Every company has an invisible board of directors. People it doesn't pay. Companies it has never had a call with. Books, articles and products that quietly take part in its decisions.
We have one too.
This isn't a list of people to copy. A copy is always weaker than the original. These are five lenses we look at our work through: simplicity, clarity, speed, scale and taste.
0137signals: a company should help you do the work, not perform it
The closest to us is 37signals — the company of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, which built Basecamp and HEY. We read their books cover to cover, not chapter by chapter. Some ideas we accepted immediately. Others we had to grow into through our own mistakes.
Getting Real taught us to start with a smaller version of the product. Not because we lack ambition, but because excess hides what matters.
REWORK gave us permission not to play at being “a real big company”: not to multiply processes for the sake of gravitas, not to measure work in meetings, not to write plans that go stale before anyone finishes reading them.
REMOTE showed that a strong team isn't people in one room — it's people with shared responsibility and clear written communication.
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work reminded us of something simple: a permanent fire is not a sign of speed. More often it's a sign of poor organisation.
Shape Up gave us a practical vocabulary for development: shape the work first, fix the time budget, leave the team room to decide, and take the work to a state you can actually show.
02Jason Cohen: think for longer than a motivational post lasts
We read the A Smart Bear blog slowly. Its author, Jason Cohen, founded four companies over 25 years, among them Smart Bear and WP Engine. His track record includes two exits and two companies that became unicorns. But that isn't why we value him.
He writes about the uncomfortable part of entrepreneurship: constraints, the cost of growth, founder psychology, bad ideas and decisions with no elegant answer. His posts rarely make you want to post something immediately. They make you want to open a document and change your mind.
From Cohen we take the discipline of not falling in love with our own idea. An idea is a hypothesis. The customer is not obliged to understand it the way we do. The market is not obliged to reward effort. The truth only appears on contact with reality.
03Higgsfield: Almaty is a starting point, not a ceiling
Higgsfield matters to us for a particular reason: it's a close-to-home example. The team gathered strong engineers and researchers from Central Asia in Almaty and took their product to the global AI video market.
Their story removes a convenient excuse — that the impossible only happens in San Francisco, only after the right university, only next to large capital. Geography shapes the conditions. It does not set the ceiling.
What inspires us isn't status or another headline number. It's the speed with which the team turns rare local expertise into a product for millions of people.
04Elon Musk: allow for scale first
From Musk we aren't trying to borrow a management style or a temperament. We take one thing: permission to set a goal that looks excessive at first.
In Tesla's early plan a difficult mission was broken into a sequence: an expensive low-volume car, then a more affordable one, then a mass-market model. The large vision didn't cancel the next concrete step. It explained why that step was needed.
Small companies easily become too reasonable. Counting only the resources at hand. Choosing only goals whose feasibility can be proven in advance. That's a comfortable way not to lose — and an almost impossible way to do anything significant.
05Apple: the product speaks before the marketing does
Apple teaches us that design isn't decoration applied to a finished feature. It's a decision about what to keep, what to remove and where to spend a person's attention.
A strong product doesn't need a guided tour of its interface. It explains itself through order, rhythm, wording, the response of a button and what isn't on the screen at all. Marketing continues that clarity: instead of listing everything the system can do, it helps you see why it exists.
It's a high bar. We don't always reach it. But we'd rather have a high bar than a rational explanation for mediocrity.
What it adds up to
Put these reference points into one system and you'll find more contradiction than agreement.
37signals says: stay small and calm. Musk says: think on the scale of civilisation. Jason Cohen makes you count your constraints. Higgsfield shows how fast they can be broken. Apple demands that every visible detail be finished.
We like that tension.
We want to build a company without needless corporate weight, but not without ambition. To ship fast, but not carelessly. To work from Kazakhstan, but not only for Kazakhstan. To build complex technology that feels simple.
This isn't a finished formula. It's more of a compass. It doesn't walk the path for us, but it helps us notice when we're heading the wrong way.
So who sits on your invisible board?
Which companies, authors and products change the way you work? We're especially curious about the non-obvious ones.
Write to us at sayat@silkroadtech.kz.
