I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
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When evaluating startups, evaluate yourself. Will you be a good customer?
Last week, I was privileged to support the annual Female Fintech Founder competition run jointly by Google, Deutsche Bank and Atos. The competition seeks to find the most promising early stage fintech companies founded by women, and to provide the winners with support for the next stage of their success. (And to provide all the participants with advice and networking opportunities.)
At the heart of the session I attended was a great presentation by my colleague Prue MacKenzie. You can read more about that here.
I can’t improve on Prue’s advice, but the session did prompt me to think about how established companies work with new companies, and whether they always get it right. Many of the founders taking part in the competition will offer their services directly to consumers, but many will have corporates as customers or partners. Founding a company takes great courage, especially in times of great uncertainty. Whether they win the competition or not, all of the founders have already taken a greater risk than any I have ever taken in my career. I think that they deserve customers and partners who think deeply about how to work with them.
Agreement is optional; understanding is essential
Technology architecture is characterised by debate: we spend a lot of time arguing with each other. Given how much time we spend, we should ask ourselves whether we are any good at it. But being good at arguing doesn’t mean that we win all the time: in fact, winning all the time might be a sign of badness. Arguing well means that we are reliably successful at discovering the truth and making decisions - which may mean that we have to change our minds.
Some time ago I wrote that, as a technology architect, one of your jobs is to get ideas from your head into other people’s heads. I still believe that to be true, but realise that I left something very important out: it is also your job to get ideas from other people’s heads into your head. It is your job to understand the objectives, motivations, constraints and thinking of other people, and to see how these change your perspective.