#84 Gardening Platforms and the Future of Open Ecosystems with Alex Komoroske

Podcast Notes

Alex Komoroske, is truly one to get inspired by when we think of the potential that powerful technology solutions can create. For 13 years, he worked with Google, building some of the most cherished products that came from the organization.

Heading product for a company that affects billions of lives is no easy feat, and Alex did just that for Google Chrome. He took his vast ocean of knowledge, and for the last two years has helped shape Stripe, as their Head of Strategy.

In his flip-book style presentation, aptly titled, “Gardening Platforms”, he discusses the fundamental emergent power dynamics of platforms, how to evolve an existing platform to continuously improve it, and how to create a new platform from scratch.

This got us truly hooked, and we are glad that Alex joined us to discuss this, and many more mind-tinkering concepts in our podcast. We touch upon the inherently complex and evolutionary  nature of platforms, the role of composability and modularity, and what it means to be sensitive to socio-technical implications of your solutions. 

Get ready to be inspired by his high-impact journey, brutal honesty, and some remarkable recommendations of books and concepts that have shaped his thoughts and processes.

Key highlights

• Platforms can be imagined as a swarm of energy, between multiple entities interacting with one another.
• Why you don’t always need a big-bang for product launches, and oftentimes self-accumulating users are what’s best for the platform’s success.
• Why a gardener mindset, rather than a builder mindset, is poised to reward a product more success.
• How organizations can prepare and design for open platforms that are resilient and expansive, but chaotic and hard to control.

Topics (chapters):

(00:00) Quote by Alex Komoroske

(00:39) Simone welcomes audience

(01:26) Alex Introduction

(04:28) Platforms as Complex Adaptive Systems and Gardening Platforms

(09:08) “Coherence” an attribute for platform development in Open vs. Closed Platforms

(12:22) Rebound from Centralized Platforms

(16:36) Translating chaotic and complex ecosystems into actionable initiatives in organizations

(29:04) Trust, Organizational Accountability, and Micro enterprises

(39:18) Moral implications of building platforms and open source movements

(49:08) Design for Participation

(53:42) Power of Decision Makers in influencing platform design

(01:00:09) Breadcrumbs (Suggested content from Alex)

Recorded on 30th August 2023.

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Music:

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Shruthi Prakash:

Sure. Thank you, Simone. So I think what point I wanted to sort of, you know, talk about a bit more, you said that it’s good to sort of design for maybe the nefarious users or the most sensitive issues, right? And that’s where I wanted to sort of touch upon how, let’s say, the power of decision makers influence how we operate as an ever evolving ecosystem, right? Essentially, and This is something you touched upon, but I think for me as a woman, for example, openness is not innate. Like it’s not something that comes very, let’s say easily to me. It’s not as maybe secure as it is maybe for others and so on. So how do you design for sensitivities essentially, and how do you progressively do that as you get more and more open?

Alex Komoroske:

Hmm. Yeah, being open to some degree is a privilege. It has to come from a position of strength. And when you’re unsure, you locally in the context of like, do I belong here? Or is my vision is my thing or that can, I think come across. And I think it’s easy to say that. As in it’s easy. Oh, everything should be open. But actually, honestly, like it’s can be there and it can be a very scary place. And the especially people who don’t want the other contact information public, or they might be harassed for various reasons. It really, it comes with a, and part of the point of an open system is, you don’t know who will participate. Pretty fundamentally, like that’s the whole thing, right? And that means you’re gonna get some bad actors and they’re gonna come in and they’re gonna be mean and they’re gonna do bad things and they’re gonna be, you know, just not live up to the code. And that’s why it’s important to have code of conduct. That’s why it’s important to go proactively and actively police those kinds of things. But I think it is important that they make both in how you design the system and also how you design the system that builds the system in terms of how you run the project. But, um, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a, there’s a, I do believe, like, I believe that people want to be good, but often they’re put in situations where they’re incentivized to be bad. And, uh, it’s very easy to get in those situations where there’s anonymous. connection of like, Oh, this is just some random, you know, personal on the thing. I’m just telling what I feel. It’s like, no, you’re talking about an individual that you think that they are terrible and worthless or doing this miserable thing. Like that’s a that the internet has this very, there’s something about seeing something, someone in person to understand their direct humanity and to feel this level of trust in them. And the internet allows you to talk with anybody. But it means that like you fundamentally like, here’s one way of looking at this trust ultimately comes from the expectation of future interactions directly or indirectly with his counterparty. So like what I mean by indirect is maybe this person tells their friends, oh my god don’t talk to Alex that guy’s a jerk. So like that’s an indirect interaction of the future. So this is where trust comes from. So you have to get that a future expected repeated interactions. So if somebody, if you’re in a small town and someone cuts you off at the stop sign and speeds past you, you probably won’t flick them off because You’re likely to see them in the grocery store again or a church or whatever if someone Cuts you off in New York City. You’re gonna flick them off. You will never see that person again. And so there’s something about this open System where you don’t know when you’re gonna see like oh cool if I if I have a bad interaction with this community Whatever, I’ll just burn that account and go, you know do something over elsewhere It’s people in this transactional mood or enables people to be in this transactional And that can create all kinds of weird oddities in the way the system underlying works. I think it’s just, I think recognizing that there’s situations in which people will do things that are probably not what people want is not, it’s like, well, we shouldn’t dwell on the negative or I hope people will be better. It’s like, hope is not a strategy, man. Like the, you gotta be realistic about the kinds of things that might happen. And what would we do if that did happen? And that’s why from the very beginning you have a code of conduct. kind of thing just and then maybe have to develop it and grow it more as you see real situations that are happening that you need to protect against. But like you can’t just say, I’m sure everyone will use this in a great way. No, they’re going to do. People will use your system in ways that are like on the web platform be really fun sometimes to see people use stuff. Like I remember the canonical example, was there somebody who built this thing using service workers to transcode a atypical image format? into a JPEG live before being passed through to render in the browser. And I remember we saw that was like, Oh my God, that’s crazy. Is that, does that even work? And then we’re like, no, it does. They made this moment like, Oh, is that security hole? And then we’re like, no, that’s fine. Actually that’s totally fine. It’s within the SEMA. And so you had this moment where people will do weird things with your platform. And ideally you want it to be like, Oh, cool, weird, cool, as opposed to like, Oh, no, like that is like, we have to like cut that down. So you have to be realistic that like, you just imagine how people will nefariously use this thing. That’s why red teaming is really useful by the way. When you’re doing it and you’re just brainstorming, people are like, oh, what a negative thought you’re having. When you put on the role of a different, of an adversary, you say, well, I’m gonna try to break this system and people will allow you to do it. You don’t start to feel the shame of doing it. So like the role playing as red team, the role play aspects is one of the social pieces that makes it work. But that makes sense.

Simone Cicero:

I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I think, you know, in general, the conversation we’re having makes, you know, makes me think that there’s no shortcut, you know, you can, you cannot really live there and things nicely develop. You should kind of seek this equilibrium between trusting the ecosystem and at the same time, taking your own responsibility, you know, in… detailing the North Star and the code of conduct and overseeing the interfaces that emerge and nudging the system in what you believe is a positive way. So for example, when you spoke about how you can design kind of attractors for coherence to emerge. So it’s really a careful process, right? It’s kind of balancing

Simone Cicero:

These emergence with… Yeah, go ahead.

Alex Komoroske:

That’s I think, the fundamental reality of it being a complex system. There is no solution. There is no one easy fix. There is no do this and it always works. There is like, here are some of the things that will be intention. Here are some of the things that you’re going to be constantly surfing and evaluating. And it’s more of that active stance of knowing that this will be a constant surfing through an ever evolving situation is more important than anything else. Because that’s what I mean with the gardening mindset versus the builder mindset of like, it’s going to be fluid. It’s going to be a little bit weird. It’s going to be a little bit unexpected. It’s going to be ever evolving. And that’s the main thing for people to have in their mind is be open to that.

Simone Cicero:

Yeah, gardens need the gardeners, right? That’s the point. And yeah, lastly, Alex, to finish the conversation, we normally close the episodes with what we call the breadcrumbs. So any suggestion that you want to share with our audience, you may drop some parts during the conversation, some essays or blogs or books, but maybe if you can mention a couple of things that people should be… looking into, especially if they want to understand deeply what’s your stance on platforms and these kind of complex systems.

Alex Komoroske:

So I have a lot of my favorite essays and articles on kamarovsky.com linked from there.

And I think that all of them, they kind of talk to each other a bit. They’re all interrelated in various ways, but I think that they are, the gardening platforms in the back, I think is useful, hopefully. I also really liked the doorbell in the jungle, by the way. I think it’s one of my favorite little things of like relatively concrete product guidance will also fanciful metaphor. The other thing I really recommend is, one of my good friends blogs. Okay, so first of all, I must recommend Flux Collective, read.fluxcollective.org. I think that’s a newsletter that I and a bunch of good friends and collaborators work on a weekly basis. And another that I think is really deserves even more attention than it gets is Dimitri Glazkos, whatdimitrilearned.substack.com. I think it’s phenomenal. I think it’s, Dimitri was the sort of Uber TL of Blink for many years. We were collaborators. We still talk almost every day. Brilliant engineer and architect. but also understands the human component of code and the systems and how they’re built. And his essays on that blog, I think, are just exceptionally insightful. And unlike what you find in lots of other places, which just for the technical decisions, and he sort of sees the whole system as a system built by humans. And what that implies or how it works within organizations and different tactics and different weird hang ups that you’ll get stuck on. And I just think it’s exceptional.

Simone Cicero:

Thank you so much. We will put these breadcrumbs recommendations into the podcast notes. So our listeners, you should check the whole notes on our website, boundaries.io, slash resources, slash podcast. You will find Alex’s episodes with all the transcripts and the notes and so on. And I mean. First of all, Alex, it was great to have you. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did.

Alex Komoroske:

Yeah Thank you.

Simone Cicero:

Thank you.

Alex Komoroske:

Yeah. ThanksFor having me.

Alex Komoroske:

Sorry. I go in lots of different directions with this. Maybe it’s different than what you’re expecting, but I had a lot of fun.

Simone Cicero:

No, but I mean, that’s why we wanted to have you here, because you can entertain the complexity of really building platforms in a thoughtful and complex way, which is, I think, very enriching for our listeners to kind of confront themselves as they develop these systems. And thank you so much, Shruthi, for your contribution.

Shruthi Prakash:

Thank you. Thanks Alex for joining today. It was really great hearing from you. Yeah. Thank you Simone as well.

Simone Cicero:

And for our listeners, as always, stay tuned and until we catch up again, remember to think Boundaryless.