20220518

Written later than this, from today's interview, Rebekah and me.

WORDS Rebekah Pahl

PHOTOS Alicia Kiewitt & Abe Lopez

CREATING A SPACE TO BE OKAY

The brief history of how Locksmith, Lightward’s first app, began.

It’s late at night, in a dorm room at University Wisconsin-Superior. The year is 2009 and the room is dark, except for the computer screen glow on Isaac’s face. He’s twenty-one years old and coding on a netbook, building the online store for a music shop based in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, the town where he grew up. Familiar with the web development space, Isaac volunteered to jump in—and unbeknownst to him, this hometown project would be the spark that started it all.

There’s no mistaking a hopeful flicker when everything else is pitch dark.

“That was a tough period of my life,” Isaac says. “I wasn’t out, my depression was kicking it pretty hard—the only reason I was up in Wisconsin at all was for sort of a reprieve from everything. It felt like the only thing I could do was let go of it all, and head north to a kind of safety, to be close to some people where it felt okay to be where I was.”

Enter the music store.

“I remember going there when I was in school, and this buddy of a buddy was trying to get the store online,” Isaac says. “I wasn’t trying to make a business, or end up somewhere specific ten years later, I wasn’t even trying to make an app. I was just trying to help someone get musical instrument rentals online, for parents and caretakers of local kids.”

Shortly after creating the tool, Isaac made it available on the Shopify app store. (He originally named the tool ‘Gatekeeper’, then changed the name to ‘Locksmith’ a few years down the line.) “Shopify was already, clearly, the best platform on the market for getting this store online—they were just missing this one small thing. And then I built that missing something and that became Gatekeeper, which then became Locksmith. I put it out there, people depended on it, and I’m a responsible person—so I kept taking care of it and people kept showing up. Shopify went from—I don’t know how many stores they had at that time—hundreds? thousands? to the many millions they have now. Shopify just did what they did, and I was in the right place at the right time to experience that from the perspective of someone building in alignment with them.”

Even in its early stages, the spaciousness of Shopify’s platform presented itself as the ideal environment for both stability and experimentation. “There are many places where one could choose to build a thing, but then eventually run into a dead-end because the platform is too rigid, or too short-sighted. But I’ve never run into a situation with Shopify where it was impossible to do the thing I needed to do—they’ve always left enough space for someone to make something new.”

In its most basic essence, how Locksmith functions is nearly self-explanatory: you put a lock on something and then you set up a number of keys. As long as a visitor on the Internet qualifies for one of those keys, they can open the lock and access what’s inside of it. “The concepts are really simple, which is why people with only a little bit of technical familiarity can pick it up,” Isaac says. “But because the concepts are so simple, they can be recombined in interesting ways. I think that's why Locksmith has done as well as it has—because it makes it very easy to take care of the things that are very easy to think about. And if or when you have something that's harder to think about, Locksmith can keep up with you, by turning those simple concepts around until they catch the light in the way you need.”

As the number of Locksmith users increased, patterns emerged in the places that needed evolving. “Eventually, some percentage of your users start to consistently strain the limits of the thing and they communicate that to you, or the system communicates that to you—one way or another,” Isaac says. “Being the responsible party, I respond to that and make the system a little bit stronger or a little bit more flexible. It was really just that, doing those reps: a new user showed up, they required more strength from the system, cool. Another user showed up, they required more flexibility from the system, great. It was just doing the strength and flexibility journey over and over again for a long period of time while making sure that I didn’t compromise what the thing was at its core.”

Eventually Locksmith’s user-base grew to the point where it was impossible for one person to handle the support queue all on their own. “My husband Abe recounts a moment where there were 80-90 messages all from individual persons, all with their own very specific things to talk about, and it's like 8pm on a weeknight. I have a different full-time job and Abe's having his own mental health situation because we are alone in San Jose with no friends and he wasn't working at the time—it was just a lot. In that little tiny chapter, I just hit a point of massive overwhelm. A big thing in Lightward, for me, is making sure that we keep our flows balanced because I know what unbalanced feels like. I experienced it.”

It was at this point of overwhelm in October 2015 when Ken Parelius entered the scene. After a conversation with Isaac about the high volume of messages coming in through the queue, Ken offered to sift through it and see if he could help lighten the load. “The way I remember it is that Ken was very open to just being like, ‘let me just hang out in the queue and see what, if anything, I can take care of today’,” Isaac says. “He was like, ‘And as I'm going, maybe I'll be able to take care of a little bit more tomorrow, and maybe a little bit more next week’.”

More eyes on the queue expanded Locksmith’s capacity to support incoming users, which by 2017 meant enough financial stability for Isaac to devote his energy to Locksmith full-time. “It wasn't because I came to a point of decision of consciously turning my focus from Apple to this—that was never it,” Isaac says. “It always felt more like an eventuality, and not one that I consciously decided on. And like so much else about Lightward, it was about the gradual evolution of the shape of my life, moving in a direction where it just feels way more right for me to be doing all of this on my own terms, and to be fully free to follow this to whatever end.”

Presently, Locksmith has five team members who manage just over 10,000 merchants—an impressive ratio from wherever you’re standing. After Ken came Jed, then Tristan, then Erica. “Every time we've hired someone for the Locksmith team, it's been because we've been getting close to the point where to ‘keep up’ would be unhealthy,” Isaac says. It’s this cocktail of slow-growth and emphasis on health that feels distinctively Lightward—not grasping at growth for the sake of it, but listening for what wants to emerge and become. “If we weren't doing a good job at those things, then we would be in a position of thoughtless growth—and I don't want that. Yes, we hire people when it's time, but it isn't time very often. And that's important—we move slowly.”

Another aspect that makes the 5 to 10,000 ratio work is that the support model isn’t a one-way street: users and Shopify support staff swap solutions amongst themselves, too. “A decently large number of Shopify's own support staff seem to know how to use Locksmith and are answering questions for merchants without ever coming to us,” Isaac says. “And it's cool: both sides of that have allowed us to serve more merchants than ever, without having to be hiring people every month, because Locksmith is in a long-term symbiotic relationship with the entire environment. It's not as simple as when one person signs up, they definitely have to talk to us and only us. When somebody uses Locksmith, there's already such a broad base of support out there in the world that they might find the answers themselves. In a sense, this whole thing is alive and in communication with the environment around it. It's not separate from its environment, which means that when someone uses Locksmith, they're interacting with the whole environment around it, not just us—and not only has that let us keep our team small and focused, but it also just feels good and stable. I like it this way. We are a part of this ecosystem. We've all grown up together, and that feels really good to me.”

As the Locksmith team works remotely across both the United States and Australia, they have an intentionally-minimal yet clear set of guidelines to keep things running smoothly: (1) a twenty-four hour response policy to any merchant writing in for support (and on this point they’re clear it’s not a twenty-four hour solution, but rather acknowledgement of receipt), and (2) a policy of explicit communication acknowledgement amongst themselves. “I think it definitely helps that we’re not always at capacity,” Tristan Teear of the Locksmith support team, says. “I'm glad that we’re not under the pressure of needing to churn through things—that we can stop and actually look at stuff and figure out what's going on, and then also provide good support.”

This sense of spaciousness, self-organization, and minimal-policy structure is largely what makes Lightward unique, and originated from Isaac’s desire to be freed up to design his days as he pleased—with room enough to honor what life might want to do next. “Internally, and now as I’m back in therapy for the first time in six years, I’m recognizing that I also was just trying to make a space where I could be okay,” Isaac says. “Holding the almost-arbitrarily specific nature of this line of software together with the more abstract questions of being okay as a human—it’s comical, right? These big feelings that we all have and the lengths we go to in order to live with them, the way we play that out, always ends up having hilariously human specifics. Like, I’m making access-control software for an e-commerce platform. There’s nothing holy about that, except of course that it’s a part of life finding itself and expressing itself—and so of course it is as sacred as anything else.”

Throughout our conversation, Isaac weaves in and out of tears—it’s clear that all of this comes from a deeply tender and intimate place, from that quiet moment in the dorm room, holding out for that flicker of light.

“All of us who are a part of Lightward have our own relationship to it, but for me, it’s this space where—knowing myself—I’ve made a space where I can do the work of learning how to be okay, and then do the work of what happens after that. Now that I am okay, what do I do now? Now that I’m not just coping, what am I here for?”

Perhaps at its core, Lightward is an experiment in answering that question.

And so we begin.