One of the commenters of my post on Apple’s Churning of the Gut said this:

We all agree that success is partly down to luck. Call it X percent. What you think of Apple’s future depends on what you think is the value of X. If you are young and inexperienced, you probably think it’s low, so Apple must have mainly succeeded on merit, which means it will continue doing well. As you get older and experience the world, your estimate of the role of luck rises, so Apple is riding a lucky streak which will inevitably end.

I’m convinced that luck is a huge component of success for a young company. Getting all the pieces right to get a company off the ground and to any high altitude is a combination of timing, the right relationships, the right marketing and the right customers. So much of that is luck.

But for mature companies, the Apple’s, IBM’s, Samsung’s of the world, I’m not convinced that luck is a significant factor. It seems that most mature companies die by their own mistakes, whether literally screwing up or not reacting to market changes.

Besides, if we want to talk cliches, any pro athlete will tell you that you make your own luck.

Brad Feld wrote a great post on UX philosophy over the weekend. His question was not who contributed to it but instead who owns it.

I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product. I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

In my experience, many small companies are 1) running for their lives and 2) consensus driven. Both of these kill good UX. For one, running fast means not taking the time to contemplate how we’d expect to interact with an application and also means no time spent thinking about the implications of design, features and experience across platforms. Some things just take time and this is one of them. In order to plan for consistent interaction the UX “owner” must have both a deep understanding of ways of interacting and vast experience across platforms, not to mention a deep understanding of the product’s intent. Acquiring those skills takes time.

As to the second point, when there are only a couple of employees it is really easy to go with the opinion of the room. This doesn’t work at all for UX. UX is a dictator’s game, for anal retentive ones at that. Someone has to have the iron fist that says this goes here and that goes there and I expect this other thing to work like this. The group can contribute, provide feedback and better be willing to challenge the dictator, but one person must take responsibility for consistently enforcing the philosophy. Everyone else, then, must follow or get out of the way.

There’s an interesting interview with Sam Soffes in this Venture Beat article. Sam wrote the app I referenced yesterday, Cheddar, which is a to do list app that works across iOS and Mac systems. I love reading these interviews with people actually out trying to make products and make a living. Once companies get big they become guarded and generally don’t release these kinds of statements.

One answer I wanted to point out specifically is this one:

After I left Hipstamatic, I decided I wanted to make something. Over a year ago, I had played with Cheddar a little on a flight and thought it would be fun to make it for real. I thought it would take three weeks tops to get a version out and start making money. Three months later, I shipped Cheddar on the web as well as a native iPhone and iPad app… It turns out shipping a product is a lot of work.

Well, yeah! Shipping a well designed, fully functioning service is hard work and does take time. He says it took him three months to ship. No, it took him a year plus to ship. Even if he wasn’t actively coding Cheddar, he was thinking about it and solving problems in the back of his brain. And this is a simple idea — a task list app.

The reality is complicated things take time to develop and ship. Be patient.

David Heinemeier Hansson at 37signals has been on a roll lately with some great writing. Yesterday he wrote about his life’s work, feeling a connection to firms of old where people worked for 40 years:

Committing myself to this long-term focus has led to a peaceful work atmosphere and an incredible clarity of purpose. If this is the last job I’ll ever have, I damn well better make sure that I like it. I won’t just tough things out. If shit is broken, we’ll fix it now, lest we be stuck with it for decades.

I generally feel that way about the work we do here at Infinity Softworks. If I spent the rest of my life on the idea of figuring out better ways for people to work with numbers, I wouldn’t be upset at all.

Wall Street, generally, has the opposite problem. Since companies are judged every quarter, it is hard to make long-term decisions. The broken stuff doesn’t get fixed because the broken stuff doesn’t help make the fourth quarter numbers.

It helps, of course, that David (like I) helped invent the company he wants to spend the rest of his life working for. He helps pick which projects 37signals takes on, he helps develop the plans and manage the teams. When you pick your own future, it’s a lot easier to love what you do and want to spend a lifetime doing it.

I spent time this weekend pulling apart old photo albums. We’ve already digitized our music and movie collections. Photos are next.

This story starts with me leaving South Florida, where my mom and stepdad moved me and my brother in 1988, to go to the University of Cincinnati in 1991. I was to study engineering, a silly choice for someone who spent all his high school free time writing code. When I got there I knew absolutely no one, was still five hours from my dad so had no support structure, and basically was in shock, completely alone. I ended up meeting some guys that accepted me, they were in a fraternity, so I joined, another very weird decision for me.

The next school year I moved into the house and lived in a variety of rooms during that time and took a variety of jobs, including cooking on Tuesday nights. (I had never cooked a meal in my life before that but I didn’t make anyone sick so I must have done okay.) In the spring of 1993 I was elected treasurer and did a solid enough job. I really enjoyed the job and was part of my decision to switch from engineering to business. My big claim to fame is that I filled the house for the summer, making it profitable. That had never happened before.

Except it was really hot and there was no air conditioning. I couldn’t stand it and, one day, went out and found an apartment with air conditioning and moved out.

It was a really stupid decision. Yes, moving further from campus was a silly decision as I wasted tons of time driving back and forth to my apartment 20 minutes away. But moving out of the house meant I had to relinquish my role as treasurer. For the first time in my two+ years at Cincinnati I finally was fitting in, being apart of the team, learning how to manage peers. And I moved out, gave up the role. I’m sure I annoyed a bunch of people, especially since I did it with no notice.

I was flailing around so badly, looking for something but not knowing what I was looking for. In the next few months, a long-term relationship disintegrated, I dumped the apartment, dropped out of school, packed my car with everything I would keep, and drove through a blizzard back to Florida.

Pulling those albums apart, looking at those pictures, just made me think about what a silly, impulsive decision it all was. It was incredible training for running a company, leading peers. I threw that all away over a hot spell. It reminded me of something I haven’t forgotten since: make the most of every situation, even if that situation is a bad one.