Remember good old encyclopedias? Back in my (childhood) days, if you wanted to look up a fact like the capital of a country or the biography of Abraham Lincoln you'd flip through the pages of Encyclopedia Brittanica. It was a slow, manual process and for most of us required a trip to the library.

Given how slow this process was, schools emphasized route memorization of facts. Nowadays, of course, we have Google and Wikipedia so we can look up anything we're curious about pretty much instantaneously. As such, we're increasingly rethinking how important it is know certain facts. Do I really need to know the exact year Lincoln was assassinated or do I just need to know how to quickly look it up?

This shift from studying/memorization to just-in-time information has also played out in the world of navigation. Gone are the days of carefully mapping out your route before starting a road trip. Today we punch in an address into Google Maps or Waze and let it mindlessly direct us. Even more than Google and Wikipedia, Maps goes a step further and works in close concert with your own actions; make a wrong turn or hit some traffic and Maps seamlessly course corrects.

When it comes to Education, many see the future as online courses and MOOCs. People point to Udacity and Udemy as the kinds of institutions the next generation of kids will attend instead of traditional universities. While I agree that these sorts of online video courses will continue to grow (I in fact built a couple of these types of companies :), I think the future of education will actually look more like Google Maps than Udacity. You see, the shift online is not just about taking a classroom and putting it online, it's about getting rid of the concept of a class all together. Instead of slogging through dense coursework in preparation for a future occupation or skillset, we'll immediately get started on a new task and technology will nudge us towards our goal as we go.

This shift will come about as more and more of today's complex tasks become increasingly deskilled. Driven by technologies like computer vision and AR, computers will gain a fuller sense of our environment, how we're operating within it, and can deliver timely intuitive instructions just when and where we need it.

When you step back and think about it, it's remarkable that driving automobiles has become so easy that practically the entire adult population can achieve mastery of this skill. Similarly when you look at fast food operations, someone in minimal time and with no required cooking skills can learn how to make hundreds of different dishes.

In the future, the same will be true of such activities as performing CPR, speaking a foreign language, performing handiwork around the house, producing and editing media, programming, and more. You won't need to take classes to start using these skills or even watch a video off of YouTube. Instead, in the moment, you will be presented with step-by-step instructions just like Google Maps does with navigation today.

On one hand this sort of future is frightening. You may say, this isn't education at all; we're not actually learning. To me this is similar to arguments over the future of work. As a society, we're going to be grappling with the fact that much work (not just blue-collar) can be automated. We'll need to ask ourselves which things are worth learning because doing so enriches us – and which things are we currently doing simply because there is a job-to-be-done? It seems to me that the latter category is ripe for automation.

On the other hand this future is incredibly exciting and even inspiring. You can look at just-in-time education as raising the baseline skills of every human being*. We will each be capable of doing at least the basics in previously impenetrable fields. From there its up to us to develop our mastery further. And I imagine as we work towards mastery there will always be some frontier that depends on more traditional practice or education.

For more on this trend see Tim O'Reilly's post on Gradually, then suddenly. My post was mostly a riff on what I picked up there.

*Actually, if I'm being a bit sensational, I should say every cyborg (part human, part computer). This future depends on us increasingly augmenting ourselves with computers. Note: We are already cyborgs as we walk around with our phones all day.

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Yesterday was one of those rare clear, sunny winter days in Seattle so we headed out to the beautiful Madison Park neighborhood for some sunshine.

We ended up having lunch at a Korean restaurant and ordered the Bibimbap. When the waiter put down the sizzling, hot stone bowl he suggested waiting a while so the rice burns.

Now I’ve known about the Korean appreciation for crispy rice for some time. When I first learned about it I was amazed because Iranians have a similar obsession. We call this rice “tahdig” — and it is often the most treasured part of the meal. I was a very finicky eater as a kid, so I would usually pile my plate with several portions of tahdig and maybe a little khorest to appease my mom.

Thinking more about my amazement over the fact that both Koreans and Iranians have discovered crispy rice, I think I know why I find it remarkable. Crispy rice is surely one of those creations that happened purely by accident. I like to picture some ancient Persian hundreds of year ago accidentally burning the rice and while throwing out these parts decided to maybe have a taste. I’m completely making up this origin story by the way, but I can’t imagine tahdig not being an accident.

The remarkable thing in such a discovery is that this person kept their senses open and explored the situation after making a mistake. So often, when something goes wrong we tend to shutdown. We label the situation a failure and move as quickly as possible to clean up our mess.

It’s like jumping off the wrong subway stop in some foreign city. You can beat yourself up and anguish over the next 15 minutes you’ll have to stand on the platform waiting for the very next train. Or you can say “Well I’m here now. A corner of the earth I know nothing about. Is there something worth seeing?” You may find that you are in some non-touristy neighborhood and end up at a restaurant where you have the most treasured meal of your trip. (I share such a detailed story because this in fact has happened to me)

The point I’m making is that an optimistic orientation to the situations you face allows you to make counter-intuitive discoveries. In this orientation try to think about how rare a scenario is for yourself or even for all of mankind.

So it’s not “damn I got off the wrong subway stop”. It’s “I’m on vacation, there’s no rush, and I’m somewhere tourists never go, maybe there’s an adventure here?”. In reality more often than not, there’s not something there. But occasionally you find something and those things often are the most valuable discoveries.

How many cultures just blindly throw out burnt rice because no one has yet slowed down and explored the situation?

How many incredible discoveries are right in front of you unseen?

Taste the burnt rice!

Photo credit: https://turmericsaffron.blogspot.com/2010/01/the-art-of-making-persian-tah-dig.html

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If you're into product development and haven't watched Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview before, I highly recommend it. It's currently on Netflix.

One part that especially jumped out for me was this 90 second clip on content beating process. I suggest you give it a watch before continuing reading.

Watching Steve Jobs you realize how contrarian his thinking was versus much of the conventional views in product development today. Today entrepreneurs are pushed to “get out of the building” and talk to your customers. Steve Jobs famously said "people don't know what they want until you show it to them" – and generally ignored things like customer research and validation.

So who’s right? Both I claim, but I think Jobs has the more fundamental truth that real breakthroughs come from deep thought and sweating the details. This truth is especially profound these days as so many entrepreneurs and companies have leaned too far into process.

Today so many of us have fallen under the spell of Lean Startup thinking. Here ideas and details are discounted if not outright denigrated. When I see people under this ideology work towards breakthroughs they spend an hour thinking up as many ideas as they can onto sticky notes and then it’s about “getting out of the building” and seeing what sticks in the face of customers. There is this back-and-forth between building and validating that emerges but the building part is consciously minimized. You rush through building quick sketches of your idea so you can get back to the real gold: feedback.

Steve Jobs would call people who think like this “bozos”.

I’ll take a more balanced view but if I'm more in one camp it’s towards Jobs. Now I think building-validating cycles are valuable, but we have the weighting backwards. We should be spending more time internally debating and fleshing out an idea and exploring the intricacies that only reveal themselves as you build. The gold is in the art and craftsmanship that is brought to building.

Now the Leaners will say that the Steve Jobs way is risky for your company's prospects. I think there's truth in this because having reliable intuition about new products is exceptionally rare. Most of time when you think you have it, you probably don't. But let’s state another truth which is that entrepreneurship is fundamentally risky. Any process that claims to remove risk comes at a cost. My suspicion is that Lean-thinking leads to derivative products. It helps raise the likelihood that you don’t outright fail, but by following what your customers tell you, you give up a shot at breakthrough. At times this tradeoff makes sense, but you need to think about your goals. Sometimes you need to over-index on process (don't fail) and other times you need to focus on content (real breakthroughs).

For product people that want to be more like Steve Jobs, skip the black turtlenecks and watch the interview above. Also I can recommend a fantastic book I'm reading called Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. Finally, spend some time learning about Allen Zhang, the founder of WeChat, who seems to be a Jobsian.

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In tech we call our companies "start-ups" which I think is an apt name because a lot of the sweat and tears occurs in this stage of just figuring things out. For most companies the act of starting up actually takes years and is filled with many reformulations and relaunches until things start working. It's feels a lot like you are tinkering away in a toolshed, building a machine, hoping that your work will lead to it actually booting up.

Less discussed is the stage of voluntarily moving on from your startup and have it continue without you. This is clearly not a stage everyone faces, but I think enough do that it's worth sharing my experience.

Yesterday, was my last day at Cody /Alo Moves, a company I co-founded seven years ago. Believe it or not this whole process of moving on kicked off nearly a year ago. It takes a long time for a founder to unwind him or herself from a company. I wanted to share some of the steps I took as part of this process.

Before I jump in a little context about our company: We were acquired about 1.5 years ago by Alo Yoga. As part of the acquisition, we kept our HQ in Seattle and increased our team headcount from about 20 to 25 FTEs. Our acquirer is an apparel company and we're a tech / media company so there was some, but not full overlap in our respective disciplines.

So with that context, here's how the whole thing went down:

• Talk early with your co-founder(s): Before my mind was really made up on moving on I had a series of chats with my co-founder, Paul. I made sure to have these talks outside of the office, in the evening, away from the usual hustle and bustle of the office. I felt like a calmer environment was critical to just have an open voicing of where I was at – particularly since I wasn't sure what I wanted.
  
• Plan out your org chart for the transition: Once it became clear what I wanted to do and Paul and I digested it, we turned our attention to the org chart. My responsibilities spanned product (which I directly managed), marketing (we had a lead but I was heavily involved), and operations (HR, office, accounting, legal). After listing out all my responsibilities, we realized we needed at least 2, and ideally 3 people to replace me, as well as shifting some of my other responsibilities to existing team members. This is pretty common for founders. We tend to do many disparate things and given our understanding of the business can do them efficiently.
  
• Back into a timeline: Given where we needed the org chart to go, and that some hires should be sequenced we decided that 9 months would give us enough time to make this transition with high-confidence. This also got us through the holiday / new year season which is our biggest and most intense. By leaving in March, the business would be better situated to deal with any bumps. This turned out to be just enough time so I'm glad we picked a long runway. On the otherhand, I have to say that personally dealing with such a long period of transition ended up being draining for me. More on that later.
  
• Determine a communication plan: Once we knew my timeline, we had to think through who to tell and when. What we quickly realized is that there would be a lot of questions from opening some of the job roles we had earmarked so we should communicate early. We decided to tell the team in September that I was leaving in March, so a six-month heads up. Partly we felt that such a long heads up would emotionally dampen the news. I decided to do this communication in the days just before our annual retreat, to give me plenty of time with the team afterwards to work through the news. We anticipated it being unnatural to share this news and then just get right back to the regular work week. So on a Tuesday afternoon, I called the founder of our parent company and shared my intention. The next morning I sent an email to the entire team, and held an all-hands a few hours later to talk through it face-to-face. The next day we went on our retreat and I had a number of 1:1 chats during all the fun. All in all, this rollout went very well.
  
• Strategically disengage: This was probably the hardest thing I did, and I'm not 100% sure it was for the best. Even before I communicated to the team, I made the decision to increasingly take a backseat in the org as this transition unfolded. My thinking was that rather than suddenly disappear one day, its better if the team just learns to push on their own while I'm still there. This was really hard as I tend to be pretty vocal and hold strong views in meetings. Suddenly I was holding my tongue constantly. In time, I started not attending almost all my regular meetings other than our weekly leads meeting and the product meetings. I can say for sure this made the transition a smooth one, as when I left the teams were already self-sufficient but it was hard for me to be so passive for the last 6-9 months. If I had to do it again, I would've started this process maybe with just 3 months to go.
  
• Take a supportive role in recruiting: One of the areas that was especially awkward in this period was figuring out how to best be involved with recruiting. As a founder, I was traditionally very involved and had multiple touch points in the pipeline. But now it felt weird as I didn't want to hold back on the fact that I was months away from leaving. So in the end I decided that I would be involved only in the middle of our process. This is where we give folks a project to do and review over the phone. Candidates would work with other team members for the initial phone screens and in the final interview loop at the office. In this way, I still could gauge the skillset of the candidate and give my opinion but I wasn't a "face" of the organization that they had spent a lot of time with.
  
• Spend your last month completely away from the office: While yesterday was my last day, we actually had my farewell party and all last month. With a new product manager on board, Paul and I agreed that it would be best for me to just get out of her way. So after three weeks together, I stopped going into the office. For the past few weeks I've been helping Paul with transition, mostly just doing calls and meeting up with him outside the office. This has been nice as many things only come up only after you're gone. Also, on a practical matter there were several services and payments that I hadn't fully transitioned that we caught during this phase.

I hope this was helpful. If anyone is starting down a path like this and wants advice please feel free to reach out.

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/49141199@N00/7052456655

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