Neoteny unconference – How Epic Fail and Agile Development Can Change the World
If you asked me to pick the buzzword spoken most during this event, it would definitely have to be FAIL! However, the unconference was anything but that! This weekend, instead of lazing around and sleeping till afternoon, I decided to hurl myself and that too at 8 am to attend the first ever Neoteny event and boy, am glad I did since I had an absolutely awesome time there, to say the least. Neoteny Labs in collaboration with the powerhouse Ruby on Rails development house – Pivotal Labs is establishing center of best practices here in Singapore, where they will be providing training for startup entrepreneurs and developers on development techniques and helping them to create products.
Agile thoughts
The event was kick started with panel discussion on product process and software agility by Ian McFarland from Pivotal Labs, Diego Rodriguez from IDEO, Jay Dvivedi from Shinshei Bank and Elisabeth Hendrickson from Quality Tree Software. Agile Development unlike the normal SDLC, is a methodology based on collaboration, iteration and process adaptability. Pivotal labs and IDEO are strong proponents of this method and were advocating this to be adapted for most web-based startups. They shared interesting case studies of Youtube and Paypal who kept pivoting and evolving their system through this process and creating more value to their customers.
The discussion also led to how Agile development forces people to constantly build and not spend time talking about the various feature requests. These discussions on development methodologies also led to the usual complaint from many local entrepreneurs on how it’s hard to find good technical talent in Singapore, when Ian responded by saying that it’s not always about hiring smartest programmer but having a process to enable them to be better, which is exactly what Pivotal Labs aim to do.
Of Epic Fails and chutzpah
With all the talk about agile development and how it led to a lot of success stories, the discussion naturally veered to what is Singapore lacking in terms of entrepreneurship? Eyal Gura from Israel had some interesting insights to share on why he thinks Singapore can be the third Silicon Valley (Israel being the second)
While Singapore and Israel share many similarities in terms of immigrant population, compulsory military service, small size of the country, there are also that many cultural differences. He mentioned how there was a rampant fear of losing face, no one questions authority and people here place high premium on politeness. But, most importantly what was needed for the entrepreneurs to succeed was “Chutzpah”. Chutzpah according to him helps lubricate the business process and he thinks Singapore is uniquely positioned to bring in global talent and also establish both early stage and growth equity discipline and to overcome the cultural challenges.
With all the talk about failing, one interesting speaker that managed to get all our attention was Johannes Grenfurthner who runs Monochrom – an art-technology-philosophy group in Vienna. With his stage presence and use of different yet interesting metaphors conveyed why it’s important to fail and had interesting points on why sometimes competition isn’t the right way to create something that people need. For more information on his talk, click here.
Diversity of crowd and talks
What I really enjoyed about the event was the amazing diversity of the crowd. People from different countries, culture and background were sharing their insights on diverse range of topics. On one hand you have Mitch Altman talking about making a one button device to switch off any TV in this world, and on the other hand you have 12 year old Max sharing his very valuable insights on what kids think about technology.
There was also the Mozilla Drumbeat challenge where people shared their idea on how to make the web better and explain open web in the most creative way. Preetam Rai who presented on reward management system for content won the challenge for the best idea category. Coleman Yee won in the category of explaining open web concept in the best way possible.
What this means to startups?
From this event, it was evident that there is an increasing emphasis on walking the talk a.k.a building products. Joi Ito mentioned that he would be interested in investing in consumer internet Ruby on Rails startups, with about 50,000 users, that grows 20-30% month-on-month. With Pivotal labs setting up base in Singapore, it will enable a lot of creators to build products and take it to market and follow the process of agile development to continuously iterate.
With a set of quality mentors coming in to help the startups, an organization to enable better development process, and an incubator set up to fund these passionate people, looks like Singapore entrepreneurial eco-system is set to become more vibrant.
Image courtesy: http://thinkingandmaking.com/
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