Everything I ever write will be a remix

Academic coursework and my relationship with it was contentious during its time. As clichéd as it may sound, I did engineering to realise I didn’t enjoy it. Maybe, it was also my way of waving the white flag knowing how much more I need to learn in the field of electronics and communication to be a competent engineer. I also didn’t find the challenge enticing.

I found digital businesses inviting and spent years finding my place in the ecosystem. The high of this rodeo up until now was how I stumbled into founding a startup.

The challenge of not having a background to understand the business and technical aspects of these digital businesses incentivised me to level-up.

During this tenure, journalistic sites failed to help me level-up. They were designed to keep you updated with the current developments, not to help delve deeper.

This is when I ended up reading the published work of serious academics and practitioners who spent years trying to answer questions that interested them. This helped me formulate some of the hypothesis that I grasped and implemented in my work. The learnings in the form on feedback in reality helped me build them into a customised execution toolkit.

Most of the source material was introduced to me due to the information stack that I built through the social channels.

I was reminded of this again during my current reading of “Understanding Variation” by Donald Wheeler whose work I came across thanks to writing at Commoncog. I still haven’t finished the book in its entirety. Just two chapters in and clearly bought into the core concept of process charts.

This is not the first time I experienced this dawning of clarity when presented with a concept backed by academic rigour. Most of the fundamental concepts that I base my work on are derived from published work of operators, analysts and academics.

In this issue, I would like to present a few of the fundamental concepts that I riff on time to time for work and self initiated learning.

An assortment of concepts :

1. Thick and Thin Markets

• I came across the work of Alvin E Roth when working on building marketplaces at the time of Subjimandi.app.
• The concept of Thick and Thin markets helped in formulating the end goal for produce marketplace we aspired to build.
• Produce marketplace known as APMC mandi(s) are thin markets where trade takes place within the confines of the facility. The focus on ownership of produce made it a thin market.
  
• By focusing on classification and decentralised operations. We tried to build a produce market modelled on Thick Markets.

2. Smile Curve

• This concept got introduced to me in a Ben Thompson’s article.
• The concept initially originated from the founder of Acer company where he broke down the PC supply chain into Value vs Process flow graph to highlight the shift in PC manufacturing.
• We adopted this concept to create a basic narrative of what is the intended outcome for stakeholders with Subjimandi.app and branded it as “Sorrow to Smile”.

3. Business Triad

• This concept surfaced in the mid-stages of Subjimandi.app. It allowed me to articulate the dimensionality in the market we are operating.
• It was thanks to work that Cedric Cin did on business expertise that exposed me to the work of Lia Di Bello.
• The three sides of the triangle represent different problems of the produce supply chain. It is important for a marketplace to focus on one side and not be distracted by the problems on the other two sides.

These 3 theoretical concepts shaped my view of understanding the space I was navigating as a startup founder. There are many more that are currently shaping my current pursuit of focused product building.

My association with concepts is that they provide me a framework to articulate my work in a broader context. It helps me understand that the lessons I am learning will be relevant in other scenarios as well. In short, helping me stay curious as I map the progress of picking up new pursuits and leveling-up.

Taxing ordeal

The challenge of being open to implementing theoretical concepts is that you will eventually develop an intuition of what will work. Once you are attuned to a new concept, large share of your work will involve aligning fellow collaborators to buy-in and see value in implementing the concept.

This time when I attempted to implement North Star Framework at my day-job. The time to buy-in was shorter due to a renewed approach that I took from my learnings in the past. I will try to write about it in a standalone post later.

It gets lonely and risky as well when you are the one pushing for change in any capacity. This is the tax that I am alluding to when talking about implementing ideas. It becomes easy if you are serious about the work you do.

Signing off till next time,

Vivek, making a living thanks to published work of others