

Welcome to the Ice Cream Factory - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/welcome-to-the-3.php

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nkurz
This is a question that is rather close to my heart: I do run an ice cream
factory (well, a small sorbet shop) and my tendency is toward complete
openness about methods and ingredients. We in fact had the Ben and Jerry's
flavor research team stop by a couple months ago, and happily gave them a
multi-hour kitchen tour. I don't think there were any questions we shied away
from.

It's certainly a debatable business practices, and makes some of my partners
uncomfortable. I think that we stand much more to gain from establishing open
communication than we have to lose. Ben and Jerry's has a lot of knowledge,
but very different constraints than we do. I'm not worried that they will
steal our techniques of juicing pomegranates by hand, and while they were
intrigued by our one-quart-at-a-time production, it's far from obvious how it
would scale to their needs. We by contrast can learn a lot about their
packaging, marketing, and distribution.

It may just be that I'm not a great business person. I'm much more excited by
making something wonderful available to the world, and resent having to use
price discrimination to make it possible to do so. We have started charging
for kitchen tours to the public ($45), and while we've met some wonderful
Google engineers, it makes me sad to think of all the people excluded because
of the cost.[1] I'd prefer a world where people build upon others' successes
to ever increasing heights, rather than one where everyone constantly
reinvents the same trade-secret protected wheel.

In response to Dan's comment below, perhaps we run in different circles, but I
have not found that smart people hoard information. Rather, the smartest
people I know tend to be unable to stop talking about whatever they are
currently working on, where they are currently stuck, and when they last had a
breakthrough. But maybe this is just self-selection: if the truly smart ones
don't talk, I guess I'd never know it.

[1] If anyone in the Bay Area is interested in a $5 shorter version of our
kitchen tour, we're running one this weekend:
[http://www.meetup.com/SanFranciscoFoodies/events/45091172/?a...](http://www.meetup.com/SanFranciscoFoodies/events/45091172/?a=ea1_lnm&rv=ea1)

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JonKernPA
sharing publicly usually also means a good business culture of sharing
internally -- and vice versa for not sharing publicly/internally.

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DanielBMarkham
There's something about this "it's all in the open" mindset that I struggle
with -- perhaps it's because so much of hacker culture is built around knowing
something somebody else doesn't? But you're right: you can tell how sick an
organization is by how poorly it shares inconvenient and embarrassing
information among its members.

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jamesgeck0
> perhaps it's because so much of hacker culture is built around knowing
> something somebody else doesn't?

I've always thought that open source was deeply entwined in hacker culture.
But perhaps you're referring to something else?

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DanielBMarkham
Yes, that was poorly-worded. Let me try again.

It's been my experience that some people naturally collect and hoard
information -- it's a form of currency to them. It's not a hacker thing, but
it does seem more common among really smart folks. We are taught that
information is valuable, that education is a necessity for success later in
life, and, worst of all, that magic ideas account for most successful
businesses. In movies and in literature, over and over again we're shown
people who gain and keep advantage because of information they hold. In
addition, large parts of the structure of human society over thousands of
years has been based on the value of keeping and sharing information. These
different factors accumulate.

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billpatrianakos
It's funny how right he is. Reading all these articles thinking you're
learning all sorts of great useful things when really they leave out the most
important parts. Then you go about trying to implement the things you read and
you're left scratching your head wondering why things didn't work out like how
the blog post said it would. By the way, not sure if someone has ever said
this before, the author could totally be a stand-in for Philip Seymour
Hoffman.

