About | Geodica Ltd | London | Sydney
Everything that can’t be done from anywhere.
Geodica is a company that builds companies. It does not build one thing very carefully over ten years; it breaks ground on several things and finds out which ones stand up. Seven are standing now — software, a game, a publication, a podcast, a home and living business, an artists’ programme, and something for pubs.
They look unrelated. They are not. Each one sits on the seam between what machines are getting very good at and what still has to happen in a room, on a table, in a shop, between people. That seam is where we think the next twenty years of interesting work is.
The founders are strategy, product and engineering practitioners out of financial services, venture capital and consumer software. The whole thing is built and run out of London by M@.
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
The house rule
John Gall
Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, 1975.
How we build
Four rulesRule 01
Simple systems first
Nothing complicated is designed up front. It is grown from something small that already worked, or it is not built.
Rule 02
Own the ground
Files on disk, in version control, rendered by software we control. No landlord owns the list, the archive, or the database.
Rule 03
Somewhere, not anywhere
If a thing can be done from anywhere, a machine will do it cheaper. We are more interested in the pub, the shop, the studio.
Rule 04
Several bets, one spine
Every venture is small enough to fail without taking the others with it, and close enough that what one learns, the rest inherit.