In 2023 I was brought in as a consultant to offer some advice about the overall software architecture at a startup in the travel and hotel market. The

Respectful Leadership

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2024-09-25 16:00:11

In 2023 I was brought in as a consultant to offer some advice about the overall software architecture at a startup in the travel and hotel market. The startup had an existing tool which found under-priced vacation spots for tourists. I was not involved with that tool. Instead, I was being asked for advice on their new project. You can think of this as a search tool like Kayak, but combining every type of place a tourist could stay. For example: Let’s say someone owned an apartment in Naples, which they offered via AirBnB, and they changed the price for which they were renting the apartment. We wanted to capture that change and register it in our database within 1 second, or, worst case, within 5 seconds. And we wanted to do this for every single hotel room in the world — and for every single apartment or home that was being rented via AirBnB, VRBO, or Booking.com, plus a number of smaller, regional "short-term rental" marketplaces. 

The major technical difficulty stemmed from the massive write-throughput combined with the requirement for near-real-time updates — difficult but possible. Yet it soon became clear that the major problems we faced were not on the technical side, but rather, the human side. The startup was poorly organized and poorly managed. They had a strong commitment to being a democratic and "flat" organization, which always sounds great in theory but in practice can lead to some rough methods of reaching a decision.

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