These days early-stage founders assume they need to build their own technology. It's the default. Hiring a CTO seems to be the first thing people do.

But what does that assumption actually cost: in money, in flexibility, in the attention you pull away from the mission you set out to solve?

In this episode, I sit down with Rob, our Tech Lead (or CTO) at Library of Things, for something of a public "retro". We trace our journey from Excel spreadsheets and asset management software through to our reluctant decision to build our own platform, and then our own custom lockers.

We get into the open source question (it sounds like a no-brainer; it isn't), how human-centred means creating the right kind of friction, and what it means to design technology around behaviour change rather than transactions.

If you're wondering whether to build, buy, or borrow your tech, this is for you.

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Why is it more normal to throw something away than to fix it?

In this episode, I talk with Jamie Hillier, our Thing Lead at Library of Things, about why that is and what another way looks like. Over the years, Jamie has made repair central to how Library of Things operates, quietly building a template that other businesses could follow.

We dig into the real story behind broken things: why planned obsolescence is only part of the picture, the genuine trade-offs manufacturers and repairers both have to make, and what it means to design something that can be fixed over and over again.

Jamie shares how he's scaled repair knowledge across a distributed team, the philosophy of care he's developed for the material world, and why the dopamine hit of fixing something might be the most underrated argument for doing it more.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This first episode explores the question behind Library of Things.

Together with my co-founder, Bex Trevalyan, we tell our origin story. 

Not only why and how we started in 2014, but why we built it differently from business as usual. Like our members, we decided we didn't need to own everything. 

We didn't trademark. We shared our model with our peers before we'd figured it all out, with tours & toolkits. We built for community before we built for revenue. Embracing the tension between helping a movement whilst also trying to prove a concept.

Twelve years on, we've proved city-wide sharing is possible and share our name with a wider movement of lending libraries in the thousands - all trying to answer that original question: do you really need to own it?

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Hosted by Sophia Wyatt, co-founder of Library of Things, this podcast examines the assumptions we accept about how business should work. And asks: what if there's another way?

Library of Things started in 2014 as a grassroots experiment that became a globally recognised pioneer of sharing and the circular economy. 

A decade on, we're steward-owned, mission-locked, and still asking uncomfortable questions about how business actually works. It's time to share what we've learned so far.

This show starts where the press coverage ends. Inside the decisions, the trade-offs, and the structural choices that most never talk about publicly. In each episode, we dig into the assumptions and question the deep design of how companies are owned, funded, built, and run.

Business (Un)usual is for the founders, designers, and leaders who know businesses need to do better.

We're starting with Library of Things' own stories. Then we're going beyond.

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