The empty seat

I heard a story this week about a chair.

At Amazon, the story goes, there is often an empty seat in the meeting. Nobody sits in it. It belongs to the customer, and the room is supposed to make every decision looking at it. It is Jeff Bezos's idea of working backwards from the customer, and you have to admit it built the biggest shop on earth.

The man telling the story was interviewing Adam Neumann, who built WeWork into a company valued at forty-seven billion dollars. So he asked him. Should I be doing that? Working backwards from the customer?

Adam went the other way.

Not rudely. He called Bezos "one of the best operators on the planet by far." Then he said: "your truth has to be yours first." He and his wife, he said, "build what we think is correct." Focus groups? "No way."

And then the sentence I have been repeating to myself all week. If you build a business by listening to the customer because you want to make money:

"Not only do I think it's not going to work for you, where's the fun in that?"

That is me. That is exactly me.

Nobody asked

Nobody asked for Ānanya. I want to be clear about that.

There was no survey. No customer wrote in. If I had asked a thousand campervan owners what they wanted, they would have told me: the same, a bit cheaper, with a bigger fridge.

I am not being rude about them. People can only ask for what they have already seen. That is not a lack of imagination. It is just how asking works.

People can only ask for what they have already seen. Somebody has to go first.

My chair

So there is no empty seat at Ānanya. I am sitting in it.

I want to travel with my wife and my daughter. All the way from Scandinavia down to Greece, and then out along the Silk Road. And I want to work from everywhere, because I love what I do. But on my time, and at my pace. That vehicle is not for sale. So I am building it.

The empty chair has one use that nobody mentions. It is an alibi. When the thing turns out average, the research was wrong, the market moved, the customer changed his mind. Nobody in the room was wrong. Sit in the chair yourself and the alibi is gone. If Ānanya is bad, it is bad because of me. That is frightening. It is also the only way I know to make something good.

Your seat

Most of us keep the most important seat in our own life empty. We hold it for somebody else. What the family expects. What the market wants. What looks reasonable from the outside. Then we work backwards from them, for decades.

It is a good way to build a shop. It is a terrible way to build a life, because at the end the customer is not in the room. You are. You, the people who love you, and whatever you made because you wanted to.

You do not need Ānanya for this. Any kitchen chair does the same job. Just do not wait to be asked. Nobody asked me.

Take the seat.

Ānanya. The world's first GlamperVan.