This article (or essay?) was inspired by a great round table about mission-driven startups that I participated at Google I/O16 Extended and some water cooler chats at the last TDC.

Sir Geek, The First.

Sir Clive Sinclair created the first pocket calculator, personal computers, folding bikes and electrical cars in the 80s. He is a geek entrepreneur ahead of his time and very misunderstood, because he had the guts to talk about the hardest topic for geeks, loving relationships and how geeks can reinvent them.

Thirty years ago he created the first mass-market home computer, connecting a TV with a cassette player and a keyboard. He created a successful solution joining different technologies together, he believed that everything in our lives is about connections and relationships, and, surprisingly geeks have the most expertise for this job.

Revolutionary Knights

Programmers have a different point of view about relationships, they are frequently misunderstood, suffering bullying and prejudice, but for Sir Clive, they are Revolutionary Knights, like him. They are reinventing the meaning of relationships, fighting for other kinds of connections, like the possibility of deep and loving relationships with machines; uncomfortable topic for geeks and very uncommon for many people at that time and until today.

Nowadays he thinks that machines will kill us and he doesn’t use a smartphone or even email. This could be another opinion ahead of his time, but for now, let’s focus on loving robots!

Decoding Code Lovers

In my journey as CXO at Youper, I’ve been facing many challenges, one of them is how to be a good tech leader and better understand developers’ passions.

I tried to find answers in many articles and some meetups, but my grandmother found the answer. I was trying to explain to her how Youper Algorithms work, and she said:

“Son, first of all, cool your jet and stop moving your arms frenetically when you try to explain something. I appreciate your attempts to explain what you do, but we never understood your passion for computers, since you were eight you have loved computers more than people, and you know who did this, don’t you? Now eat some more spaghetti!

Yeah, she knows how to cool my jet with spaghetti. But that comment about my childhood enlightened me.

My first crush was 25 years ago, I was a skinny 8-year-old boy and love caught me, it was a platonic passion, with that classic age incompatibility. At that time, adults didn’t agree, thinking “I was far too young”, I wish I had said:

” – What a clichê, your cortex is not an open book like mine, do you know anything about neuroplasticity? No? I feel for you! Now I need to feed my fantasies, I won’t give up.”

But at that time, my communication skills weren’t so good enough to answer those people properly or even to start a relationship. So, I asked my elder brother to introduce me, and that was the first of many times he introduced me to a crush with his sincerity.

” – My little brother has a crush on you. I know he is weird looking, he hardly ever goes out and spends many hours of his life watching TV, but he’s kindhearted”

The answer was:

10 FOR N=30 TO 0 STEP -1: POKE 23606,N
20 PRINT AT 10,8;”Hello Diego”
30 PAUSE 3: NEXT N

This was our first conversation and my first relationship with a computer.

Welcome to the programmers’ misunderstood passions.

Imagine how Sir Clive had been misunderstood his whole life. When I was having my first relationship with computers he was inventing them. But what if Sir Clive and I were right? Let’s try to understand the meaning of relationship first of all.

“Relationship is the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected, or the state of being connected.” Wiki

We were right! Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to Wikipedia in the 80s and this would have been a great answer for my parents.

Few people understand the pleasure of being connected or talking with computers using code language, any kind of language, it doesn’t matter. Actually, programmers are polyamorous, they have a lot of deep relationships which many languages, frameworks and OS at the same time. Except Java fans, they prefer the traditional boring monogamist certification. I’m kidding, monogamists are not boring, only Java is.

Is this Free Love? It could be, but it’s not!

After awesome, hidden overnight relationships, the computers introduced me to other people, they were fascinating people, but they didn’t have an intense relationship with machines like me, so I started hacking them.

I was living a really prohibited relationship, connected with concepts, objects, and people. I was enjoying that kind of life so much, I was decided to be a Hacker for my whole life. Until I hacked private documents from a Brazilian Web Designer, and that was my last hack.

This person revealed the universe of free love and uncompromised relationships, with people and codes at the same time. I found unpublished photos and temporary CorelDraw files added to the version control. So, I asked myself if I wasn’t doing the same.

Surely not, I’m not polyamorous. Am I?

“Polyamory is the practice of, or desire for, intimate relationships involving more than two people, with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. It has been described as “consensual, ethical, and responsible non-monogamy.” – Wiki

Where is the “consent of everyone involved” in that dirty thing that you are doing, Diego?

The User Experience saves me!

I don’t think they were enjoying our relationship as much as I was. Their experience was definitely not going well with technology and I was making it worst. Maybe the machines are guilty, maybe not, or the problem could be the human-computer interaction gap, as Sir Clive likes to put it, relationship problems.

So, it could be easy to solve that, let’s try to improve their life experiences as Sir Clive tried to do in the 80s in one of his inventions, commercializing the first smart and electrical vehicles in the world.

In the 80s, some Europen cities started having problems with traffic, pollution, and parking lots. So that geek, passionate about technology, created a small electrical vehicle to move inside the city. It was very disruptive… and a notorious example of failure.

Perhaps Sir Clive was ahead of his time again, although his solution was a bit unsafe and hard to drive. He was always challenging the status quo and was really passionate about his technological inventions, and didn’t find it necessary to invest in market research and customer experience, because he thought his product was so wonderful it could sell itself. A mistake that tech entrepreneurs frequently make nowadays.

Code Lover to Startup CXO

Justin Wilcox, another possible polyamorous supporter, could have helped him with customer development and market opportunities like he helped me. The rite of passage is hard for geeks, frequently that great technology or framework that we love don’t fit with the problem. Justin always says…

“Once I started focusing on my customer’s problems, and validating my assumptions…I found my startup success.”

This new mindset was in constantly built in my mind by many other non-monogamic revolutionary knights, like Eric Ries, Margaret Meloni, Richard Faust and the guys from 37signals, I mean Basecamp.

These guys converted me into a developer who is passionate about understanding user needs and a great fan of agile development, inspiring me to create useful, delightful, and easy to use products.

More than viable products, we need to build lovable products.

To do this properly, I’m always learning how to improve the relationships with people and machines, translating their needs and languages.

My other challenge is to “speak engineer” and also “speak business” to ensure that the business needs are aligned with the technical decisions, although, I’ll never stop to code, my first crush.

Sir Clive Sinclair guides me to here with his polyamorous energy and one of his inventions, he created the ZX Sinclair Computer, my first love that I’ll never forget, especially the keyboard texture. :p

A New Super Journey

ZX helped me to hack maybe a hundred people, but nowadays I’m building a platform that can help millions of people to improve their social relationships and to understand their own feelings.

When I decided to be part of this project, the main motivation was the opportunity to create the most perfect technological solution that I ever made, so the path turned into a startup journey. And the first steps in this journey showed me that it is not about building the most perfect product, it is about challenging ourselves everyday. Eric Ries defines a startup as..

“An organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty”

Luckily, I’m not alone, I joined my energies with a Science-Lover Jose Hamilton in this Youper journey to create digital therapeutics to improve mental health care all over the world.

So, this is my main goal, all technological decisions need to be aligned to achieve this goal. We are building a huge matrix of services to improves our development environment, business metrics and user experience. And to do this properly I need to have deep relationships with many frameworks/services to create better people relationships. Easy huh?

Sir Clive said that to become one of the knights, the prerequisite is to leave our comfort zone and accept the challenge of improving the complexity relationship between humans and our inventions.

Challenge accepted!