Eat the Damn Fish

Sometimes people ask me why our company is called Coelrind. I am glad when they do, because it is a good story, and it involves two of my favourite things, ancient mythology and fishing.

Once upon a time, there was a well in Ireland. This was a mysterious, metaphorical well, not found on any maps, because it existed in the world-between-worlds of Irish mythology. The name of the well was The Well of Coelrind, and in the legend it was the source of the River Boyne, the river that flows through the most magically charged landscape in Ireland, past ancient sites like Newgrange and the Hill of Tara.

Surrounding the well were nine sacred hazel trees. Every nut that grew on one of these trees magically contained a bit of knowledge or wisdom. In the well lived the legendary Salmon of Knowledge. It would feed on the magic knowledge nuts, each one adding to its knowledge, until it eventually accumulated all the knowledge and wisdom in the world.

So that’s it, literally in a nutshell. We named our company after the source of all knowledge.

Our first logo was a hazelnut, a magic knowledge nut. Unfortunately people kept asking why our logo was an onion. So we changed the logo to its current form, the lemniscate or infinity symbol.

But there is more to this story.

Let me introduce you to Finnegas. Finnegas was a druid who lived in a village somewhere along the banks of the River Boyne, and he spent seven years trying to catch the Salmon of Knowledge.

Picture the scene. Every evening, Finnegas heads off to the river bank, rod in hand, a look of determination on his face.

Several hours later, he returns, empty handed and crestfallen. By this time the local villagers are on their third or fourth flagon of mead.

Villager 1: Hey Finnegas! Any luck with that ‘Salmon of Knowledge’? (nudge nudge).
Finnegas: It was that close! I had him on the hook, he got off!
Villager 2: How can you be sure it was the ‘Salmon of Knowledge’? Maybe it was the Trout of Truculence!
Villager 1: Yeah! Or the Carp of Crapulousness!

Much hilarity. Finnegas storms off to his hut, face like thunder.

Then one day, after seven years of enduring the mockery of the villagers, Finnegas does it. He catches the Salmon of Knowledge.

He gave the fish to his young apprentice, Finn McCool to cook, with express instructions not to eat any of it. But in the process of cooking, Finn accidentally touches the sizzling fish with his thumb, and instinctively sucks on the burnt digit. The magic is discharged, it only works once. All the knowledge and wisdom in the world is downloaded into Finn McCool. Finnegas gets nothing.

Finn McCool went on to fame and fortune as the leader of the Fianna, the warrior band at the heart of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. Finnegas is never heard of again.

So what is the moral of this story? The conventional interpretation is something like, wisdom comes to those who are worthy. Finn was destined for greatness, so the fish found him.

Rubbish.

The moral of the story is that Finnegas was a complete loser. He had done all the work, caught the fish, gave it away, and came out with nothing. He should have eaten the damn fish. Finn was not an expert in Salmon of Knowledge theory, he was purely lucky, and he got the big payday.

Now, this is a business blog, so what can this tell us about business? Well, quite a lot as it turns out. The history of the computing industry is replete with examples of companies that caught a magic fish, and either threw it back, or gave it away like Finnegas.

In 1976, Hewlett Packard landed a particularly large and malodorous magic fish. Their employee, Steve Wozniak, designed the Apple 1, and basically invented the future. Wozniak offered them his invention, as stipulated in his contract. They declined. They had the magic fish, and they threw it back.

They were not fools. Hewlett Packard made high end scientific calculators for engineers. What was this thing that this long haired weirdo, crawling under the desk with his soldering iron amidst a tangle of wires, was showing them? They didn’t get it. Wozniak went on to co-found Apple, and the rest of this story is well known.

This presents a problem with the whole enterprise of magic salmon fishing. How do you recognise a magic fish when you catch it? In my children’ s school textbook on Irish mythology, it was illustrated wearing a pair of Harry Potter spectacles. I feel this is unlikely. For a start, salmon have no ears, so the spectacles would fall off.

Kodak invented the digital camera. In 1975. The engineer who built it showed his prototype to the management team and was told, politely but firmly, that this was not something Kodak was going to pursue. Kodak was in the film business. Digital photography was not film. The logic was impeccable. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. They had the magic fish and threw it back.

Xerox PARC, in the 1970s, invented an extraordinary proportion of what we now think of as the modern computing environment. The graphical user interface. The mouse. Ethernet. Object-oriented programming. Pretty much the entire modern world. The laser printer was the one product they actually commercialised. Steve Jobs visited in 1979, saw the GUI demonstration, and immediately understood what he was looking at. Steve Jobs ate their fish.

Nokia, in the mid-2000s, was the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. They had internal research projects exploring smartphone concepts with touchscreens, application ecosystems, and mobile internet integration. They did not pursue them aggressively. The iPhone launched in 2007. Another magic fish thrown back.

The roll call rolls on. I am sure the reader can recognise many other examples of magic salmon fishing gone horribly wrong.

At Coelrind, we have not yet caught a magic fish. But like Finnegas, we still go down to the river every evening as the light begins to fade, cast our fly into the current, let our mind wander in search of ideas in the pools and eddies. As any fisherman knows, the process and the experience is the point. Catching a magic fish is just a bonus.

Just remember, if you do catch one, don’t be Finnegas. Eat the damn fish.

John Duminy is CTO of Coelrind, builders of XAMS, a regulated online assessment platform serving awarding bodies across the UK and Ireland. He has been writing software for forty years and still finds it magical.