6 months is a long time in start-up land…
When I got made redundant in February, I felt none of the loss people talk about. 17 years is a long time to spend at any company (especially when the last few years were marked with deep cognitive dissonance) but I felt no need for closure, no bitterness, just relief and uncertainty.
It took me 6 weeks of relaxation (if you can call being a parent, husband and football coach relaxing) before I felt ready to explore my options. When you are stuck on the corporate treadmill it’s not always obvious just how burnt out and jaded you are feeling. You get very good at showing up.
The one thing that was apparent was that I didn’t want to go back into the corporate space (even in a contract role). Tackling social inequity, navigating complex systems and moving towards are regenerative economy are areas I’m passionate about. Unfortunately, there are not many paying jobs in this space, plus my corporate background seemed to exclude me from the hiring algorithms in the NFP world.
Mike and I met on an internal course at Macquarie about 5 years back and hit it off immediately. A shared love of football, frustration at corporate politics and structure, curiosity about the future of our world and navigating neurodiversity gave us endless topics to riff on. We collaborated on various side hustles (including a meetup called the Future Shapers) before Mike finished up at Mac, vowing to work together at some point in the future. We kept up the connection, meeting every couple months for lunch. So when Mike shared his contract role was winding up and I was looking for a way to add value, we brainstormed ideas for collaboration. The result was EthicCo (aka the Ethical Collective Australia), a company built in line with our values, our work preferences and a belief that small-medium businesses can help society and planet flourish (if the value-aligned choices were made easier than the extractive, exploitative norms of our economy).
So what have we learned after 6 months of start-up life?
There is a whole ecosystem of small-micro businesses flying under the radar, helping each other out. It’s genuinely collaborative and supportive, real people connecting on a personal level and sharing knowledge, championing each other. You do lots for free, trusting in karma, help is given and received in a non-linear fashion.
Variety is the spice of life, you wear lots of hats. It pays to be a generalist to juggle the diverse workload, although you do need a deep level of expertise to excite people. There is nobody to delegate to, when stuff breaks, there’s nobody else to fix it, when there’s an awful, dull job to be finished, it’s going to wait until you knuckle down.
Start-up life is authentic, you work in rhythms that suit your energy levels, your family commitments. It’s also more cyclical, some times you are flat out, others less so. We both enjoy working from home and you quickly realise how much of your life is wasted commuting. A trip to the city is now very carefully planned with no waste.
A small company allows for low friction collaboration and embracing emergence on a way that a large enterprise can’t. Decisions can be made instantly and without heavy change management overhead. Our first product had a working name that someone else beat us to, a new name was selected in minutes, so we could get back to work.
You miss the income of the corporate job, but not the politics. Your family bills remain the same and your funds dwindle much faster than they should. The cost of living crisis is very real when you don’t have a regular paycheck.
At the risk of quoting Ronan Keeting, start-up life is a rollercoaster, you feel all the emotions.
Without giving away too much, our 6 month journey has been an exploration of agentic AI. It’s moving so fast that it’s hard to benchmark your infrastructure to develop on. In July, we made the decision to rearchitect our stack, this cost us 2 months but is starting to pay back in terms of faster delivery speed and tech flexibility. We are confident that few others in Oz are pushing the tech boundaries in ways we are, Mike gets excited about some nerdy revelation daily! We rely on our design and product experience to retain focus on the problem to be solved and to use the tech to that end (not just for the thrill of exploration).
Most of the focus in Aussie business is on Gen AI, this is a red herring. If used wisely, Gen AI can help with efficiency – but benefits are incremental, rather than transformative. Many companies are missing the agentic trick – but it’s not simple. It takes a very special human brain orchestrating agents to make everything sing (eg. I can’t do what Mike can). It takes solid foundations (eg. well structured data, understanding of development, non-functional awareness) and it takes a long time to get it right. AI allows for rapid development but it’s a massive step from there to enterprise grade, this is where the struggle lies.
Our experience suggests that micro-small companies with deep subject matter expertise and the time and capability to embrace agentic delivery will be the greatest beneficiaries of AI.
My wife recently asked if we were ‘taking jobs’ by developing with agentic AI. It’s a valid question without a clean answer. Our original plan was to build a prototype with vibe coding, then secure some finance and have someone else build for us. When we realised we could DIY, it meant we didn’t need to go into debt or make decisions just to please shareholders. So I think many small businesses will accept this trade off and be able to launch products that otherwise wouldn’t have been built, this a net positive for our economy. Large corporates will use agentic to cut costs via lay-offs, that is a social negative.
Our first product will land for alpha testing in the new year and we are hugely excited about it. We can’t wait to get it into the hands of early adopters for feedback. We’ve run a bunch demos and the feedback has been hugely positive, people can see genuine value in the problem we are solving and are very keen to play a part on our journey.
Enjoy the break, catch you in the new year
Ewan and Mike
