Steve Jobs, June 1995, as played in the Fast Company article “The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes”:

Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint. There are times when you run a marathon and wonder, why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

Fortunately my training has been in doing things that take a long time. I was at Apple ten years. I would have preferred to be there the rest of my life. So I’m a long-term kind of person. I have been trained to think in units of time that are measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight.

I have struggled for years with institutional investment. Part of me loves investors. The experience they bring can catapult a company forward. The money they bring allows us to focus on the task at hand. On the other hand, the goal of institutional investing is to get their money back while maximizing the ratio of years and dollar return.

I am a long-term thinker and I want to have massive market impact. Sure, you say, I write a software calculator for a living. What kind of impact could that have? And I would answer huge. Have you seen what kids are using in school today? It’s a DOS computer from 1985. What bigger impact could I have then changing the future for millions of students.

But at the heart of this struggle — the struggle between return and the struggle between massive impact and long-term thinking — is where I get confused about institutional investors. I recognize the great benefits they bring but I also recognize that their goals may be very different from my own.

At some point I hope the goals align, that I can find investors that can have great business impact who also think long-term and hope I can partner with them to make something amazing.

My dad is a piano technician in Northeast Ohio. This morning he was telling me a story about a guy he went to piano technicians school with who never actually went into the business of tuning pianos. Instead he went into the family business — home remodeling.

His family business was very specialized, focused primarily on repair of tub and counter tops, especially Formica and polyester substances. Apparently he is very good at it. Well, after all these years he decided he wanted to get back into the technician business. He went out with my dad and apparently he has no ear for tuning at all. Really bad.

So they got to talking and it turns out that his skill set is perfect for a very specialized piano technician skill in high demand: piano refinishing. The high gloss coating on a piano is made of polyesters and this guy’s background in mixing, blending, etc., is perfect for this.

This was very interesting to me. We always talk about businesses pivoting, where it focuses on a chunk of its expertise and builds that into a full-scale business. Here’s an example of a people pivot.

Almost a month ago, Marco Arment was writing about piracy of movies and music, but I thought he was really making a much broader point:

We often try to fight problems by yelling at them instead of accepting the reality of what people do, from controversial national legislation to passive-aggressive office signs. Such efforts usually fail, often with a lot of collateral damage, much like Prohibition and the ongoing “war” on “drugs”. And, more recently (and with much less human damage), media piracy.

It is a well-written piece and deserves a full read. His point applies to so many things in life.

Given that, there is a fine line between fighting the status quo and going with the flow. Some battles are worth fighting. For instance, I agree that the fight with Congress over the way campaigns are financed, which in essence leads to favor-politics that distort what needs to be done for the best of society, is worth it. Putting a garbage can by the door in the men’s room, as per Marco’s example? Not worth the fight. Just move the can.

Obviously Hollywood believes fighting piracy is worth the fight. Can they win? Probably not. It’s a gorilla war that Hollywood fights with bazookas and tanks. So the best approach is to change the way it sells products, which the media companies will do eventually when they realize they can’t win the old way.

Many of the issues that surround Hollywood have surrounded software, too. Apps used to cost $20-$50 for mobile platforms. Some of our powerOne products demanded over $100 per copy. Now an expensive app is $5. We could have fought this trend, still charging $10, $20, $40 for our apps. Or we could go with the flow and experiment with free versions, versions at different price points, in app purchase, subscriptions and the like. We chose the latter. It doesn’t make sense to fight this trend. It makes sense to figure out how to use it to my advantage, a lesson Hollywood would heed well.

One of my goals a decade ago was to create more usable products. One of the ways I figured out how to refine my aesthetic for this was to use documentation (help files or manuals) as a guide post. When I write documentation I focus on consistency and on explainability. If something is easy to explain to the intended audience and it fits a continuity across the product then usually the product is solidly-designed.

As the decade has past I don’t need to write the documentation as much to spot these issues. Now, as I design new components or entire products, I can see the documentation in my head. In fact, I often use the question “How do you explain that to a customer?” while designing or reviewing development work.

For instance, with powerOne version 3 we had a situation where we were trying to decide on a format for a new function call for graphing. For scatter plots it is written one way, for bar graphs another. Well, that is too confusing. (And we are talking about the most technical of our customers here, by the way, as only a small percentage actually write their own templates.) So we simplified the function call so that they don’t have to think so hard about the parameters. In other words, we decided it was better to ask the user to submit a piece of information we would ignore (because we know the answer based on the data) then ask them to do it two different ways.

I correlate this problem with the dreaded IF statement. IF I have this then I do it one way but IF I have this then I do it another. I hate these. IF statements require the customer to remember too much about the product.

I’m sure when Dan Bricklin invented the spreadsheet he didn’t have much choice but to introduce the notation we have all become familiar with in spreadsheets. IF you are entering text then just enter it but IF you are entering a formula then start it with = but IF your text starts with an equals or a math symbol then… Yeah. The reality is that that notation worked at a time when computers were only really used by experts and everything was hard. The last half dozen years are introducing an era when everyone uses a computer and these “non-experts” aren’t going to take the time to learn fancy notations, to remember the IF statements.

Of course the ultimate goal is to completely eliminate the IF statements and completely eliminate the documentation. To make something amazingly powerful that needs almost zero explanation is the ultimate goal. I may never reach it but it is my goal none-the-less.