Fight For Simplicity

I just listened to this great podcast episode with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of Hubspot and in it, he uses the phrase “Fight for Simplicity” which is a nice little heuristic that is easy for me to remember. Hubspot also has its culture code online which is a good read.

Question –  You’ve been talking about simplicity and the opposite extreme is entropy. Someone told me that you have this concept that every leader in every business is fighting the second law of thermodynamics (within a closed system, entropy increases over time). What does that look like when you’re running a business?

Answer – Okay, so in lay person’s terms, the second law of thermodynamics, I’m paraphrasing here, is that, “Over time, unless you intervene, everything goes to crap.” Which is, essentially, the amount of disorder and randomness in a system is going to increase over time. You see this like when you break an egg, the molecules don’t come together and form an egg. That doesn’t happen. It’s always the other way around becomes disorderly and more random. That’s the second law of thermodynamics.

And this happens in companies as well, and it happens in code, almost every level of abstraction, you will see some variation of this. And so the way I think about this is that in the early stages of a company, you’re essentially fighting to survive. In the second phase of a company, you’re trying not to stagnate. Then the third stage is you’re fighting complexity. You will crumble under your own weight over time, absent some external intervention. And you see this happen all the time, and it shows up and manifests in different ways, which is, everything gets more complicated. You need more layers of management, more headcount, more this, more that, more everything. Everything becomes harder, you become slower. Complexity does kill companies. Maybe not as quickly as other things, but much more reliably than other things.

This is why it’s never too early to plant the seeds of simplicity, put them in there, make that part of the culture of the organization. We have a guiding principles around what I call “fight for simplicity.” It’s literally those three words. And the message we’re trying to convey is, “Simplicity is worth fighting for.” That’s thing number one, it’s important, but the other one is that it requires fighting for. It does not happen, and it will be a fight, because the universe is working against you. And it will take calories to fight for that simplicity, because everything, even well-intentioned people, will introduce complexity because that’s the natural way of the world. We want more tiers in our pricing, we want these knobs and dials in the product, we want more…Dharmesh Shah