On Hobby Startups and such..

You know, an odd thing has been happening to me recently. I've been drifting away from hobby programming, and drifting into hobby startups. For folks who've known me long, most projects I do (outside of work) are hobby projects. Programming and tinkering around has been a dominant theme.

But this is different, it feels different, and I'm suddenly getting yanked back to the unsureness I had back when I was a teenage programmer. I'm now a total newbie and beginner in a world of suits and businessmen, and wondering what I'm doing here. For starters, I'm currently totally immersed in this - I've taken a break from Amazon and am learning how to start a company. It sounds quite loopy (probably is), but in the university of life that's the learning I'm seeking. And as usual, I prefer the practical approach of doing it and make up/learn theory along the way, and iterate.

A good number of people start companies to promote their vision of the world, which I've heard is the right way to start a company. But the hobbyist/tinkerer itch I've had for a while is to actually learn how to start a company, just for the sake of that. And learning to do so much like how I learnt how to program - by just programming a lot (really, a lot). It was through lots of fun projects, painful hours of debugging and figuring things out, years of constantly realizing what I was doing wrong and in the process learning better things. It was fun, it led to a brief career as a programmer solving somewhat interesting challenges, and a countless series of hobby projects I loved.

Now this new branch of learning - of building a company to "program" your vision is turning out to be quite fascinating. This involves newer aspects of learning, where I'm learning (through repeated reality checks) the simple yet complex interplay between a customer, his/her problem, his/her solution to the problem through the purchase of your product, which in turn is your solution to how you understood the customer's problem, and improving the overlap in the two. There are other equally interesting aspects like keeping the company afloat, and dealing with the new, unexpected reactions from the people you interact with. If you aren't confused yet, good, because you either got it or your eyes glazed over.

But yeah, it does feel at a fundamental level like programming, except you're dealing with an extremely complicated analog system, and I've never programmed analog systems. Like my post above, logical contradictions are part of the whole deal. And you need patience, tonnes of it. There's no point getting frustrated with a computer, and there's no point getting frustrated with humans.

I'll try to post more on this as it goes, but I'm usually quite lazy in matters of posting :)

Cheers
~Shashank
PS: The thumbnail pic is the Antikythera mechanism, the world's oldest analog computer dating back to ~150 BC.