I Just Wanted to Get There First

I didn't expect to find my own resume inside an essay by someone I deeply admire. Paul Graham recently published 'The Brand Age', a piece tracing how the Swiss watch industry crossed over from the world of precision machinery to the world of luxury brands. I couldn't keep my mind on watches while reading it. My last several years kept superimposing themselves on the page.

What happened to the watchmakers

The essay's story goes like this. From 1945 to 1970, Swiss watchmaking had its golden age. Watchmakers competed on two things: thinness and accuracy. A watch is something you carry to know the time, so you make it easier to carry, or better at telling time. An era of competing on substance.

Then in the early 1970s, disaster struck in three layers. Japan started making cheaper and better watches; the collapse of fixed exchange rates made Swiss watches 2.7 times more expensive for Americans; and then came the finishing blow — quartz. Knowing the exact time, which had been expensive, became free. Unit sales fell by two thirds in a decade.

Here the road forks. Omega was the watchmaker's watchmaker, the nerd's nerd. When Japan caught up, they responded the Omega way: build an even more accurate movement. The high-frequency movement they launched in 1968 was so fragile it wrecked their reputation instead, and there was nothing further down that road but a race to the bottom. By 1981 they belonged to their creditors.

Patek Philippe went the other way. While Omega was redesigning movements, Patek designed cases. The fine watches of the golden age all looked alike — you had to get within a few inches to tell whose watch someone was wearing. The moment you make the case distinctive, the whole watch becomes an expression of brand. By Paul Graham's math, the brand's surface area grew from 8 square millimeters to 800. The companies that survived that way became today's luxury watch industry: an industry that once sold precision, now selling expensiveness itself.

The spine of the essay is one sentence: "Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear." And erasing those differences is what technology naturally does. So what happened to watches will keep happening everywhere.

What happened to me

I've lived this story twice. Not as a spectator.

Hypercommunity was a location-based social community service with real-time translation built in. People talking in the same room across languages — back then, that was a substantive difference. I argued consistently for one direction: raise even a small round, launch fast, grow in stages, claim a place in the market early. But I wasn't the one making the decisions, and the service never shipped on my timetable. A few years later, real-time translation became a commodity part in the LLM era. The way quartz made exact time free.

Quickstart.id is a service for authentication and authorization — the problem every developer knows and nobody wants to rebuild yet again. These days Korea is waking up to how much this problem matters, one incident at a time. The market is only now opening its eyes. But I came back to this problem after spending too many years on Hypercommunity, and by then, large and very good companies were already established, selling answers to the same problem.

The road laid out in front of a latecomer is Omega's road: build it better and win. What I realized reading the essay is that I never wanted to stand on that road in the first place.

Picks and jeans

What I wanted was never to win. I wanted to sell picks and jeans in a gold rush. Not the picture where everyone fights on scale and technology from the same starting line, but the position of selling tools to the miners as the rush begins. That position isn't won by fighting. It's claimed by arriving first. That's why I kept saying we should ship fast.

Paul Graham writes that there are only two situations where branding and good design can coexist: when the space of possibilities is enormous, as in painting, or when you're the first to arrive in unexplored territory. The one who arrives first gets to find the right answer and claim it as their own in a single motion. The pick-seller's spot is exactly that spot.

It gets better when you remember who the jeans half of the story is about. Nobody remembers the names of the men who struck gold, but everyone still knows the name of the man who sold miners their trousers: Levi Strauss. The essay says don't buy brand and don't sell it either — and the Levi's of that era wasn't selling brand. They sold something genuinely needed at the start of a rush, and the brand accrued as a byproduct. Set out to build a brand and you're on Patek's road. Keep building what people need, and one day the name remains. The latter is what I wanted.

The echo

So how do I feel now? I still catch myself saying "it's not too late." The Korean market is only now waking up to authentication and authorization, so the math isn't even entirely wrong.

But after reading this essay, I finally recognized that sentence for what it is. It's not a plan. It's the echo left in someone who never got to start. I could start now, sure. But starting now wouldn't be the pick-seller's spot — it would be a war of scale and technology against companies already in place. Not the picture I wanted. In a footnote, Paul Graham writes that the independent watchmakers still earnestly making good watches today show how hard it is to do good work when the current is against you. That sentence stayed with me a long time.

The essay ends like this: golden ages aren't something you go looking for. You follow interesting problems, and later, people call that period a golden age. It doesn't even have a name while it's happening. So what's left for me isn't chewing over the rushes I missed — it's following the next problem. Rushes always start where the problems are. Having been late twice, I know exactly how fast that spot disappears. And this time, the decisions are mine to make.