Writing and building are the same activity at different distances

People who have seen this site have asked, politely, whether it is two sites. There are essays on political economy and international law on one side, and three software companies on the other, and the connection is not obvious from the outside. It is obvious from the inside, and it is the reason I keep them together.

An essay about a market and a company operating in one are the same activity conducted at different distances. Both begin with a claim about why something is not working. The essay then argues the claim. The company has to survive it.

What the building corrected

I wrote a paper this year arguing that a cashless society is, on balance, worth having. The efficiency case is strong, the transparency case is stronger, and the objections, while real, are tractable. I still think that is right.

What I would not have written two years ago is the part about who bears the cost of a transition. That paragraph exists because of BoatXchange, which is a marketplace for used rowing boats, and because of the first honest conversation I had about it. Rowing clubs are not irrational for buying new equipment when a used boat would have done. They do it because the used market has no reference price, no standard way to describe condition, and no process a volunteer committee can follow without becoming an expert first. The inefficiency is not a failure of will. It is a missing institution, and the cost of that gap falls hardest on the clubs least able to absorb it.

That is exactly the shape of the argument I make about cashless payments and the 2.6 billion people without internet access. I would have made it anyway. I would have made it more cheaply.

CourtDesk taught me something narrower and more useful. It is booking software for padel clubs, and I started it believing the problem was bookings. It is not. The bookings are the easy part and every scheduling tool does them. The burden is the questions arriving around them, and nobody had bothered to look at that because it does not appear in any of the categories the software industry uses to describe itself. A cost can be enormous, universal, and invisible, purely because no existing category names it. I am now suspicious of any economic argument that relies on a measured quantity without asking what the measurement was designed to capture.

What the writing corrected

The traffic runs the other way too, and more usefully than I expected.

VRhino builds VR fitness software, and the premise came from reading rather than from the gym: people leave a sport in the first few weeks, and almost everything built for sport is built for people who already stayed. That is a selection effect, and selection effects are something you learn to look for in economics long before you would notice one in a product roadmap. The entire company is downstream of noticing that the visible customers were not the relevant population.

Writing also makes you slower in a way that is worth paying for. An essay forces you to state the strongest version of the position you are arguing against before you dismiss it. Applied to a product, that becomes the habit of asking why the obvious thing has not been built already, and taking the answer seriously rather than assuming everyone else was asleep. Most of the time they were not asleep. Most of the time there is a reason, and finding it is cheaper on paper than in code.

Why it matters that both are visible

The honest reason for keeping the two together is that each one disciplines the other in public.

An argument that only ever appears in an essay is never tested. A company that is never written about is never explained, even to the person running it. Putting both on one site means that if the writing stops matching what the building shows, someone can notice, and the most likely someone is me.

That is the whole case. It is not that building makes you a better writer, or that writing makes you a better founder. It is that holding both at once removes the place where a comfortable idea could otherwise sit undisturbed.