Walking Into DiSH Alone | Alt Production Group

Buildathons, neurodivergent minds, founder panic and learning when to stop talking

Being a solo founder does something slightly strange to your sense of scale.

You spend enough time building by yourself and your entire frame of reference becomes your own work.

Then you walk into a room full of people building things.

And suddenly your brain goes:

Oh. F**k. Everyone else is doing technological advances too.

That was part of the experience of taking part in a DiSH buildathon.

Alt Production Group operates in some fairly deep technical territory. Much of what I had been working on wasn't directly comparable with the projects around me, particularly the deeper security architecture and research work.

That didn't stop the brief founder panic.

Comparison doesn't generally wait for a detailed technical taxonomy before arriving.

But then something much more useful happened.

I started talking to people.

Finding other brains that work differently

There is something incredibly valuable about being physically around other people who build.

Particularly people whose minds jump between ideas, systems and possibilities in similarly unconventional ways.

Technology contains an enormous number of neurodivergent people. That isn't exactly a revelation.

But solo development can still be isolating.

Being around other intuitive minds, including other neurodivergent people, creates something that sitting alone with another terminal doesn't.

Ideas bounce.

Different disciplines collide.

Somebody describes a problem and your brain immediately sees it from another direction.

You remember that technological development isn't supposed to be an entirely solitary activity.

I would like to see considerably more of that.

Less obsession with treating every other person building something as competition, and more environments where capable people can exchange perspectives, meet one another and allow unexpected collaboration to happen.

But there is a complication.

Neurodivergent enthusiasm can be very informative

Put several excited founders and technologists in a room and ask them what they're building.

People talk.

A lot.

This is brilliant for community.

It can be considerably less brilliant for intellectual property.

When you are excited about something, particularly when you have finally found another person who understands why you're excited about it, it is very easy to go from:

“Here's the problem we're solving.”

to:

“AND THEN THIS BIT DOES THIS AND THIS TALKS TO THIS AND...”

And suddenly you've given somebody considerably more of the implementation than you intended.

There is no suggestion here that somebody at DiSH was trying to extract anybody else's ideas.

The risk is much more mundane.

Founders are excited.

Networking encourages openness.

Neurodivergent enthusiasm can occasionally remove the brakes entirely.

Early-stage founders therefore need to understand what they're carrying before they walk into these environments.

What is public?

What is confidential?

What is a trade secret?

What might eventually form part of protected intellectual property?

What can you happily explain?

And where do you stop?

Collaboration doesn't require surrendering your IP

I don't want the answer to be founders becoming terrified of talking to one another.

That would destroy precisely what makes these spaces useful.

The answer is understanding the boundary.

Talk about the problem.

Talk about why it matters.

Talk about the experience.

Talk about the outcome you're trying to create.

But understand when explaining what you're building is about to become explaining how your protected implementation works.

DiSH reminded me of two things simultaneously.

I need other technical people.

And I need to occasionally shut the fuck up.

Both have proven useful lessons.