#1 - Chris Bellew [Software, Entrepreneurship]

Thought Club with Percy Grunwald

In this episode I have a discussion with my very good friend Chris Bellew. Chris is a software engineer, originally from England, but now living in Perth, Western Australia. Chris is the person who inspired me to become a programmer many years ago. We start by discussing how we both started down the path of software and what our goals were originally. The conversation moves into talking about Chris’s first entrepreneurial venture and his most recent, looking at the commonalities and potential mistakes that were made in both. Along the way we cover a variety of philosophical questions about what one should choose to do with ones time.

If you’re interested in following Chris, please check out his Medium profile.

Mini-transcript

• 1:00 - Amateur hour + interruptions by Barnaby
  
• 7:00 - Percy feels most capable now, but less optimistic
  
• 10:00 - What’s an easy route to entrepreneurship?
  
• 12:00 - How did Chris get into programming?
  
• 14:00 - Why is C the introductory programming language in most engineering courses?
  
• 17:00 - Is programming like music? Or more like engineering? How much talent is required to be competent?
  
• 18:00 - Why can someone unskilled at music can tell who is a good musician, but the same is not true for programming?
  
• 19:00 - Is the point of programming to eliminate errors? What makes a good programmer?
  
• 20:00 - Did Chris have a goal in mind when switching to programming?
  
• 21:00 - How can a 17 year old make the decision to go to university and what to study?
  
• 23:00 - What if I had left school and just started programming at 17?
  
• 25:00 - How satisfied to you think people are with what they chose to study at university?
  
• 26:30 - Is it a good thing that we have so many choices? How do we choose what to do in life?
  
• 27:30 - What tools can we use to deal with infinite FOMO?
  
• 28:00 - What would the effect on satisfaction be if you were just told what job to do?
  
• 31:30 - What would cause someone to be unfulfilled in a particular job?
  
• 33:00 - Did you have a dream job?
  
• 35:00 - Could you determine someone’s dream job from when they were really young?
  
• 39:00 - What did Chris and I start building when we first learned to program and make websites?
  
• 40:00 - How do startup people choose what to work on?
  
• 40:30 - What was Chris’s first startup project?
  
• 45:00 - What happened to Chris’s most recent entrepreneurial venture?
  
• 51:00 - What is the cost vs value of software?
  
• 53:00 - Did the team for Chris’s most recent project approach the problem in an incorrect way?
  
• 55:00 - Where should validation live in the software product development cycle?
  
• 58:00 - What would Chris and I do differently if we were starting a business now?
  
• 1:02:00 - What rituals are necessary for starting a successful tech company?
  
• 1:07:00 - What does being around a start-up culture do to your psychology?
  

Thanks for listening!

Love,
P