Building with Purpose
By Luke Deller, Chief Technology Officer
What makes you get up in the morning and go to work?
All those hours, the energy and heart poured in day in and day out – for what?
Earlier this year I made the difficult decision to move on from a company where I had worked for over two decades, beginning as software architect at the beginning of a startup, and finishing in a CTO role leading hundreds of engineers in a corporate environment. These are the kind of questions that suddenly feel more urgent.
I have loved computers and software since I was a child, and doing technology well with my team is something I take pride in. But when I look back, the work that I value most is where we have used our love of technology to build something that makes a difference to people.
This is what I want to get up in the morning for. It is so refreshing to be once again in a startup company with a great team and building with purpose.
I believe in the value of good financial advice, which can be so empowering when done well. I find some comfort in what we achieved with Xplan at my last company: we fundamentally changed how advice was delivered, helping the industry meet higher standards of rigor, efficiency, and compliance.
It still troubles me that financial advice remains too costly for most Australians to use. The very sophistication that made these tools powerful also made them complex. Even today, quality financial guidance remains expensive and labour-intensive.
At InvestStream we are tackling this problem from another angle, by helping superannuation funds to support their members. Every working Australian is a member of a superannuation fund, so this will have a much greater impact. We’re building SuperAnne - combining the kind of comprehensive cashflow modelling tools that were previously only available to trained professionals, with a simple language chat interface to make it accessible to everyone. Whilst recent advances in artificial intelligence have generated a lot of hype, I must say that this kind of solution to a real world problem would not have been possible before this year. AI alone cannot do this though, as it also depends heavily on more traditional components built from our experience in financial advice technology.
What does it look like though to build with purpose?
Building with purpose has a profound impact on how we build. A single privacy breach could undermine everything we're trying to achieve, so in an increasingly hostile security environment we must lean heavily on best engineering practices for building and operating workloads securely. This is not a matter of superficial compliance to scrape through an audit if we actually care about the purpose. Similarly we know that an awkward user experience or unreliable service will strangle adoption. AI safety is critical when handling people's financial futures. Building with purpose actually motivates software engineers to be better engineers, indeed all of us to be better at our profession.
I'm looking forward to getting up in the morning.
