David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It makes sense. If you are thinking about your company like an entrepreneurial organization or perhaps better put a group of individual startups all operating in a very nimble, entrepreneurial way, then you should think about them as separate companies. If all the startups out there are communicating with each other without a BD person, and they're all just pinging each other's APIs, commerce is flowing, and things are getting built, maybe that's the right internal model, too, for the modern next generation type of company. Academically, thinking around this was in process. I think Amazon is really the first company that did this in practice. This comes to be called service-oriented architecture. Instead of a monolithic codebase software architecture, service-oriented architecture is this. Every small team, every individual feature is its own architecture, completely separate from everything else. And it's worth teasing out. One is a human cultural thing, which is basically trying to reduce the issue of Metcalfe's Law, where every time you introduce a new person, there becomes an n-squared relationship to all the people that they could communicate to within the organization. This is like an exponentially worse issue as more people join the company. There's this cultural element that you're talking about there. The services-oriented architecture thing is the engineering counterpart to that same mental model of, okay, well, now we actually are going to build each one of these things as a completely separate application that then all interact to create the user phasing thing.…

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