Will There Be Joy in Mudville?

Douglas at the Bat

Lately, I’ve been feeling a little down about where I am.

It’s strange because, objectively, I’ve done pretty well. I built a company from scratch. It has recurring revenue, it’s growing, I mostly own my house, I make a good living, and by most measures I’m considerably better off than I sometimes feel.

But debt has a psychological weight that assets don’t.

The debt shows up on a statement. It has an interest rate. Someone sends you a number every month reminding you exactly how much you owe them.

Nobody sends me a statement every month reminding me what the company I built is worth.

So sometimes I look at the debt and think: Jesus, I’m close to the edge here.

But I realized recently that I’ve been looking at the scoreboard instead of the game.

And when I think about it as a game, my position looks quite different.

I’m at the plate.

Maybe I’ve got two strikes against me. I’ve made some aggressive bets over the last couple of years, particularly in R&D and AI. I’ve borrowed money to make some of them. There are things outside my control that could go well or badly.

But I also have three men on base.

That matters.

Because this isn’t the ninth inning.

It’s maybe the sixth. Maybe the seventh.

If I strike out here, it’s going to hurt. Those runners get stranded. I have to go back to the dugout, rethink a few things, tighten up the team and figure out how to load the bases again.

But the game isn’t over.

I know how to do that.

In fact, I’ve been doing it for most of my career.

Sometimes I look at my bench and, if I’m being fair, it doesn’t always look like the team you’d design on paper. We’re not the 1927 Yankees.

I’ve got people who pitch funny. People who hit funny. People playing bases they were never trained to play. Careers that took strange turns before they got here. If you were building a team by looking at résumés and checking all the conventional boxes, some of them might not look quite right.

But that’s the point of Moneyball.

The old scouts knew what a baseball player was supposed to look like. They knew the right build, the right swing, the right mechanics, the right history. Billy Beane started asking a different question.

Does he get on base?

That’s what I’ve learned to look for in people too.

Behind every person on my team is some skill that matters more to me than whether they look exactly right for the position. Maybe it’s judgment. Maybe it’s persistence. Maybe it’s curiosity, adaptability, loyalty, an ability to solve problems, or simply the willingness to keep working at something after a more conventionally talented person would have given up.

It’s different in each of them, and sometimes it takes me a while to figure out exactly what it is.

But they get on base.

That’s been Thinking Cap for years.

I don’t need everyone to have the perfect swing. I don’t need them to have come through the right farm system or spent their whole career playing the position they’re playing today. I need that thing inside them that produces results when the game is actually being played.

When you don’t have unlimited resources, you learn to pay attention to things other people don’t. You learn where talent is being undervalued. You learn which problems actually matter. You learn the difference between spending money and accomplishing something.

You learn to Billy Beane things as best you can.

And then AI showed up.

AI has made the bench deeper. More importantly, it has made the people already sitting on it more capable. Someone playing slightly out of position suddenly has a very good coach sitting beside them. The pitcher who throws funny suddenly has better data on the batters they’re facing. The hitter can study every pitch.

For years, one of the fundamental advantages of being a much larger technology company was simply the ability to throw more people at things. More developers. More analysts. More researchers. More documentation. More support. More experiments.

AI has suddenly made a lot of that cognitive capacity dramatically cheaper.

It’s as though somebody unexpectedly put a salary cap on the Yankees.

The Yankees get AI too, of course. I have no illusions about that. Every large competitor I have can buy access to essentially the same technology.

They’re still the Yankees. They have the bigger stadium. They have more money. They have a deeper roster.

But they don’t get my team.

And they don’t get me.

Some of the things they used to be able to simply outspend me on have become commodities. And I have spent decades learning how to play without their advantages.

I’ll put Billy Beane up against Steinbrenner any day of the week.

That feels like an opportunity.

So I’ve been spending aggressively on R&D because I don’t think this is the moment to make the company look pretty. I could cut spending. I could improve the balance sheet. I could take less risk and make the numbers considerably more comfortable.

There may come a time when I need to do exactly that.

But right now I think there is a window where I can take a company that has already survived, already found its market and already produces substantial recurring revenue, and push it into another weight class.

I want to double it.

Not just double the revenue. Double the stability. Double the capability. Make it less dependent on any one person, including me. Build technology that lets a relatively small organization do things that recently required a much larger one.

And while that is happening, I have to tolerate the uncomfortable part.

The scoreboard doesn’t always look good while you’re building the team that might win the game.

There’s another thing I know about myself.

I have a lot of energy.

If this were the ninth inning, two outs, two strikes and everything depended on the next pitch, I might feel differently.

But it isn’t.

I can pitch a doubleheader.

That doesn’t mean I want to. It doesn’t mean I should waste pitches. And it certainly doesn’t mean I can’t lose.

It means I have innings left.

Right now I’ve got a full count and the bases are loaded. And I can see a couple of pitchers warming up in the bullpen.

We won a big hit getting the AI Compute grant from the Federal Government but each year repayment for R&D is a risk.

And we have a lot of RFPs out there.

I don’t know what any of them are going to throw me. They might come inside with a fastball or hang a lollipop over the middle of the plate. An RFP might be a pitch I can drive or one I have no business swinging at.

Some of what happens next depends on how well I swing.

Some of it depends on how well they pitch.

I’ll find out soon enough.

If I lose the runners on base, that’s going to hurt. I’ll go back to the dugout. I’ll make some changes. I’ll put some more runners on and take another swing.

I’ve done it before.

The important thing is that I finally remember what game I’m actually playing.

And, more importantly, that I’m in the game.

Whatever happens from here, I will have had a life playing it. Not everyone can say that.

A lot of people find the game terrifying. They’d rather sit in the stands. There’s nothing wrong with that. The stands are safer. You can enjoy the game, have a beer and a hot dog and an opinion.

But you don’t get the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.

And there are people who desperately want to play but simply don’t have the talent to stay in the game. Entrepreneurship has a minor-league system of its own. Plenty of very smart, very determined people get sent down.

I’ve been lucky enough to stay on the roster.

I bounce between AAA and the big time all the time. Some years I feel like I’ve been called up and I’m standing under the lights. Other years I’m back on a bus wondering what the hell happened.

But I’m still playing.

That’s worth remembering when the scoreboard makes me nervous.

I’m not trying to protect a lead.

I’m trying to build one.

I’ve got runners on base. I’ve got a bench full of people who know how to get there. I’ve got a new tool that makes every one of them more dangerous. I’ve got a few innings left.

And I’ve got a bat in my hands.

Play ball.