I want to share with you part of a letter written to a technological innovator who wanted to bring his invention to market:

Firstly: I want to know whether if I continue to work on and about your own great subject, you will undertake to abide wholly by the judgment of myself … on all practical matters relating to whatever can involve relations with any … fellow-creatures?

Secondly: can you undertake to give your mind wholly and undividedly … to the consideration of all those matters in which I shall at times require your intellectual assistance and supervision; and can you promise not to slur and hurry things over; or to mislay, and allow confusion and mistakes to enter into documents, etc?

Thirdly: If I am able to lay before you in the course of a year or two, explicit and honorable propositions for executing your engine, (such as are approved by persons whom you may now name to be referred to for their approbation), would there be any chance of your allowing myself … to conduct the business for you; your own undivided energies being devoted to the execution of the work?

Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? Would you care to guess when and by who this was written?

A blast from the past

This letter came to my attention in my role as computing history maven. It was sent by Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, to the inventor Charles Babbage, in August of 1843. Babbage had been obsessed with his vision of a completely mechanical programmable computer, the “Analytical Engine”, and had been improving the design for years; he was also driving the project into the ground by exceeding budget and time estimates, quarrelling with his chief engineer, and pissing off the government whose funding he sought. In other words, he was a technology genius with poor management skills.

Ada, then 27 years old, had been assisting the 51 year old Babbage for some years, but was despairing of the setbacks to the project. Unlike him she had excellent PR skills, and she wanted to save the project by taking on the management and external relations roles and putting Babbage to work as what he did best – as what we’d call today a CTO.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

It’s amazing how the issue Ada was trying to solve in the 19th century is still very common in today’s startup scene. I’ve been helping startup companies since the early nineties, and I can identify with Ada all too easily: one of the crucial moments in an startup’s early life is when its techie founders attain the wisdom to bring in a professional business-savvy manager. Of course, it may happen at times that the founders include a good manager or two; it happened to Apple, Intel, and Google (and to one or two less famous startups I know close up). At times the founders consist of a technologist and a manager that got together; at other times the founders are all tech geniuses, and lack the management skills needed to grow a company. Relinquishing the reins of their company to someone else is a tough decision and emotionally painful, but it’s critical.

How to get founders to do it right

It isn’t easy to tear a founder from their perception that they know it all. You’ll note how Ada’s letter is couched in terms of an inquiry: Can I rely on you, she asks the respected inventor, to focus on the technology and leave management to me? Can I rely on you to work on the priorities I assign – and then create good documentation? Can you promise to trust my judgment completely in all matters of interaction with other people?

This intelligent young woman senses the danger, and is therefore seeking a very explicit commitment from Babbage – she needs him to promise to respect the division of roles she proposes, to shut up and do as he’s told – or she’s out! (This, mind you, she says to a  respected man who could easily have been her father! Gotta love her chutzpah!)

These days it’s often the VC folks who do the founders this favor, by insisting on bringing in a business manager, or demanding that one be appointed – or be proven to exist – as a condition to investing. And of course much depends on personalities – the founder/CTO and the new CEO need to get along; tragedies have happened when the wrong people were forced to manage such a small company together.

If you’re starting a company and feel uneasy about this matter, better get some help: doing this wrong can easily break a startup.

Babbage’s answer (the wrong one)

It could also break one in Victorian England, and in the case before us, it did.

Charles Babbage replied to Ada’s letter the very next day. He rejected her conditions in their entirety. Ada, true to her statement and her instincts, did not take charge. Babbage continued to try and build his Analytical Engine, and failed miserably to make it happen. He died a sick and bitter old man.

To end Babbage’s story on a positive note, following the successful construction in London of his Difference Engine in 1991 – Babbage’s 200th birthday – there is now a project afoot to build the much more ambitious Analytical Engine.

Bringing the History of Technology to life and use today

It’s amazing how relevant these lessons from earlier eras can be to our modern world; and I make good use of this relevance. This particular  post is derived from two slides in a lecture I’m developing at this time, to be called “Breakthroughs in the history of Computing: Lessons and insights for managing innovation” (more details coming soon). This will be a much expanded revision of my shorter “Nine lessons in innovation from the history of computing”, which I often give in Innovation oriented events in various companies. There are many other lessons – not only from Babbage, but from other innovators going centuries back (indeed, one goes all the way to ancient Greece!).

You see, technology changes, but human nature – that of innovators, of managers, of investors and of end users – abides unchanged!

If you want to discuss your Startup company’s business plan or product, we can help!