Balena’s ‘why’

Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do WHAT they do. By WHY I mean your purpose, cause or belief – WHY does your company exist? WHY do you get out of bed every morning? And WHY should anyone care?

Simon Sinek – ‘Start with WHY’

I have a problem with books. More specifically, I have a problem with buying books. Someone only has to mention a book, be seen reading a book, or cause me to go near a shop selling books, and within moments I own more books. The manifestations of that problem are a house full of books, and a “to read” list the length of War and Peace (which is not on the list, as it happens). All of which is a long ramble to explain why I have only just got around to reading The Infinite Game, despite having bought it when it was published in 2019. But that reminded me of “Start with WHY” which I then re-read because it caused me to think balena isn’t doing a good enough job of communicating our “WHY” with the outside world.
So let’s address that.

Why The Mission

Konstantinos wrote about the mission statement in 2023 and gave some background about why it changed. To save you a click it is:

Enable people to leverage technology to address the real world challenges of our time.

To Mr Sinek’s point; we must be explicit about the purpose of our work. Why do this, over something else. After all our time is limited so we need to make sure it’s spent impactfully.
Balena believe that there are many challenges facing humanity, all of which need clever people to innovate and find ways to address them. We as a team potentially cannot solve any of them, and we definitely cannot solve all of them. But what we think we can do, is make a platform to enable others to attempt to solve them!

Why balenaCloud?

Given that as the mission, why then are we solving the problem of people deploying, configuring, updating and managing compute devices? There are lots of ways to enable people to solve the challenges facing humanity, right?

Absolutely. But this is where we feel we can add the most value right now. You would think that in 2024 it’s really easy to deploy a device somewhere, make it run some code, update it occasionally and maintain it. Right?
Wrong:

Really wrong:

And if large companies and organisations cannot reliably deploy and manage these devices, what hope have people got when they are trying to focus on environment change, humanitarian crises, disaster relief, access to education, access to health….etc?

Why that mission means so much to us at balena, and why we are focusing on the fleet management of edge devices, is because it’s still our hard problem and we want to solve it for others. We want to solve it so that clever people can find ways to address all of those real challenges humanity is facing, and NOT have to even care what an edge device is or how it stays updated. We are deliberately “use case agnostic”, by which I mean we don’t build any products for a particular industry or type of user. This isn’t a profit-maximising decision, it’s a solutions-maximising decision. We want our customers to be enabled to solve any problem where managing remote devices is part of the answer.

However I don’t want you, dear reader, to get the impression that unless you’re solving a humanitarian crisis, that you won’t be a valued customer at balena. That’s not the case. All, and I genuinely mean all, customers are valued. People build their business on our business, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Businesses are vital to the global economy. They make jobs and support people and their families. Businesses provide vital services and products to people who need them to lead this modern life. We are all part of a fragile ecosystem, and every one of our customers are a vital part of that.

Why enable?

The word is in our mission statement with intent, and it appears in our writing with purpose. Enabling people is a core driver in everything that balena does.
The ‘why’ here is because a fundamental belief and principle of balena is that we want to be a positive-sum company. We don’t want to do anything where the company or the team gain but at a loss to someone else. This applies to how we hire, how we look after the team, how we acquire customers, how we do support and everything else!

Let’s look at some specifics:

Team Enablement
The people who work for balena are trusted to use their own judgement. They collaborate to decide what work is done and when. They take leave when they need it. They take as much leave as they need. They decide if the company should spend money. They decide the processes the company uses to run the company.
We do things this way because we only hire clever people aligned with the company mission and culture. And when you hire good people the worst thing you can do is weigh them down with bureaucracy and hierarchy. Instead we work together to make frameworks and guardrails to guide us, we are radically transparent with company information, and enable everyone to seek advice and make decisions.

It’s positive-sum to run a company like this because the team have autonomy and trust, and the company has happy people who are more innovative, less siloed and more intrinsically motivated to further the mission.

Customer Acquisition
Even that heading makes me feel queasy. It’s a bit “company speak” for me, but it’s at least concise. The point I want to make here is that balena does not, and will not, have “sales” people. Nobody at balena is on a commission or bonus scheme. Nobody has “numbers” to hit. Nobody has any motivation to get a customer to sign up, unless they truly believe balena is the answer to the problem.

Instead we have a team of wonderful, personable people that work in a group called “Customer Success”. This group spend their days talking to current and potential customers, and go out of their way to give them any help and information they need. They are technical enough to answer most common questions, and know who in the team to ask for everything else. But they are also affable enough to guide the most non-technical person through how to build their solution on balena.

We will also never do anything that “tricks” a customer into using balena, or traps them once they start. We don’t do “free trials” that you need a credit card number to use, so that you slip into paying. We offer everyone 10 devices for free, for life.
And we don’t lock you into anything. We have openBalena if you need to move from a paid plan to a self-managed instance. We also open source as much as we can, give tools such as Etcher for free and actively help customers remain intentionally cloud agnostic.

This is all positive-sum because customers are safe to try balena with help from experts who have no motivation other than a desire to see them succeed. And balena gets customers who genuinely benefit from the platform and therefore are a low risk of churning. The customer success team benefit because they are working to help both sides, and not making decisions based on their own gain (other than warm fuzzies).

Balena’s WHY

balena wants to do good in the world. Oh sure we need to make money, otherwise nobody gets paid. But that’s not our driver. What drives us to go to work each day is the thought that the time we spend earning our money is making a positive difference in the world. Why spend your time playing zero-sum games, when you can spend it playing positive-sum, infinite games? Which reminds me…..