Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Here are the secrets to success in tech and any other business. (No, there isn’t anything earth-shattering here.)

Okay, here it is, right at the start:

Have smart people work on worthwhile problems.

Sorry, I told you in the summary that this wouldn’t be earth shattering. So, let’s delve into this a bit more.

Consider Amazon Web Services. Amazon is making a lot of money on this. A few years ago, they put a bunch on smart people to work on the problem of how to allocate computing resources to large numbers of people. They had a room full of computers connected to the Internet. They wanted customers to rent the computers. The customers wanted low, low prices. Amazon wanted a way to allocate computers that would be efficient enough so that they would make a profit while charging these low, low prices. IT departments around the world all had this same problem.

It is a worthwhile problem.

After a few years of work, Amazon improved its algorithms to the point where they solved the problem. They could and do rent computers at low, low prices efficiently enough to make big profit$.

Amazon solved the problem that all the IT departments in the world shared. Why did Amazon succeed (first, but not the only one to succeed) when practically everyone else in the world failed?

They put smart people to work (and let them keep working for several years).

This is one example. There are others.

There are far more examples of smart people working on problems that aren’t worth much. These smart people solve these problems and solve a bunch more problems that aren’t worth much. They spend their entire lives working on these okay, but not so hot problems.

Advice: Find the worthwhile problems and put your smarter people to work on them.