Technology matters, but people remember the human bits
This year marks 20 years since we launched the world’s first commercially available LED Illumination System for fluorescence microscopy.
We’ve already spent quite a bit of time looking back at the last twenty years.
There have been new products, new technologies, new applications, new markets, and a frankly ridiculous geographical spread that now includes every continent as well as the International Space Station.
Those are the bits that make it into fancy-looking timelines because they’re easy to record. Product launched. Company grew. System went to Antarctica. Light source went into space. Lovely. Put a date next to it and somebody in marketing (i.e. me) can make a lovely graphic.
Twenty years is also thousands of completely ordinary working days.
It’s cups of tea going cold because somebody got distracted. It’s someone saying, “This’ll only take five minutes,” shortly before ruining everybody’s afternoon. It’s exhibition crates arriving where they’re meant to, and the considerably more memorable occasions when they don’t.
It’s prototypes, deadlines, technical conversations you only half understand, office in-jokes that have somehow survived longer than some product ranges, and people knowing where the obscure cable is because, apparently, they’re now the official custodian of obscure cables.
That’s the stuff people actually remember.
So this week, we stopped for lunch.
This week, everyone stopped for a while, sat down together and had lunch to mark the 20/10 celebrations. There was good food, plenty of chat, and a proper chance to enjoy the occasion without anyone having to think about emails, deadlines or what was waiting back at their desk.
Huge thanks to CoolLED and our events team for putting it all together.
On top of that, everyone also got a house plant to take home, courtesy of CoolLED. Which means the celebrations now come with a long-term survival challenge attached.
A surprisingly appropriate anniversary present.
There’s something quite nice about that as an anniversary present. It isn’t a plaque that’ll disappear into a drawer or a branded object destined to become emergency exhibition stock in 2031. It’s alive. It needs looking after. It’ll change over time.
Some of them will probably still be enormous and thriving in ten years. Some will be dead before the next newsletter. That’s life.
Companies don’t really exist as a neat sequence of milestones either.
They’re made up of people turning up every day, solving problems, passing knowledge around, helping each other out, laughing at stupid things and occasionally keeping a plant alive.
We’re proud of what’s been built over the last twenty years but the technology is only part of the story.
