My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Get Lost

tech
by Antonio on

It is a rare pleasure to see something that is so good-- so far above the rest of anything else that might compete with it-- that while you are using it (or watching it), you keep asking youself how it is possible that this thing/service/content could be so good. It happens with Apple and their portables, jetBlue and their flights, and in the case of recent television shows, the first season of Lost.

After watching the first episode for exactly four minutes it became perfectly clear to me that this was a television show cut of a different cloth than just about anything else out there. In it's first season (disclaimer: I have not seen any of the second season) is better written, better shot, better edited, better cast, and better acted than anything else out there. By a long shot.

The obvious question to ask is: why Lost and not the other two dozen shows that have been created over the last two seasons? Or perhaps more strikingly, given Hollywood's "studio model" where the same folks come together in different combinations to work on projects, why is there such a big gap between the quality of Lost and the quality of just about everything else out there?

I'm not sure I know the full answer, and frankly I'm not sure JJ Abrams (the creator of the series) knows for sure either. After all, his previous hit, "Alias," is a far inferior show-- in fact at it's core it's just an hour-long music video with a semi-klad Jennifer Gartner changing costumes and bouncing through raggedy-thin plot lines.

It was so striking though that I went looking for wisdom in the 'Bonus Features" part of the Season 1 DVDs. I don't often get into the bonus tracks mostly because of the way in which they end up making the actors look so much more clueless than the characters they portray, but in the case of Lost I just had to look. And I'm glad I did not so much because of anything that Abrams says but because of the smart things that his producers, set people, and other staff say about him. Here I want to focus on the two observations made that I think can best explain why the show is so good:

  • talent: on the casting side, someone described JJ's style as finding the right people and then re-writing the characters around them. I am not sure how common this is but when you see characters as complex as Kate and Hurley and listen to how their characters were written before the actors were cast (and subsequently re-written), you quickly realize that this was a team that was just not afraid to make wholesale changes to the story to accommodate the way in which the actors could bring different characters to life.

  • creative direction: I've heard this one about great CEOs as well but it's still worth mentioning it here. One of the production people says at one point that what JJ is really good at is having "very clear big concepts" and then letting the team (actors, cinematographers, special-effects people) "texture" the ideas to get to the final product. The "having the big thoughts" bit is part of every bonehead business book written so it's nothing new. What is not often said however is that it's also very important to be crystal clear about the big idea or plan. Without clarity it's very hard to discern when someone's "texturing" is going in the right direction.

This has got me thinking about how to apply these two insights to building software. You can't quite draw a direct parallel because the product delivered in both cases is so different. But it is an interesting thought experiment to think about what would happen if product features could be dictated by the specific talents of the engineers and designers hired. To some degree features are emphasized (or de-emphasized) according to engineers's preferences unofficially, but the whole process of "software engineering" with its product management, functional specs., etc. is in place to correct for this. Maybe the new era of software delivered as service (with much tighter time-to-market schedules and instant feedback from users) will help to get us there.

So, go and get Lost. You won't regret it.

Update: I started writing this post while on an airplane ride to California. While there I met with a bunch of folks at different places including some at Google. It occurred to me after talking to them about their work that Google gets this JJ Abrams insight about shaping the work around the talent. It was pretty incredibly to see a company of 4,000+ people that can operate like this at the scale they are at.