kraya

Collaboration is one of the most powerful things that anyone can do. In a lot of media, where there is “good” vs “evil,” a common theme is that the “evil” side is dictatorial or working largely alone (e.g. Thanos), with one person making all the calls, while the “good side” (e.g. The Avengers) tend to be collaborative. The more people that are involved in a collaboration, the more powerful the outcome can be.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Kate Vitasek on Forbes talks about how widespread collaboration will make the world a better place including some excellent examples.

Personally, there are few things that bring me greater joy or a sense of fulfillment than being involved in something collaborative. It can be as simple as a tête-à-tête or as complex as a large scale project of some form. I love watching the efforts of a group of people come together into glorious fruition. Perhaps that’s why I ended up leading teams, often delivering incredibly difficult, apparently impossible challenges.

One severe burnout and several adventures later, I am at a place in my life where I am pondering next steps. Having run my own company for almost two decades, I have a personal style of working, which makes working in a corporate environment more challenging for me. I would like to start my own company again, perhaps on the basis of a product, either of my own, or in partnership with someone else.

Since I have little to no capital (I put almost all of it into buying a house, and the rest went into what we’ll call some poor investment choices), I figured to start with something small. Admittedly, I might run out of money before I get it completed, but I intend to give it a decent shot.

I believe in and follow Lean methodologies, BDD, TDD, DevOps, and most importantly on putting people first. In every job before, I have had to make compromises because the focus was so heavily on commercials. I am taking this opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and follow the methodologies with faith that the commercials will work itself out.

For the product itself, I decided to try and build something like Axolo. I used Axolo at my previous company and absolutely loved it. It is a great collaborative tool that really eases the peer review process. I have only one (but major) complaint about Axolo and that’s the price. $8 per user per month feels incredibly overpriced, particularly when you consider that GitHub charges $4 per month and Slack charge $7.25.

Most businesses consider how they can maximise revenue – how to exploit a marketplace. This is at odds with my people-first philosophy, and I want to turn it around. No exploitation of the market and no maximising of revenue. I want to know what you want – well, what my customers (hopefully, including you at some point) want. I want to consider what a fair fee for the service is – not “what it’s worth” (I am looking at you pharma companies). At its extreme, could the cost per seat be purely the running costs + a reasonable markup? Product development could be funded by an additional revenue stream where the interested users pay into the features they are interested in – essentially democratising the roadmap.

I also believe in transparency, so I will also aim to be as transparent about everything as possible. While I want this to work, with my limited capital, it is possible that I will run out of money before this starts to make enough money and I might have to go to plan B and find myself a contract or permanent role. At that point, it is possible that any updates here will quickly stop.

In that event, I will consider open sourcing whatever I have completed so that it can be put to good use.

On that note, I should probably introduce myself. I am Shri and I ran kraya, a digital technology company for 15+ years. I have extensive experience in leadership and tech, having played a huge range of roles within the digital sector including CEO, CTO, Technical Architect, Software Engineer, Systems Engineer, DevOps etc. etc. etc.

As I mentioned at the start, I love collaboration and feel that it’s my superpower – or at least my favourite power. I would love to hear your thoughts – please ping me a message on LinkedIn and I’ll do my best to respond.