Why I wrote the book Software is Feeding the World

A new book is out! You can find it on Amazon available both as an ebook and paperback. The book was published on the 1st of December 2019, exactly one year after the whole thing started with the blog post Software is Feeding the World. When I published the blog post one year ago, I got a bunch of comments from a bunch of people. Instead of answering each and every message, comment, call and text one by one, I decided to say fuck it and write a book instead.

Books are unique in today's fast-paced click-bating society, where our attention span has become less than a goldfish. Everything has to be explained in an emoji, a catchy headline or a ten second video story. With books — especially hardcopies —you get a chance to escape all that, follow a train of thought, dive in deep to fully wrap your head around things. That is in a nutshell why I decided to spend countless hours explaining why software is changing our world for the better, and how organisations can sustain themselves by riding the tsunamis that software provides us.

The word “author” is a strange characterisation that I still have to get used to. It's a funny word, so I looked it up.

It was only during the 1900s that an “author” became known as a “person who writes books”. Before the 1900s, an author was a person of authority, a person who has ownership or possession of something. Even before that, an author was a person who has claim to the promotion of something, which is where the word “auctioneer” comes from. In a way, everyone is authoring their own stories, writing their own book.

This book reflects the discoveries I have made on my journey, reflecting on my learnings, and helping others to use these learnings in their organisations. Technology in general and software in particular, is very focused on appealing to the head and to the hands. Not so much the heart. Despite being trained throughout my entire life to cater to logos, I don't intend to give you a long list with do’s and dont’s on how to work with these software tsunamis in your organisations. Humans are creatures predominantly driven by emotions, what you remember is what you felt. To reach into your inner feelings, storytelling is the best gateway to do so. This is why I have collected the best stories from my journey who truly made a dent to the organisations we have worked with.

In the book, I provide a number of anecdotes and stories from the real world that exemplify these software tsunamis — both from the world tour was on when I wrote the blog post, but also from countless software projects we have worked on in Wiredelta — which help organisations navigate unchartered water. On LinkedIn, I figured the most relevant stories should revolve around the Commerce software tsunami. Before diving into the three most powerful stories, may I remind you that organisations who manage to navigate and utilise these software tsunamis, have grown far beyond what even entire countries have achieved. The examples are many: In 2017, Netflix’s revenue exceeded Malta’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Tesla’s exceeded Albania the same year, McDonalds exceeded New Guinea, Walt Disney surpassed Bulgaria, Microsoft exceeded Slovakia, Facebook Bolivia, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) Puerto Rico, Apple Portugal and finally, Amazon exceeded the entire GDP of Kuwait.

So, without further ado, here goes three of the most powerful stories where software has been feeding the world through the Commerce software tsunami:

Kylie Jenner: Sales and marketing is not based on advertising budgets any more

Kylie Jenner — Kim Kardishian’s younger half-sister — reached 100 million followers on Instagram alone at the age of 20. She also had more than 24 million Twitter followers and 20 million Facebook followers, bringing her total social media following to more than 150 million people. To leverage her reach, Kylie launched Kylie Cosmetics, and in less than two years — with no paid advertising — Kylie Cosmetics generated an estimated $630 million in revenue. Think about that for a minute. It took Tom Ford 10 years to reach half a billion dollars in sales. It took L’Oréal’s Lanc?me cosmetics line 80 years to hit $1 billion. It took MAC 13 years to achieve $250 million and another 10 years to reach $500 million, even with Estée Lauder owning a majority stake. In comparison, for Kylie to reach an estimated $630 million in sales within two years is absolutely insane. It is without a doubt a challenging and overwhelming time to sustain an established brand, let alone an entire organisation, navigating the obstacles from commerce tsunamis, where humans and computers come together. Even more challenging is it to introduce new brands and concepts with tough competition from the likes of Kylie Jenner! 

In a world where Justin Bieber can become a global icon by creating a YouTube channel, then what is stopping you? Everybody has something to offer. With software, you can now reach far and wide at virtually zero cost. If you can drive, you can reach customers with Uber. If you can sing, you can reach customers on Spotify and YouTube. If you can make a product, you can sell it on Amazon. The opportunities are endless.

VOC: Companies can become more powerful than countries, but also more risky

To illustrate just how much an organisation can dominate the world through commerce, there is no better example than the world’s most valuable company ever recorded in history — the Dutch East Indian Company, better known as VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie). This company was so large that it virtually shaped the borders on the world map that we see today. Valued at a ridiculous $7.9 trillion in year 1637, the company fuelled what the Dutch call The Golden Century, making Amsterdam one of the richest cities in the world.

VOC was the very first company to ever go public on the world’s first stock exchange, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. With 70.000 employees at its peak, the company employed more than 0.01% of the world population. They ran their own shipyards, built a network of hundreds of bases around the world that covered anything from offices to work stations to warehouses. In order to protect these bases, VOC even developed their own army. This is where VOC as a company transitioned into unchartered territory. 

The company was given the power to negotiate treaties, wage war, mint its own coins and establish new colonies. It even had expeditions to discover new territory, and it laid the foundational work for the world borders we see today. The company went so far as to fight against the Spanish empire in the early 17th century. And remember, this was a publicly trading company on the stock exchange! The company went beyond what any other organisation has ever done. 

The peak of VOC’s wealth came from flowers — tulips to be exact. Back then, having tulips in your garden was an important symbol of status. In addition, tulips take about 7-12 months to flower and only bloom for about a week. This combination made tulips a prime candidate for the first financial bubble in history. At the time, the Dutch were pioneers in finance and commerce. They devised a market where you could trade tulips all year around even if they weren’t in bloom. The prices were set by traders that signed tulip contracts based on future prices. This was the very first future derivatives market, the same kind that we use to trade stocks, bonds and other assets today.

The market boomed, and the prices of tulips skyrocketed. VOC started to incorporate tulip trade into their operations, and their stock price climbed as a result. To give a sense of the price of a simple tulip bulb at the peak of the bubble, a single tulip bulb was worth 10 times a craftsman’s annual wage. At that point, VOC’s market capitalisation had risen to its record $7.9 trillion in current USD. To put that number into perspective, VOC was worth 3 times more than the amount you would get if you merged Apple, Microsoft and Google into one juggernaut company! 3 times! Today, VOC is a thing of the past along with the excessive tulip prices, but still stands in history as a testimony of how much commerce can govern our lives. Modern day examples of this are companies like Amazon and Alibaba, who continue to extend their reach from ecommerce into every corner of the commerce universe, on track to beat VOC eventually in market capitalisation.

El Paquete: Information is the number one growing commodity

El Paquete is a brilliant example of Cuban ingenuity when resources are scarce. The concept is rather simple and perhaps familiar to you if you lived during a time when the internet was as slow and expensive as it is in Cuba. El Paquete, in the shortest sense, is simply a hard drive with the latest digital content. It is a hard drive with an unknown sender and receiver. The hard drive is packed with the latest music, movies, TV series, ebooks, emagazines — anything that can be digitized and fit on a hard drive really. This data is duplicated to multiple other hard drives when arriving to Cuba. These hard drives are then transported all over the country in neat little packages — or paquetes — to satisfy the Cubans’ need to watch their favourite TV show, new movie release or equivalent. El Paquete is transported by all kinds of people around the country, from taxi drivers to family members and dedicated El Paquete transporters.

Despite the lack of technical, financial or material resources, sheer human will prevail and find new ways to exchange all kinds of things with one another — both goods, services and information. Even when the first software tsunami — connectivity — is cut off, and risk of copyright infringements are looming, it is somewhat beautiful to think that someone in Cuba could be reading this as an ebook just a few days after being released because of El Paquete. There are countless examples akin to El Paquete in other parts of the world. They showcase just how smart we, humans, have become within commerce, and how we continue to find new ways to exchange with one another.

The stories highlighted will evolve beyond this book’s imagination and will be rewritten countless times. Simultaneously, the stories to support these epic tales are not strict instructions either. Rather, they work to stimulate the creator’s head, heart and hands, building a helpful guide as to what challenges to tackle next. Together, they will provide more insight to the open mind than any course, class or even degree can do on this subject.