The death of teamwork
It is time for teamplay.
How was this song made? I often watch interviews and BTS videos about how musicians work. How Ye's "Runaway" began with a single piano note. How Sister's Barbershop made their legendary album despite all the fighting inside the band.
Recently, an interview of Silica Gel changed how I think about teams. One line caught my attention:
"We are not aiming for teamwork where everyone moves toward one grand cause. We are aiming for the kind of result that naturally emerges when each member is free to fully use their own talent."
What we call "teamwork" often looks more like a waterfall — Someone at the top defines the direction/goal, and everyone else follows. Even bottom-up feels the same. You persuade your boss, and then the work comes back down as an assigned task.
As I wrote in my previous essay, Series B: the Death of the Canary, most of the companies move by sacrificing the small for the sake of the large. People get buried under work they do not believe in or enjoy, until they burn out and leave. Then the company loses context, costs for hiring and onboarding, and misses problems or ideas it could have caught much earlier.
In the interview, Silica Gel offers "teamplay" as an alternative to "teamwork." During a performance, whoever fits the moment takes the lead, while the others support them. When they write a song, someone brings a frame with a clear intent, and each member adds their own taste and silicagelize it.
Last year, I was under a lot of anxiety and stress while building a sales meeting assistant. It was not a tool I used every day. I didn't know what to build next. Even when we crafted tiny details in the user experience, people didn't care. Our pace slowed down, work is not fun anymore, and I felt like we were slowly dying.
Then I read the interview, and the word "teamplay" made me ask a few thoughts like what do we love and what are we good at.
I think building something is mostly about speed and consistency. If running a startup is a game you win by not dying, all you need to do is build/fix fast, and keep doing it for at least 3~5 years. I believe that this is the only rule that stays true, even though the world keeps changing.
So how can we survive as long as possible? The answer was simple.
We are nerds. We like building f**king great products that we use every day. We are the people who fork Chromium just to support Liquid Glass, and reverse engineering binaries just because a new technology or a beautiful product catches our eye. When we realized that, deciding to pivot in the opposite way became so easy.
For me, teamplay means starting from an idea everyone truly agrees with, then letting each person fully use what they are good at. We build, adjust, and push each other's work forward. We use our product every day, fix problems when we found a bug, and make improvements without asking for permission. Because we started from the same belief, everything is just fine.
I haven't had a harder time than now. But I also haven't had many moments that were this fun. When building is fun, staying up all night no longer feels like something I have to do. It becomes something I want to do.
Fun and ADHD-level divergence, are the two things that give us speed and consistency, the core of how we work, and I want to keep protecting them as a co-founder.
Nietzsche said "God is dead" as a way to tell us to look inward, affirm ourselves, and live from there. Teamwork is dead. Now it is time to find our own color, and learn how to play together.