Thinking of Elega Values: Independence

Hello and welcome from Scott Lee, Director and CEO of Elega Corporation!

While the Elega Corporation website has been around for some time (since early 2017), there has never been a company blog until now! The reason for this is simple: we have been really, really busy. Running a start-up is hard, and at Elega: we do everything we do so far from bootstrapped efforts. We currently have no Series A investment, no venture capitalists, no grand IPO plans, none of it.

The reason for not having outside investors is simple. It is sometimes critical that new organizations have total creative control over what it is they produce. Part of the reason for setting out to do all of this was to create Age of Nomads, a real-time strategy game that has since been put on hold. But even as Age of Nomads has been put on hold, the reasoning behind never doing a sales pitch over it remains. Sometimes it just isn't possible to produce certain kinds of products when investors watch your every move. Or, even worse to imagine would be a scenario in which you imagine losing heaps of investor capital because the risk behind your product is too great and it turns out not to be commercially viable.

This can easily happen with games, and indie games at that. The statistics vary as to how many indie game developers fail. Some say it is 95%, others say it's higher: around 98%, who never make even $5000 in total revenue. Part of the reason for this is the hyper competitive atmosphere for games. Let me say, though, that the hyper competitive market is exactly as it should be. Anyone should be able to create games, and every developer should be able to have a chance at the top if they are willing to work for it.

Frankly, Age of Nomads is not about business. It is a game originally envisioned in my teenage childhood. Admittedly, it is close to my heart. This leads one to ask about the business! Fortunately, I have a lot of plans in that arena, and make no mistake: I know business sufficiently to succeed.

You don't succeed with a high risk product. You succeed with something that the market needs but is in short supply. In Elega Corporation's current case: that's educational content. As of this post, hundreds of hours have been poured into the production of online learning courses produced in partnership with Pluralsight. Courses are fantastic in the current market: tech jobs are growing like crazy (22% year-over-year for Software Developers according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and in almost every area of tech there are shortages of skilled workers. By producing, holding, and maintaining these digital assets: Elega Corp is provided a continuous stream of funding while at the same time making an impact on thousands of lives. It is so incredibly exciting, and we haven't even started!

Assets are really the meaningful difference in the quest for independence, one of Elega's core values. Independence really means having automated resources and productivity multipliers at your disposal. Without those, too much is left to chance, to physical capability, or to hard labor. And that's just not what we're about. We want to find ways of taking care of tedious work automatically so that humans can get to what they're meant to do: be creative, learn, explore, and much more. The avenues for achieving independence are plentiful, and it is really about passive income that has a positive impact on lives. That might mean robotic retail or food service experiences, such as this robotic coffee maker covered in the Wall Street Journal. It might mean our online courses. It might mean renewable energy that takes folks off-grid. It might mean all kinds of things but the theme remains the same. Independence is essentially freedom.

I feel that many large enterprises have failed to catch on to this trend: individuals may soon have extremely powerful levels of independence. Granted, there are a lot of other steps to get there. Folks will need a lot of resources to acquire the means of automating away hard labor. One fact is certain: the future is coming. From this perspective, I felt that sitting around and waiting to be creative later just was NOT an option. This revolution of individual productivity is happening now, and it's important that folks experienced in tech help build the next paradigm.

In enterprise scale companies: large, clunky information technology (IT) departments are sometimes getting surprised when small companies rise up in the market against expectations. Firms that hire hundreds of consultants are usually building specifications to business processes. The business processes are often developed by non-technical staff, are designed without respect to technology research (and what is actually possible), and are made without any possibility for dynamic extensions. By contrast, small companies come in with tech and domain expertise, creating products that respond to change dynamically, use machine learning and AI, and might be hyper-optimized for speed, reliability, and performance.

This is also why so many companies yield to outside vendors for all kinds of software. I argue that it is not purely because of economic specialization, although that is certainly part of it, it is also because outside vendors are often outcompeting in-house IT departments because they are not hindered by the same kind of creative squelching and burdensome bureaucracy. Working smart has never been a greater multiplier than it is today, and that means there is great hope yet for the tiny tech start-up.