Turukawa

I was in Pakistan a few months ago on a project. Security at the main Benazir Bhutto International Airport in Islamabad were using these. As I arrived at the airport, with massive and completely over-the-top security everywhere, stern-faced soldiers are marching up and down holding these devices out at arms-length.

Terrifying to realise, in that moment, that this is all that stands between a bomb and me.

The worst is a zombie business; the ones that earn a bit, seem to be on the cusp of success, but also won't ever give you the clarity and just die.

Your business doesn't sound like a zombie, though. It is time to shut it down and move on.

I've been where you are a few times and I know the incredible paralysis that sets in when this decision needs to be made.

You're doing this so that you can do something else (even if you don't yet know what it is) and to be kind to yourself. No-one deserves that sort of punishment.

And, if it helps even a little, know that you can walk away and you can start again. The sun also rises.

About 15 years ago, I developed a startup challenge for micro-enterprises called the Thousand Rand Challenge (about $100 at the time). That became a large-scale project, starting 1,000 businesses simultaneously. We Creative-Commons the results here: http://startup.wikia.com/wiki/Thousand_Rand_Challenge

For places like Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, trust is so incontrovertibly broken that there is no clear path back to central government and rule of law. Government has to start where it has always started, with circles of trust.

This system isn't a hack or 'route around' these circles of trust, it simply makes them verifiable, persistent and mobile. Eventually, once they get large enough, then they can lead to stable, centralised government.

It's not very different from the way circles of trust for lending eventually became large, national banks.

There's a major risk to that ... one person in the group gets discredited and that compromises everyone in the group.

You're coming at this from a very specific perspective related to your experience of government and services. I'm glad you live in a place where you can trust these sorts of fundamental services. This paper was not written for people like you.

Look at something like M-PESA in East Africa. It allows a person to have the equivalent of a bank account and transact with others without having any form of state recognised identity - only a mobile phone. That this is so successful is largely as a result of the complete inadequacy of the local banking system and the regional governments' inability to provide meaningful identity to their citizens.

Consider vaccination programs. Aid agencies responding to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 struggled to place young children back with their parents because no-one carried identity and the state - which had been barely functional before - was entirely non-functional. As reported in The Economist at the time, agencies carried out mass vaccinations against cholera but some people were vaccinated multiple times and others were missed entirely because there were so many agencies all running around like headless chickens.

Again, a simple distributed identity system would have permitted a better response.

Or the other example from the linked paper ... in rural communities in the world's poorest countries, people's identities are vouchsafed entirely by that community. Community-based lending programs (as popularised by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh) are successful precisely because individuals lack identity or their own independent credit record. Micro-lenders offer loans to these community groups rather than individuals and so the individual builds up no credit record of their own.

If they ever need to move (because of drought, joblessness or whatever) they lose the reference and identity they have built in that community. They cannot take it with them.

In the presence of a motivated and functioning state, sure, maybe this isn't needed. Unfortunately, billions of people don't have that luxury.

There are many governments which lack either the physical capacity or the political interest to provide persistent and meaningful legal identity to their citizens. Sometimes they use this to prevent their citizens exercising their democratic rights.

The impact of this is that their citizens lose the ability to create or enforce legal contracts. Take property, for instance. Families from Syria to Haiti to Sri Lanka have been living on and off the same land for centuries then along comes a war or natural disaster and they are forced off their land with no legal way of proving - once their communities are destroyed or distributed - their ownership of title.

There are numerous cases where the lack of a fundamental right to legal identity is a cause of tremendous hardship to people. In the poorest countries it is a recognised and well-researched cause of perpetual poverty.

It's not building a new nail, it's giving people full and persistent access to the hammer that was always their's but was never in their possession.

Nope, small companies with bad processes grow up to be big companies with terrible processes. Precisely because you hope to be a big company (or mature into a profitable one), get your processes right from the beginning. I'm definitely not saying "run your small company like the big companies you hate" ... I am saying, start as you mean to go on.

Nope, small companies that don't think about growth while they have the time, cement bad practice.

"Run your small business as if it were a large business" is more about conscious decision-making and awareness of consequence. Do your admin, make sure payroll is documented and people are paid on time, make sure that managers pay attention to work-load and communication, develop work practices that support people rather than assuming everyone is committed to 24-hour days ... sweat the small stuff so that your employees can get on with the thing you hired them for without concern.

It's all those assumptions that get small businesses as they scale. And then - if they survive - they become horrible, impersonal large businesses.

A small business is like a small child. All the potential is there, but surround that child with all the clutter of a poor environment and it will become an adult that perpetuates the system it was raised in.

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," said the Jesuits. They knew what they were talking about ;)

There was a great piece of advice I was given about 20 years ago by the South African guru of franchising, Eric Parker:

"Run your small business as if it was a large business", or, "Start as you mean to go on".

There is a great deal of bullshit in the tech industry; that chaos is somehow normal and that planning and the principles of good management can wait "till we're big". It should be painfully obvious that once chaos has set in, then that is the business environment and it cannot change.

If that environment includes hiring in panic and treating people badly, and the organisation survives anyway, then that organisation becomes one in which toxic relationships are rewarded indefinitely. It will be unsurprising that people like the OP will find it horrifying and be forced out.

I cited the book as reference ... I didn't claim anything else.

A fantastic book to read on this topic is "A world lit only by fire" by William Manchester. He also makes the case that Europe emerged from superstition because the Pope declared the world to be flat just as Magellan circumnavigated the globe, and the printing press permitted millions to learn about it. The age of myth and superstition was rapidly replaced by the Enlightenment.

Update: as has been pointed out below, Manchester overstated his case. It was still an enjoyable read some 16 years ago, and I still agree with the idea that the printing press - by disseminating news and knowledge at speed - undermined the prevailing authority of the day.

I think the idea of revolution as a result of age-disparity is a tad overstated. At the point most people would become sufficiently aware of any age-gap, and angry-enough to want to riot about it, you'd probably be suffering age-related effects and want a nap.

Also, drugs eventually fall out of patent and become available at far lower prices to everyone. The poor have far larger problems than whether they get to live an extra 10 years or so once they get to 70.