Explorations / Direction
After scale, what do I want to build?
A decade at Google taught me to build for billions. It didn’t tell me what’s worth building next. That’s the question I’m actually sitting with.
What it taught me
Open questionAfter enough scale, the question stops being “can this reach millions?” and becomes “is this a problem I can respect up close?”
Still open
Is the work I want defined by its reach, or by how close it lets me stay to the people it’s for?
The question under the question
Scale stopped being the answer
For a decade the implicit goal was reach. Does it work for billions, ship in a hundred languages, hold up under a load most products never see. I learned to build that way, and I’m proud of it. But somewhere in the last couple of years the question changed on me. Reach stopped feeling like the point, and I started asking what I’d want to build even if it only ever served a few thousand people who needed it.
What I’m optimizing for now
Closer to the person it’s for
Reach is a multiplier. It multiplies whatever you point it at, including the parts you got wrong.
Reach multiplies the wrong parts too; proximity is how you catch them
Fig. 01 — The measure shifts from reach to proximity
reachproximityThe work I want next still has technical depth, but it also has a kind of proximity: close enough to the person it’s for that I can tell when it’s wrong, not just whether a metric moved. I don’t have a title for that job yet. I have the shape of it.
So I’m sitting with a slower question than “where next”: what’s worth pointing a career at, once reach by itself stops being a reason. I’d rather answer that honestly than take the next impressive thing because it’s in front of me.