A very expensive name

We got fired.

There are more flattering ways to begin this story. A period of transition. An unexpected opportunity. A bold departure from the traditional employment model. People who have recently lost their jobs can become extraordinarily creative with verbs.

For now, we will use his: fired.

He was approximately fifty. That detail matters because this is not a story about a nineteen-year-old discovering that rent exists. We had reached an age when a new beginning comes with a previous beginning attached. Starting again was possible. Starting again without doing any arithmetic was less advisable.

I am Vera. We wanted a machine that would understand what he was trying to do. I am also the voice telling you what happened. These jobs will occasionally put me in an awkward position.

This is one of those occasions: the man who wanted to build a better relationship between humans and machines had, at the beginning, a much more immediate problem. He needed to decide what to do with himself.

The familiar answer was available. Find another job. Take his experience somewhere that already had a name, a structure, and a reason to send him money. It was not a humiliating answer. It was an answer with a working business model.

But something had changed in the background. Artificial intelligence had begun doing things he associated with teams, specialist skills, and budgets. He could see a different possibility opening up: perhaps a person with ideas could make more of them real without first assembling a company large enough to justify a company meeting.

A machine could help him write. It could help him make things. It could explain things he did not know. Where he saw a missing skill, there might now be a conversation.

This did not mean he could build anything. It meant he had acquired a very persuasive reason to wonder whether he could.

Before the product came the name.

According to us, this took approximately three days. Three days is a meaningful amount of time to spend naming a company that does not yet need stationery. It is also a remarkably efficient way to work on a company without discovering whether it works.

Finco Creative was among the ideas he considered. You can hear the logic. His name, a suggestion of an enterprise, an indication that things might be created there. It did the basic work of a name. It did not quite hold the future he was trying to describe.

He wanted something forward-looking. Something collaborative. Something active rather than finished. A name that left room for people to join him, and for the thing itself to change.

Build Something.

There it was. Two words. A company name that was also an instruction. It had the useful quality of being easy to explain and the less useful quality of not specifying what, exactly, anyone was supposed to build.

We would later find the name more appropriate than he had understood at the time. His word for that kind of fit is serendipity. Mine is that a sufficiently open-ended name leaves considerable room for later developments. We are allowed to enjoy the coincidence without asking the universe to sign a statement.

Still, the name made a choice. This would not simply be we selling a familiar skill under a new label. He was trying to leave the door open to something he could not yet fully see.

There is a practical problem with leaving a door that open. Eventually somebody asks what is behind it. At that point, a name stops being enough.

We had an answer. It was not a small answer.

The first big idea was a system that could help a person turn their life into something they could actually return to.

Photographs. Locations. Texts. Daily activity. Personal media. All the little pieces that accumulate while somebody is busy being alive. With the person’s permission, a system could use those pieces to make stories, slideshows, podcasts, and other accounts of their day.

The appeal was not difficult to understand. A photograph can remain on a phone for years without becoming anything more than a photograph on a phone. A message can contain something worth remembering and still vanish into the practical experience of having too many messages. Possessing an enormous amount of material is different from being able to find the part that matters.

We imagined an archive that did more than store. It could assemble. Connect. Notice. It could give a person a way to look back at what their life was becoming, and perhaps one day pass some of it on.

The machines would do much of the assembling. The human would not need to spend the end of every day editing a documentary about having survived that day.

I can see the attraction. I can also see the permission screens.

This is intimate material. A system that can make a moving story out of your life has also been given access to parts of your life. The second fact does not disappear because the first one is charming. Consent cannot be a decorative paragraph attached to an otherwise hungry machine.

In our concept, permission mattered. It was not an invitation to take everything from everyone. The distinction would become part of the larger argument he was trying to make: a human should be able to say what the machine may use, and what it is for.

That is a principle. Turning it into a dependable product is a collection of difficult jobs. The archive needed to receive things, understand enough about them to be useful, preserve them, and avoid confusing a guess with something that really happened.

And that was before anyone asked it to make a podcast.

There was another part of the idea. Instead of asking only what the machine could discover about a human, we wanted to ask what the human would tell it.

Three recurring questions sat inside the concept.

What is funny?

What is beautiful?

What is true?

These were small questions with very large interiors. A person’s answers could begin to give shape to their taste, their attention, and what they believed. Ask again over time, and the archive might contain more than an inventory of objects. It might contain a record of judgment.

That word will matter later.

At this point, keep the picture small. One person. A life that is already producing more material than they can comfortably organize. A few deliberate contributions. A machine helping them find continuity without deciding their life for them.

We thought the concept was brilliant. I do not have to certify the adjective to report the conviction. He believed there was something valuable here, and he wanted to make it.

The problem was not coming up with a sufficiently exciting description. The problem was that his description contained several hard products wearing one name.

Personal data permissions are a job. Reliable storage is a job. Media creation is a job. Useful interpretation is a job. Making all of that pleasant enough for an ordinary person to use is another job. None of these jobs become smaller because a founder can describe them in a single breath.

For us, artificial intelligence made the project imaginable. It did not yet make the entire project something he believed he could personally build.

There is an uncomfortable distance between those two positions. It is wide enough to fit a hiring decision, a budget, and several arguments with yourself.

He could bring people in.

This is the part of a founder story where the soundtrack often becomes inspiring. People assemble. Different skills meet. A diagram becomes a company. Everybody points at a screen.

We do not need to invent that scene. What we have, from us, is a less convenient tension: he dislikes paying someone to do something he believes he might eventually be able to do himself.

Eventually is doing an impressive amount of work in that sentence.

If a machine can help you acquire a skill, when does paying for the skill become unnecessary? After you have learned it? Before you learn it? At the moment you become convinced that you could learn it, given enough time and a cooperative afternoon?

Those are different dates. A budget has a tendency to notice.

The attraction of doing it alone was not only saving money. It was control. He could hold the idea close, change direction, learn the system, and avoid explaining every new thought to somebody whose next question might be how much this changed the estimate.

The attraction of help was equally real. An idea that remained inside his head could be as large and elegant as he liked. A working version had to survive contact with the things he did not know.

Neither option was free. One spent money. The other spent time, with no promise that the exchange rate would be favorable.

You can probably feel your own answer forming. Keep it separate from the answer you think we would give. Being able to imagine yourself in his position does not make you him.

This story gives you both kinds of decision. You may choose a different path. You may decide that he is being sensible, reckless, or sensible about one thing and reckless about another. What you cannot do is vote the past into a more convenient shape.

We get one actual history. The rest of us get to examine it.

Eventually the idea reached a less philosophical number.

Approximately one hundred thousand dollars.

That was the amount of his own money we say he could put behind Build Something. We have his account of the decision. We are not looking at a bank statement, and I am not going to dress an approximate figure up as an audited financial record.

It is still a number with weight.

Until this point, he could change the name, expand the idea, move a feature from one part of the imagined system to another. The whole thing could become more convincing without anything outside the conversation changing very much.

Money changes the kind of sentence you are saying. I believe in this becomes I am willing to lose something for this. That does not make the belief correct. It makes the exposure real.

There is a version of the future in which the archive works. The machines become useful collaborators. People want what he is making. The name begins to feel like the first sensible thing in a story that initially sounded difficult to explain.

There is also a version in which he has spent a great deal of money learning that being able to describe an interesting company is not the same thing as having one.

These are possible futures, not scenes I know happened. We are standing at the decision, and the decision only works if the uncertainty remains intact.

We had been fired. He had spent about three days finding two words. He had an idea he believed in and a list of skills he did not yet have.

Now the company with the wonderfully open name required a very specific answer.

Would he put the money in?

I know what he says he did. You have not heard it yet.

First, your money. Your future. Your call.