In 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had five hundred dollars, a garage, and no idea what they were going to sell.
Their notes from that first year read like a junk drawer. A foul-line indicator for bowling alleys. A drive mechanism for telescopes. A device for weight-loss shock therapy. Whatever paid that month’s rent, they built it.
Ask most people what a company’s first year should look like, and they’ll tell you: find your product. Nail the thing. Everything else comes after.
Hewlett and Packard postponed that question. On purpose.
Underneath it, they were already building something else — profit-sharing with every employee, a hard rule against taking on debt they couldn’t cover, a culture built to keep good engineers around and doing their best work. Instinct, mostly, not a plan.
Here’s what I think they actually built in that garage, without naming it at the time: a machine that could keep producing good products indefinitely, regardless of which one happened to be paying the bills that particular month.
Jim Collins has a name for this: clock building versus time telling. A time teller looks at the sky and gives you the right answer, once, brilliantly. A clock builder makes something that keeps telling the time correctly forever, without needing a genius to read the sky each time you ask.
Most founders want to be time tellers. It’s the more romantic job. Hewlett and Packard, almost by accident, chose to build a clock instead.
I’ve spent my career choosing this on purpose, not by accident. Systems and processes are my whole thing. Build something at work that can take on whatever gets thrown at it, project after project, without needing me standing in the middle of it every time.
At my day job, that’s just how I operate. At a gym a friend and I are building from scratch, it’s still early — a lot still runs through the two of us directly, because that’s just where a young academy is.
But even now, the parts that don’t need us are the parts we built on purpose. And I know that if I ever stepped back from teaching there, it wouldn’t collapse. I’d just be choosing not to show up for something I love. It wouldn’t need me to survive.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. A good system makes your presence optional instead of load-bearing. What’s left of you in it is only the part you actually wanted to give in the first place.