Columnist

The speed of the world, and the scale-ups rocketing through it

There’s a key benefit that comes with being a millennial.

I’m not taking about avocado and toast - we’ve had an analogue childhood, but a digital adulthood.

I started first school with one TV with four channels, started high school with a Nokia 3410, but started university in a world with iPhones, Facebook and super-fast broadband.

YouTube was a year into Google’s ownership, and Myspace was already colliding with Facebook’s rise, on its way down out of favour.

News travelled by newspaper, people would call the landline or just turn up to your house.

Now you open your phone and drink from the firehose, platforms live-streaming events as they happen – how many newspapers per second is that? Traditional news scrambles to publish hours later – we’re hyper connected.

Information moves faster, at higher volume.

Clients like Crowd Threat work hard to make sense of it all.

Scandals land and depart so quickly you’d have better luck making eye contact with someone travelling the opposite direction on HS2 – if it ever actually runs.

There was a time we’d argue the cold cheese theory in a pub all night – would cheese in space at absolute zero still be cheese? Now within 30 seconds you’d now have an answer.

Social media platforms hoover up market share: Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Your house can vacuum itself.

Productivity marches higher every year:

Automation has made entire sectors of labour redundant.

Since the 1950s, UK agricultural productivity has more than doubled, produced by one fifth of the workforce.

Everything moves faster, and the pace accelerates. Consider the progress of the last five years, against the last ten, the last 20. We’re on an exponential curve.

Then AI hit us with an almighty slap. At Christmas 2022, ChatGPT felt more gimmicky than useful. Three years on, it’s woven into the tools we use every day.

We’re addicted to productivity. If at 1am I have an idea, Claude can prototype and deploy in 20 minutes – it’s hard not to reach for the phone.

I sometimes feel guilty when my AI agents are idle – how ridiculous.

It’s sometimes difficult to see – how much have the fundamentals of life really changed in the last five years? We still work, eat, sleep.

But then there’s this…

Why am I writing this? Perspective. The only certainty is uncertainty.

The same forces play out in business – digital adoption, the spread of (mis)information, productivity, rapid growth (hopefully no scandal). Growth breeds complexity.

Wubbleyou is a growing tech business. We build business-critical and market-leading tech products for scaling B2B companies – packing their knowledge into software they can sell repeatedly – they scale and exit.

Our clients are themselves scaling and innovating; we share their growth challenges as well as our own.

Nowhere in my professional life can I look without staring into innovation or uncertainty – it’s the life I chose.

Scaling a business means hitting challenges you’ve never seen – sometimes winning, sometimes losing, knowing it keeps happening as progress marches on.

Five things I’ve learned running a tech business in this world:

• The world moves at speed, and that is accelerating. Things explode and fall out of favour. Stability lives in your own vision.
• Modern businesses are built on complex dependency chains of thousands of suppliers and tools, often falling out of date overnight. Keep it simple. Use automation to detect and pre-empt business-critical issues, focus people on the things where people add the most value.
• We’re spoilt for choice. So many excellent tools exist that analysis paralysis is a real risk, but given the options today, it’s hard to make a bad decision – most decisions are reversable, so make the decision.
• Balance short-term gains with long-term vision.

1. Assess tech against your long-term vision so today’s decisions don’t hurt tomorrow.
2. Align tech to business objectives across the next two years, while focusing on 90 days / one year of progress.
3. The future isn’t predictable. Treat long-term thinking as strategic direction, not fixed plans, sweating multi-year implementation detail, just slows progress.
4. Implement now if it won’t hurt the long term, even if imperfect. Something at 80 per cent beats today’s status quo, provided you can quantify the return – focus on continuous improvement

• Knowledge and perspective are transient. The greatest tragedy of continuous learning is realising how little we know. A ‘V-shaped’ approach, broad understanding plus deep expertise in a few areas, works best. Share knowledge freely.

Mark Renney - analogue child, digital adult.

Mark is co-founder and managing director of Newcastle-headquartered digital agency and software development company Wubbleyou

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