Lewis Cirne argues that software companies should focus on protecting people's time, since it's the most precious resource. Faster, more reliable software returns time to users and their families. New Relic's mission centers on improving software performance and user experience.
Chapters
But then it isn't just about the money, it's about changing, in some cases saving the world.
Well, yeah, and I don't want to— I don't want us to put ourselves on too high a pedestal, but I have been deeply thoughtful about why does what New Relic do matters. I mean, we make software a little bit faster, right? So it's taken a while to really think deeply on it, but here's my best answer to it. I think the most precious thing we have on this planet is time. The most precious thing we all have is time, and thank you for spending some time in this room. But, you know, it's possible to make more money, it's not possible to create more time. And so people spend— young people spend up to 6 hours a day in front of software. So if you think about managing that time, making the most of that time, life's too short for bad software. Life is too short for crappy software. And that's why when you wait 6 seconds for that page to load, it seems like the mother of all first world problems. Why are you so frustrated during those 6 seconds when you know it should take just a couple of seconds? But I think it's because during that 6 seconds when there's nothing you can do but wait, you're just sitting there saying, you're wasting my time and that's my most precious thing, right? And then— but it's not only just is it slow, it's like there's nothing more frustrating to me than like you're on that website, you're about to fill out the form, you type in all the fields, you click submit and then the next page comes out and says, oh, you didn't fill this one thing, you didn't put dashes in the phone number and then the whole form is empty, you got to redo it. The website just wasted your most precious asset, your time, right? So New Relic's mission is to help give people more precious moments in front of their software and hopefully even time away from the software, more time with your family or something like that instead of waiting around for bad software. So that's why what we think we do matters.
