This interview is part of an ongoing series that profiles leading IT professionals, their companies, their careers, and what inspires them about the work they do.
David Geer spoke with Steve Bjorg, Cofounder, President and CTO of MindTouch. Steve has over 10 years of experience in software development and product design. He previously founded a company in Europe and has also worked at Microsoft for the CTO's advanced development team tackling concurrency, distributed systems, and the evolution of web-standards. Following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
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David Geer: How has your multi-cultural background influenced you as a programmer and an IT professional?
Steve Bjorg: I was brought up in Europe and so from the very beginning, [I was exposed] to software being localized. There are also different perceptions of technology, and I think that has really given me a broader perspective.
Geer: What's a specific example of an experience or your cultural influences and how they relate to your approach to programming or IT?
Bjorg: There are some really benign little things that nobody would think about and, for example, many words in the English language are considerably shorter than the French or the German language. Similarly, they also require different kinds of letters, and if you do not anticipate that ahead when creating software, you might really run into a problem later on. And being prepared for these kind of situations is really an advantage.
Geer: I understand you started programming at eight years of age. How did you get into it so young?
Bjorg: One day my older brother dragged in a box that had some weird little keys on it and started spending enormous amounts of time with it. Of course, as the younger brother, I became curious about it and he taught me the first commands in Basic and I got hooked. Interestingly enough, my brother decided to pursue a career in business with an MBA, while I remained stuck with computers and it was really love at first sight, and I have made it my career. I am, in that regard, in the most positive sense, the black sheep in the family because all [of] my relatives are small business owners. So working with them I also really learned a lot about where technology falls short. What are the kinds of headaches that people encounter every day. It was the perfect environment to be aware of how we can do a better job at what we do. It's a fascinating challenge to wake up to every day, and I'm really glad that I chose this track for my career.
Geer: I understand you had an initial startup company. With reference to that, what did you learn about the IT profession from that experience?
Bjorg: I actually suspended -- like so many other younger people -- my academic education to pursue a first startup. It was a moderate success, but the big lesson I learned was "time to market". The time it takes you from the initial idea to the time that you can put your product into the hands of customers is extremely important, for many reasons. Every day that you do not make your product known to the world, somebody else can come in and basically steal your thunder for what you thought was the next big innovation.
The other one is -- and I learned that lesson later in my career, has to do with validation. You might think that your idea is great and people will love it, but at the end of the day, that is not your call. You have to go out to other people, you have to show them what you're doing and how that would help them, and they are the ones that tell you, yes, you're on track, this is great, or I don't get it. Why is this good?
I was at Microsoft for five years. I had the incredible privilege of working directly for the CTO, Craig Mundie, in a fantastic, fantastic team doing product incubation. It was a great experience. But unfortunately, we were not allowed to talk [about] what we were doing because we were doing very advanced development, playing with very innovative ideas, but we didn't have the opportunity to go out and talk to customers about it and really get this validation. And that, I felt, was very, very frustrating. You're developing in a vacuum and if you develop in a vacuum, you have an inbreeding of ideas and it's not the most effective way for cultivating a good idea into a great product. But that aside, Microsoft is a fantastic company, and working with the people I worked with there was a blast.
Geer: What drives you in your career?
Bjorg: Innovation. I love to think about the next thing. And innovation, not in - well, where can we stick technology now today where it hasn't been before? But more like innovation based on my background of, it has to be accessible to as many people as possible. There are so many things, I believe, where we're making life more complex than we have to as software engineers. And there are some very beautiful, natural paradigms that have been emerging over the past years that have shown that technology can actually be very, very simple and very, very powerful. And that is just a wonderful challenge to have. My favorite quote these days is one from Leonardo da Vinci and it is, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". And I totally swear by that. I think trying to find a solution that is simple and elegant, that fits with the natural human behavior and cognitive models that we have when we interact with objects or people, happen into that so that becomes an intuitive experience. It's an incredibly exhilarating problem to be part of and solving it. And so that's what drives me these days is finding this natural extension of human behavior so that we can do things we didn't know we could do before.
There are several concrete examples that I can bring up as analogies. And it amounts to number of moving parts. Let's take a master clock maker. They have thousands of moving parts. They have beautiful achievements in complexity and engineering. But they're also very fragile and tend to break very often. When you take clocks, or watches - I'm into antique clocks - that have less moving parts, they tend to last much longer, they just work. And with software, this is very similar. If you can solve a problem with less complexity, it's much less likely that you're introducing defects. And at the end of the day, that means that the user experience is going to be better. But it goes beyond that as well. Instead of having an interface that is cluttered with a thousand different options, make sure that the user interface has the primary amount of options.
For instance, in our product, we decided to make an interface that has exactly three buttons, because those were the primary actions. Compare that to many other products that allow you to edit content. That's a very drastic departure. And it works very, very well. But it takes a lot of head scratching to find out and to make the right call, as an engineer, and you can't just do it by yourself, you have to do it with feedback from users, as to what is the right amount of visual complexity you bring in front of people? If there's just too much noise, too much clutter, people will be intimidated, the buttons are too small to click on, so there's a real advantage for interface design when you can reduce that visual complexity, it also makes it more accessible to many people. And I think we all know of one company that has been incredibly successful recently because they really simplified the interaction paradigm. This is one of many success stories that we're going to be seeing over the next decade where technology is innovating, not by adding more dials and switches, but by removing them and by providing a more intuitive, a more natural experience that didn't take away from the functionality. And that I think, is the spirit in which the quote is said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." It is a very, very powerful driver for design.
Geer: What else challenges you?
Bjorg: Well, being a co-founder of a new startup. It's building a company, building a great team, taking care of the team. It's very, very important for me that the team aren't employees, they're really partners. We're peers. We listen to each other. We are family and sometimes we have fights, like any family, and that is good. Because passion is really what everybody needs to bring to the table and keeping this environment going and bringing new talent into this environment is one of my top priorities.
Geer: For those who are looking to get ahead in the world of IT, from your experience and your viewpoint, what kind of skills are especially important today in the IT market?
Bjorg: It's adaptability. The IT market, the IT technology, there are always new trends, the emerging trends, they are persistent trends, but at the end of the day, somebody might elect to work for one company for a certain period of time, working on one set of technologies, then switch over to another company, for whatever reason -- they're relocating, they got a better deal, they're more interested in the technology - but it's unlikely that they will be able just to bring with them everything they have learned from the previous company. So they have to be able to learn new skills all the time, adapt to what the new environment will ask of them. And I think that's what keeps our profession also so incredibly exciting. It really never gets old.
Geer: And is there any other key trait that you look for in potential employees or colleagues when looking for new talent?
Bjorg: Well, the most fundamental one is, of course, you have to have a proven record of a skill set. 'Without that you cannot achieve much. But, one aspect that gets omitted is passion. I am passionate about passion. I am super-enthusiastic about it. I think anybody that works as a startup, needs to realize that this is not a job. This is a lifestyle. And you are driving to bring a vision to market. You're fighting the odds every single day. You have to believe in what you do and you have to take the level of personal risk, knowing that there might be a great reward at the end, or there might not. But one of the rewards that you know that you are getting is, you get to work on something that you love working on and that's what makes it worthwhile by itself. So if somebody doing an interview, basically, just comes across as having, yes, I'm going to do this and that and I've done it before. And if there's just no enthusiasm, if they haven't even read what we do as a technology company, I'm sorry. That's not going to fly. You have to come to the table and pitch what it is that you're going to provide to the company when you join from day one. I think that's really, really important.
Geer: All right, Steve. It's been a very interesting conversation and I appreciate you for taking the time.
Bjorg: David, my pleasure.
Geer: If you would like to learn more about Steve's new company and what he's building today, visit
http://www.mindtouch.com.
