There is a radio on Sam Devlin’s desk. It is not a prop and it is not off. It sits between the laptop and a spiral notebook, and roughly twice a day it says something about a gate, or a queue, or a driver called Errol who is somewhere he did not expect to be. Devlin does not answer it. He listens to it the way other engineers watch a dashboard, except that a dashboard has never once told him a farm road was flooded before the farm knew.
Fieldnote is two people. Maya Okonjo, who founded it in 2022 after a season in the passenger seat of a collection truck, and Devlin, who writes all of the software. Between them they route produce for about 60 co-ops and something close to 2,000 farms, on subscriptions between $400 and $2,600 a month, for a shade over $1.1 million a year. They have been offered money four times and have hired nobody.
Devlin is aware of how this reads. “Everyone assumes it’s a virtue,” he says. “Two guys in a barn, very pure. It isn’t. It’s a constraint we chose because of what it does to the code, and I can show you the line in the codebase where it pays off and the line where it hurts.”
What the third chair would cost
His argument is not about burn rate. It is about the distance between a complaint and a commit. Right now that distance is roughly ninety feet — the length of the yard outside — and one person: him. Errol says the gate is chained; Devlin hears it, or Okonjo does, and the person who heard it is the person who changes the software. Nothing is written down in between. Nothing is prioritised, scoped, groomed, or assigned.
Add a third person and, Devlin says, you have not added a third of a company. You have added a translation. Somebody now hears the thing and tells somebody else, and the moment that happens the complaint has to survive being turned into a ticket. “A ticket is a lossy format,” he says. “Errol doesn’t say ‘routing constraint, gate, temporal.’ He says the gate’s shut and makes a face. The face is half of it. You cannot put the face in a ticket queue.”
The whole product is a very expensive way of writing down what Errol already knew. If there are twelve of us, eleven have never met Errol, and we start writing down what we assume he knows instead.
This is why he rides. One week a season, in the cab, which was a condition of the job and — he has said before and repeats without much affection — the strangest line in an offer letter he has ever signed. He has stopped arguing with it. The week he did the year before last produced four changes he says he would never have thought of, including the discovery that the app’s confirmation button was unusable in gloves, a fact no user had reported because the workaround was to take off a glove and nobody thinks of that as a bug.
The ledger of two
He is careful not to sell it. Asked what it costs, he answers fast enough that it is clearly a list he keeps:
- No holiday that is really a holiday. If the router breaks in August, it breaks for him, wherever he is.
- A support rota of one. He has taken calls at 4:40 in the morning from a driver who assumed the software had a company behind it.
- Features that will never exist. Three co-ops have asked for a stock-forecasting module. It is a good idea and Fieldnote will not be building it, ever.
- A bus problem nobody has solved. If Devlin stops, the codebase has one reader left, and she isn’t a programmer.
- Roughly $1.1M of revenue that a larger company would call a rounding error and a sales team would call a start.
The last one he finds least troubling and everyone else finds most. The Corrigan Institute’s survey of small software firms puts the median revenue per employee in the sector somewhere near $190,000; Fieldnote does about $550,000. Devlin does not think this proves anything except that the denominator is small, and says the number that actually matters is the one nobody collects: how long it takes a fact observed in a yard to become behaviour in the software. At Fieldnote it is a day, sometimes an afternoon. He has worked places where it was a quarter, and the software there was, in his assessment, confidently wrong about everything for months at a stretch and had beautiful test coverage.
The version where they hire
There is a version, he concedes, and he has thought about it more than Okonjo has. It involves a second engineer who also rides, which cuts the candidate pool to approximately nobody, and it fixes the bus problem, which is real. He has interviewed three people over two years and offered nobody, and admits the bar may not be a bar so much as a preference for the room staying quiet.
The radio says something about the Vance gate. Devlin listens, does not move, and then says the thing he clearly came to say. Every company he has worked for built a layer whose job was to explain the customer to the engineers. Fieldnote has no such layer, and that is not because it is small. It is small so that it doesn’t.