now and smile that we had taken the road less traveled.