A Fresh Start: Why we are starting a Terakoda

I quit my job in March. It wasn’t an easy decision. It qualified as a Good Job on basically every metric: good pay, growing business, interesting technical problems, smart co-workers. There was very little to criticize about the company. However, I realized it wasn’t the right fit for me. It’s the culmination of some ideas and feelings that have been growing and solidifying over the last six years and four companies. I realized I needed to try something different.

I talked it over with my wife and we decided that we would try this together. On top of that, we decided that what we really wanted was to be both independent and part of a cooperative. That might seem like a contradiction, but let me explain.

First, a little history

I’ve been working in and around Silicon Valley for two decades now. My first job was plugging in cables at the San Jose Convention Center in 2005. Between then and now I’ve done many things. I worked at big companies like Google. I worked at start-ups, so many start-ups, small start-ups, dying start-ups, zombie start-ups, even founding a short-lived start-up. I was lucky enough to be around for one IPO. I’ve also done freelance work a few times, though never for long.

Lindsay worked in the video game industry for a decade. She did design and production. She was a producer when THQ shut her studio down. She did production at a few small studios trying to get in on the mobile-game gold-rush. Eventually she landed at Cryptic and did design and production on a major Dungeons & Dragons game launch: Neverwinter. Ultimately, she left that industry to go back to school looking for a change.

In short, we’ve had enviable careers, but find ourselves disillusioned with the industry. Our careers have gone well, but something just hasn’t felt right.

Congruence

A key issue that we’ve faced is that the values we hold and those of the companies we work for don’t align. We believed in a set of values, but found our professional lives following a different set. Living with this cognitive dissonance was putting a stress on the both of us. We’ve decided that it’s time to pursue a career that better matches those values.

What are some of those values? Here are just a few that we’ve identified.

We believe in self-determination. Many workplaces don’t give their employees much agency. Your ability to succeed, grow or advance may be largely out of your control. Instead it’s determined in the majority by the projects or managers you are assigned to. Many people don’t have the ability to choose what to work on. Even if those choices would ultimately come to the same conclusion they aren’t allowed to make that decision themselves. And don’t even worry about realizing there’s something more important to do if it’s not part of your managers roadmap.

Similarly, we believe in autonomy. This is the right of everyone to work in the way that works best for them. This is a fundamental support for equity.

A system of cooperation will always produce better outcomes than a system of competition. Competition is fundamentally a structure of destruction. It’s about beating your opponent, about taking away their resources, about taking them down. It leads to a system where there is less. Cooperation is about building each other up, about sharing resources and information. Cooperation creates and adds to the system.

But, wait, what about all the benefits of competitions? Are you saying sports are negative? No. I frame those as cooperative endeavors. They are inherently governed by a set of rules that the participants put in place so that they can create a space where they can motivate each person to do their best. Compare that to business where the goal of most businesses is to take customers and resources from competitors. It’s framed in terms of selfishly taking and hording as much as possible. How many times have you seen the founder of a failed business go out and congratulate their competitor? How often do they publicly say that they appreciate the financial loss because of the lessons it taught them?

We also believe that every person in an organization is valuable and worthy of respect. Many tech companies recently have begun laying off workers and doing their best to replace them with AI. We believe that every worker deserves a voice in their workplace.

This also extends to the customers! Customers are people too. The worst phase we ever heard in our professional lives was when someone said, unironically, “it’s our money in their pockets”. Companies should exist to serve the customers and the employees just as much as the shareholders.

So what now?

We could try to opt out of the system. We could go join a commune in the mountains, grow our own carrots and make our own goat cheese. That’s one alternative, but it’s not an attractive one. For one, it doesn’t leverage any of the skills that we have developed during our careers. But more than that, it cuts us off from the very industry that we would like to see change. So that is why we are going to a new start-up, but we aren’t going to do things the way we’ve seen them done.

We are founding a new tech cooperative. We will be building a company that follows the principles of cooperatives. We will be democratic, we will be sustainable, we will work for the benefit for our workers, our customers, our communities and the planet.

We don’t know exactly what our business model is going to be. This is a start-up, and a start-up is all about the search for a new business model. We are going to embark on the customer development journey. Most of the text on the topic is framed in terms of high-scale, VC-backed companies, but many of the points work just as well for a small company.

We will be small for some time. We don’t know how large we will grow, but we will grow when it makes sense to do so based on our business model. We will need to balance the goals of creating a profitable, sustainable company with the goal of creating a cooperative alternative to Silicon Valley competition.

We’ve named ourselves Terakoda. Tera- could reference the Greek-origin SI prefix for one trillion, evoking the potential scale of technology. It could also reference Latin word “terra” meaning land or earth. Koda might be reminiscent of “code”, again referencing technology. But also coda, which is a passage that brings a piece to conclusion, much as we hope this represents the conclusion of the search for a fulfilling career.

A journey begins

And so the next phase of our careers begins. We don’t know quite where it will take us, but we know what direction we are moving in. We are excited to embrace a community of respect, cooperation, resilience and sustainability. We will do our best to live our values every day.

This won’t be a journey we undertake alone. We will rely on the help of many others who have walked these paths before us. We invite you to participate. Please follow along. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any thoughts, advice or opportunities for us. We welcome the cooperation.