I’m sitting in the lounge at Berlin airport reflecting on the last 24 hours. A conversation on Zoom led to me booking a flight an hour later and meeting face to face with a team of engineers. Not just engineers, but scrappy, multi-faceted, well-rounded people. It’s inspiring. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a place where such motivation, care, intuition and inquisitiveness exists. It was a thrill.
Picture this: past 5:30 pm, office lights buzzing overhead, I’m still logged into work. One eye is focussed on a crashing WordPress error log and the other on a WhatsApp group where members are yelling that they can’t RSVP. For the past eight weeks, a standing It’s Culture Innit trustee call has eaten up my late afternoons.
Let’s talk about Geebos – Generic Business Objects (GBOs).
Every product has them; they’re the nouns in your system.
For a dead-simple to-do app: User → List → Task – that’s your geebo set.
Recent events reminded me of a lesson I learned the hard way: don’t take the cloud call. I’m not going to unpack them here. It lit up a part of my brain that’s all too familiar with what comes next.
I just watched my father try to use a furniture website. Not a banking site, not a secure government portal — a furniture site. He clicked through from Google Shopping, only to be met immediately with a CAPTCHA. Not a simple one — a frustrating, overly complex verification that made him give up entirely and leave the site.
I have been thinking about the kind of software companies I’d want to back - and it starts with the tools I actually use day to day. My own stack isn’t built atop a mega-suite I get from Microsoft or Google. It’s sticky-taped together from a set of focussed, well-made apps that are each good at one thing. They don’t pretend to do everything and that’s exactly why they’re good.
I’ve made some edits on 8 May 2025 to clarify some points I’ve made - I was worried that I have discounted the hard work that goes into building products and I wanted to make sure I was clear on that. I’ve left my original wording in here for reference. I don’t intend to make offence, but I want to be honest about the challenges we face. I may have done that unintentionally. I apologise and have amended my wording to add clarity.
This post will be a bit different for me because it’s not even remotely about my usual technology & startup rants.