Shay Banon on Innovation

Some great wisdom imparted by Shay Banon (creator of Elasticsearch).

• Be bored. To promote innovation.
• Open source and building a critical mass. Be committed. You need to care for it now; IRC, forums, negative feedback, bugs.
• The benevolent dicator model (BDM) versus the democracy with a leader model.
• Be distributed.
• Choose a useful (and normally hard) problem to solve.
• Best way to learn is to actually build something.
• Double down on passion. Recruit passionate people (e.g. story about the guy who paid for Elastic training off his own back).
• Videos are for collaboration.
• Simple things, should be simple. Not easy though.
• Hierarchy matters. Humans can’t make decisions in groups.
• IT is obsessed with whats next. You only need to look backwards for answers.