Thomas Keiser

homas Keiser has spent the last seven years at several of Boston's enterprise software startups. His role is typically as one of the first two or three employees, where he helps just-funded seed-stage startups go from a vision, and perhaps a demo, to the bedrock and scaffolding upon which future team members will stand to build product.

While Thomas' day-job is software architecture, he believes that an early employee's greatest strength stems not from technical skills. To the contrary, early employees derive their greatest strength upon the realization that they are bestowed the privileges and responsibilities of a minority-stake owner-operator. Consequently, he is particularly interested in the processes that remain obscured in the shadows: recruitment, interviewing, and hiring; shaping of corporate culture; avoiding the conflation of beneficial with necessary; striking a balance between adaptability and tractability; etc.

Early in his career, Thomas spent nearly a decade consulting for several Fortune 100 firms, primarily bulge-bracket investment banks and global diversified manufacturers. The experience instilled Thomas with a conviction that business needs dictate all sound technological choices. When cognizant of the extreme risks from failure (imagine the losses that can mount from an idled trading desk at a major bank), one makes markedly different decisions than when ignorant of the risk parameters. Through dialogue, we illuminate business needs, risks, and uncertainty. Soundly establishing those parameters is the outright prerequisite to broaching any technical discussion. When Thomas Edison famously said that in order to have a great idea, one must generate a lot of ideas, he left a critical point implicit: the end goal must be set in stone. Ignorance of this leads to random walks rather than evolutionary refinement.

Thomas derived from consulting the principle that technology for technology's sake is as useful as studying the origins of the Phoenician alphabet: academically interesting, indeed, yet of no practical importance. The very people we rely upon to design complex algorithms and systems are not themselves immune from caprice and emotion. The same traits—inquisitiveness, keen analytical talents, ability to think in abstractions, etc.—are ipso facto honed by overthinking. This intrinsic tension is only resolved insofar as peer review can 1) reveal clever shortcuts, and 2) forestall every engineer's desire to turn a problem into a vehicle for learning.

Resumé-driven development is manifest everywhere the keen observer peers. Defanging such pompous tendencies is arguably the single most critical facet of any architecture/design process. If you have an MBA, you're likely familiar with Jensen and Meckling's seminal work on the agency problem. Here, we have an analogous and equally complicated due diligence dynamic. Resumé-driven development not only preys upon the costs of due diligence, but also on incompetence and naïveté. Established firms are better positioned to endure such forms of organizational slack (one can think of it in much the same light as fatigue and laziness, albeit willful). With the startup, however, the privation of revenue and barred access to public capital markets entail a near complete lack of organizational slack. All design choices become crucial.

While organizational management authors perennially beat the drum regarding the importance of human resources, Thomas finds that academic understanding seldom strikes the nexus of rubber and road. For the entrepreneur, time value of money is an incessant force impelling growth. Early stage companies are under extreme pressure—from VCs, early adopters, and key employees alike—to execute as rapidly as humanly possible. This tension can be healthy when managed well by the founders, but disastrous should they should succumb to the fear of failure.

Through this site, Thomas aims to examine key lessons from the areas of venture capital and startups, computer science, and distributed systems. In the spirit of docendo disco, scribendo cogito, this blog is a means to think through and explore tough problems.