Sharing your secrets (chef's recipes)

`1:23:01`

chest cuz you don't share your business secrets. But instead, they write cookbooks and they put their recipes out there for the whole world to see. They're not afraid of somebody buying that cookbook and then opening a restaurant next to theirs and putting them out of business with the same food. They're not afraid of that. They They're afraid of not being known and no one knows who they are and whatever. So, cookbooks are a way of sharing getting the message out there, getting people to try their stuff. It's not saying be a cook like me, but here's some recipes you can make. That's what Getting Real was. It was a series of recipes for how we think about building software. And all future books follow the same general thing, but that's where it really started for us was like this is our cookbook. This is our our These are our recipes for building a business. Real quick, it hasn't changed that much.

`1:23:49`

I mean I was You know, as I was reading it, it could have come out a few years ago and you know, there's a few things that would have changed, but not that Yeah. And what's behind that you think that you really had the sort of sense of vision for the company that you wanted to we had a way I don't know if it was a sense of vision for the kind of company we wanted to build, but it was a way of doing things that is still every time we've strayed away from it, we've we've gone down the wrong path. Huh. Keep the company as small as you can. Be pretty scrappy. Small teams can can move fast, do a lot of things really well that big teams can't do. Um you know, a lot of these things, the way we launch products with little teasers first. It was a It was a formula we were developing in real time that worked. So,

`1:24:35`

like we kept doing it, but also getting back to some of the earliest things we talked about, it just feels natural for us. We do not try to be this way. We are this way. And that is why I think we're good at it. When you try to be a way that you are not, you're always struggling. You're always copying. And they're I think there might be a an essay in Getting Real about this, but I can't quite remember about copying. It might be in Getting Real or could be in Rework. Um The problem with copying is that you might copy someone really well, but you don't know the ideas that went into the thing. So, now what? That's the problem with copying is it now what? You copied them until that present moment, but now what? If you don't have the the the ideas behind what made the thing initially, you don't know where to

`1:25:21`

take it next. And this is what hurts. And so, I think a lot of people who try to copy a style, it's okay to copy by the way like to learn, but then you've got to find your own way. And so, I think these books are the result of us have found we found a way early and we've been developing that way, but it's always like what's natural for us. So, yeah, to take I mean if we're going to continue on the road, I mean it's the same idea though. It's just like as we got bigger, we had new ideas, we saw new things work or not work and we just continued to layer into these and eventually we felt like we had enough material to put a book together. We didn't set out to write books. Books are byproducts of us being who we are and being willing to share those things and not feeling like these things are private and proprietary. I think the business world that we entered back when

`1:26:08`

we started this was like a scared, uh proprietary, secret world of like everything's important, let's patent everything, it's ours, no one can know what we're doing and everything's stealth. It's like I don't buy any of that for a minute. I like let's just share it all, let's get it all out there, let's talk about these things and I think that's really better for business and it's better for you and then you're honest with yourself and everyone knows you are so they can call BS on you if you're not being that way. It's just healthy. It's healthy. Yeah. It's an interesting place that we found because like I really admire what you've achieved and accomplished both as a writer and in business and I don't feel like I've done that. And I want to have