Every year, around winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, humans enter into a reflection of their life and labours over a full cycle of the seasons. A new year, like a new day is a chance for new beginnings, new ideas, new energies, new resolve. “Ring out the old, ring in the new” is the flavour of the season. A chance to put our own misses and failures of the last year behind, and go ahead full steam to make new ones. So with this naive optimism, let me reflect on what my year was and what it means for our tribe in our little corner of the world.

While wars were being fought in regions that have historically been in fighting wars, the world’s largest democracies went into an “election cycle”. The United States decided to hand over their government to the richest person in the country, Elon Musk, who in turn has promised to make a complete mockery of the government. In India, both the parties tried hardest to score as many self-goals as they could, the election being decided by the party scoring the least amount of self-goals. Britain, on the other hand, kicked out the only competent person they could find to run the country, a brown immigrant. Conservatives became champions of “free speech”. They were now free to decry anyone who did not agree with their way of life. The world became a much more honest place as a result. Voice of the people was now voice of god. God, if there ever was one, was content letting mortals fix their own problems.

Continuing from last year, “Artificial Intelligence” continued to dominate the industry narrative. We heard stories of how AI is going to transform industry and jobs. The big “expense” AI is going to eliminate is, um, “salaries”. The first salaries they are going after is of software engineers. Software engineers who are building AI applications are most familiar with their own jobs, and hence it makes sense to make themselves obsolete first. This way they can end up protecting the rest of the economy. SaaS companies meanwhile are going after automating “Sales”, which seems to be the thing they do best.

While software engineers make themselves obsolete, they are also going after the work they are most familiar with - Customer Support. Customer Support is the industry that shouldn’t exist in the first place, but exists because software engineers can’t stop producing bugs or software features that no one can use. While doing all of this, companies expect stupendous financial growth. AI engineers will now be able to produce serious bugs that will need an army of AI customer support agents to defend. The survival of this industry seems guaranteed.

While the world was focussing on AI, some industries in India died a quiet death. There was not even an epitaph on the demise of India’s most valuable startup, Byjus. There was no change in India’s most profitable startup though. Zerodha continued to pile up the cash faster than their founders could give it away. (Disclosure: Zerodha is an investor in Frappe). Industry commentators continued to repeat whatever was being said in Silicon Valley, urging founders to tear up their roadmaps and think everything from an AI first perspective, even though they did not seem to have a clue of what they were saying.

The Frappe community showed up in big numbers at Frappeverse and at the various local events we held through the world from Nairobi to Dubai to Jakarta. Frappe as a developer platform continued to be discovered by several folks who are quietly building products and companies on top of it, even though it is still miles away from being “mainstream”. As the ecosystem grew, we continued starting to build new products just because we thought they were fun to build. We also continued to incubate community projects that had potential or helped in local compliance. Having the ability to do what we like without worrying about financial considerations continues to be a source of strength. We came closer to our quixotic vision to build a unified application platform. “Our progress is measured in decades” is not something most companies can boast of.

Along with this, we reworked all our websites on a new design philosophy inspired by our products, built on top of one of our best products, Builder. We managed to update most websites other than the most important one, erpnext.com. We continued to add very few new features in ERPNext, while trying to find a lasting solution to fixing last mile quality issues. All our products are deeply integrated into our own ecosystem. Frappe Learning powered the learning of more than 40,000 students on Frappe School. Frappe Insights has been giving invaluable insights into our data. FrappeCRM and Helpdesk are now core tools in our workflow along with FrappeHR. All our documentation is now powered by the Frappe Wiki. Our internal forum is based on Gameplan and I write this on the editor provided by Frappe Drive. Our business runs on our own ERPNext and our infrastructure on Frappe Cloud, which achieved 99.9% uptime over 6000 customers, several with custom deployments. Everything we run is built on Frappe Framework. Irrespective of whether others benefit from our free tools, we have derived reasonable value from them.

Frappe as a business became “truly profitable” this year, allowing us the room to invest again in expanding the team. While a few people left this year, are closing in on 70 people as the year ends. Attendance in office increased slightly, with some folks using office as a space for “socialization” while continuing to “work from home”. Most of our teams were stable this year other than sales. We scrapped our enterprise team and brought it back to life. Then we went ahead and took on a very tough "enterprise" project. As we shifted our “customer focus” from end users to partners, we are learning the right model for adding value to the entire ecosystem.

“Democracy” in Frappe continues to be a work-in-progress. This year we established a “fellowship” model in Frappe by adding four fellows to the original four “founders”. The new fellows are Rohit, Saurabh, Faris and Aditya. Just when we think there are no more debates / fights to be fought, we (read: I) keep fighting new ones. FOSS United became "disunited" as a consequence. Trying to setup a leadership team while keeping the democratic ethos continues to be a challenge.

Personally it was a much better year as well. From the “Jobless CEO” of last year, I became more hands on and active. I removed some cobwebs and pushed some UI changes in the Framework. To give myself a goal, I forced myself in terms of thinking of a million customers, a 100X growth from our current ~10,000. A very senior industry leader told me I was not "serious enough" to become a CEO (yet again). I tried to figure how how to run a great company by reading business books, while I read a lot more fantasy and science fiction (A Song of Ice and Fire books are monumental), which incidientally contained great lessons in leadership. I also read through biographies of business leaders, memoirs of Dr Verghese Kurien of Amul, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen among others. My belief that the world is run by people who are prepped for success from early age and have shown promise by excelling in academics has grown. Not sure if that is the direction we will take as Frappe hires a new batch of people.

As we begin a new year, I hope I will continue to read and write more and continue to do whatever I think is fun and useful. Frappe will graduate to doing better “business” - building better products, tools for the ecosystem and enabling the ecosystem to go out and win the world. We will most likely move into a bigger office this year. Change will be incremental even though we will continue to take big swings. One of our new products will go viral this year, though I don’t know which. ERPNext will continue to be the work horse that powers more and more organisations across the world. AI will probably not take over the world, and neither will Elon Musk. CRUD apps will continue to be deceptively hard to build and maintain and Silicon Valley CEOs and investors will continue peddling delusions rather than eat a humble pie.

We continue to live a world that makes less and less sense. Money used to be a measure of value, but now is a measure of the value of crypto currencies. Loss making startups continue to be celebrated and people continue to invest more and more time being distracted. As we hit the quarter century mark, I wish for us to be less and less distracted by the incredible amount of sh*t that hits our screens. The only way to remain sane is to invest in reading books rather than feeds and maintain a strict diet of television and YouTube. I feel incredibly lucky to love what I do - challenging people and bringing out their best versions.

Media brings the world to our door steps and begs us to be part of every remote war. For this year, I wish I continue to focus on the basics, stay sane, and let the world take care of itself. The world is probably doing just fine.