I Want To Build A Chair (or... What Is Up With These Livestreams, Alex?)

In which I try to articulate a concept that I still don't have the right words for.

I’m sure you’ve noticed the recent dearth of written articles in this space. Instead, various podcast/livestream announcements have appeared. I want to tell you a little more about what’s going on—or at least try to—because the idea I’m struggling with is at the edges of my ability to articulate it.

To start with, a brief life update: I’ve recently stepped down from my role as CEO of balena, the startup I founded 11 years ago. I’m incredibly proud of all the things we accomplished there (yes, I know everyone says that, turns out some times they mean it), and I can barely even imagine that I could start a company that would go on to employ almost 100 people, grow consistently every year, be on the path to profitability—even in the crappiest economy in recent memory—while breaking new technical ground all the time and genuinely caring about doing what’s right by our customers.

While all the above is true, what happened during the pandemic—and the things I have learned while trying to make sense of things that don’t seem to want to make sense—have distressed and distracted me enough that I didn’t think it was fair of me to ask the team I care so much about to keep forging on without leadership that is 100% focused. So I handed the keys to folks who have risen up organically through the company. It’s been fascinating to watch them implement their version of our vision for the future of balena. I aspire to launch “good loops” into the world, and it really is looking like balena is going to be one of those.

I am still, however, a builder first and foremost. Many of you have probably seen and/or used balenaEtcher, a program I envisioned and led the development of for years. It is still being used by millions of people every month:

Just because I’m moving on from balena, doesn’t mean I can stop thinking of ways the world around me could be better. Only now my focus is shifting to trying to improve the way humans make sense of the world, either alone or in groups. I’ve been fortunate enough to have made some non-balena investments that were very successful, which means that my family and I can continue to support ourselves for a few years. And, of course, I want the things I work on to scale.

So, while sitting here on this Substack, opining on anything and everything might be fun, I can’t stop thinking about ways to make humans better at navigating their way through this information mess we find ourselves in. It’s not like I expect it to get better by itself. Yes, it’s a tall order, but I am compelled to try. This is part of a broader effort I will probably tell you more about in the future, but for now let’s get back to the chair.

The Chair?

I want to build a chair in which I can sit, entangle my thought process (for example, on how to answer a difficult question) with interested people everywhere who can take it apart, put it back together, and offer ways my approach that question could be better. Whether by pointing me to information I’m missing, pointing out flaws in my reasoning, holding me accountable when I’m cutting corners, or even suggest improvements in the question-framing itself. In fact, I want this kind of chair to be available to my friends, so we can all sit and do that together. And why not make it available to everyone who wants one? I can’t force people to think better, and I’m not even sure I’d want to, but surely it’s worth enabling those that want to, people who find the cost is acceptable.

But let’s face it. The chair is the easy part. I’ve got a really nice one, from Norway:

Nice chair, no?

The hard part is where we actually put our minds together. At balena, we had a tradition of holding team-wide brainstorms on various topics. We would do it for several hours every day. Nothing was too big, or too small, so long as it was genuinely difficult to figure out. It was so incredibly exhilarating to have capable people on hand who are able to answer nuanced questions, go broad or deep, can point out missing steps, propose sophisticated hypotheses and ways to test them, note weird outlying evidence, and help weigh very messy options in a sea of uncertainty. One of the best feelings in the world is exiting a discussion with a specific and inspired solution to a hard problem that no individual person in that call could have come up with. At balena, this happens almost every day.

My subjective evaluation is that doing that daily for a decade is what built the habits of mind that allowed me to produce the outputs you’ve all seen here over the last few months. Obviously, not everyone is impressed. Let’s face it, some people are really not impressed. Thankfully, another thing I learned at balena is to know when to care about what others think and when not to. I am confident that new ground has been broken—much of it by leveraging the community’s collective intelligence—both here, and on other platforms. I want to find a way to develop that informal sensemaking process further, cross-pollinating it with what we discovered at balena.

Yes, I do realize all the obvious objections about how the internet is a terrible place. Trust me, I’ve been here since NCSA Mosaic was a cutting-edge browser, and yes, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Much of what I see now is about the potential of humans, especially when they can connect to each other over high bandwidth, to accomplish shared objectives. Social networks these days leave a lot to be desired, but I don’t think the attempt to subjugate them would have happened if they didn’t pose a threat. Well, I thoroughly believe the only way out is through, and I intend to use all I have learned to try a few experiments in the direction of streamlining much of what we all learned over the last two years. Those paying attention probably know I’ve been experimenting with these ideas for a while, but this is an area for which we don’t even have the right vocabulary yet, never mind the ability to manifest it on demand.

The Nitty Gritty

So, what you’re seeing in those livestreams is me and a very small team experimenting and iterating on the format, the software environment, the way to interact with people randomly showing up, etc. This isn’t even 1% of the potential I see, but I am a firm believer in the rule that “every complex system that works is built on a simple system that worked.” I am also prone to two failure modes this process is designed to sidestep: designing over-ambitious architectures and losing focus.

We are putting together a setup that is intentionally exposing its flaws so we can fix them at their root. Expect a few of these to go very, very wrong. The aim is not to avoid flaws. It is not to repeat a mistake twice. As we say at balena, “don’t waste mistakes.”

So far, each time we’ve done one of these livestreams, we have learned one or more things and improved them for the next time. Even at such an early stage, I’m shocked at the amount of complexity that is required to stream a desktop environment on which people can collaborate fluidly, while at the same time multiplexing the sound to each participant and to the stream correctly. It’s seriously non-trivial, but we’re very lucky that Ryan Bennett has a lot of experience with this kind of setup. The fact that it’s non-trivial means that we’re already identifying something of value in what we’re building. Hopefully, we will put together an open source implementation that people can examine, experiment with, and suggest improvements for. If you’re going to invoke collective intelligence, might as well use it wherever you can. On the other hand, I don’t want to start a sprawling project before we validate that we have something that is worth investing in, so I guess we’ll have to figure all that out as we go.

Back to the streams: it’s been incredible to see the people show up to keep us company (shout out to Tim Williams, brdgs, Skylab, and everyone else!) What we’re building is intended to be easy to use for anyone who wants to replicate our format, though I expect it will take a while before it’s much to be jealous of. I still have a lot to learn about how most of this “livestreaming” world works, and frankly, that’s the way I like it. If what we’re trying ends up working, you should see the quality of the output on my personal Rumble channel improve over time, both in technical terms (sound quality, picture quality, less dead space, etc.) and in content. While I expect there will always be variability in the output—as anything not scripted or quasi-scripted will necessarily fluctuate—you should expect to see the signal-to-noise ratio naturally improve quickly as we pick the low-hanging fruit.

We’re looking to find the kinds of tools, patterns, equipment, filters (etc.) that will make the result better (both while we’re recording and for the recorded output).

Jump In, The Water Is Fine

And yet, this isn’t an invitation to passive viewers but to participants. The idea isn’t to monetize the daily rant. Others have done that already, some better than others. These streams are intended as “frictionless thinking together, out loud, on the internet.” If they happen to be entertaining, so much the better. But not at the expense of the primary objective: To make these streams even more fun and rewarding methods of co-creation than Twitter threads—where I can (could?) jump in with a seed of an idea, and am almost always blown away by others’ real-time feedback—which I then try to incorporate into a much better result, often highlighting other important questions that are worth digging into.

After all, the world is one big recursive rabbit hole all the way down, but at least we can be in it together.

Starting next week, I’ll try to run these streams on Rumble every weekday at 2pm PST. I might announce them here on occasion, but there are only so many times people will humor these livestream announcements. So if this is interesting to you, please be sure to… make a note. (I’ve promised myself to never say “please like, subscribe, and press the bell button to help feed the algorithm!” Let’s see how long that lasts.) If you happen to watch after the livestream, insightful comments are always appreciated.

In any case, I hope this article has helped plug some missing context about where my mind has been, where it’s at, where it’s going, and how we might improve our collective intelligence in 2023 and beyond. Thanks for being part of a community that has given me much to be optimistic about, despite a backdrop that appears to be anything but.

P.S. If anyone knows or has seen any products/projects or other things that are similar to what I am describing—even as a metaphor or as a source of inspiration—please leave a comment. We’re still in the early stages and getting a better sense of the neighborhood is probably the most important thing we can do right now. Ta!