The Venn diagram of one

There's a phenomenon I've come to think of as the Venn diagram of one.

In SAP rooms, when I mention I co-founded a UGC startup, faces freeze. Polite. A little concerned. Definitely about to change the subject. In startup rooms, when SAP BTP comes up, conversations experience a small, polite suction — everyone leans back two centimeters at once. Both worlds are full of brilliant people. They just don't share a vocabulary, an aesthetic, or the same week.

I run between them. Every day.

By 9am I'm reviewing transport packages and authorisation roles. By 10pm I'm in a Slack arguing whether Reels should auto-play with sound on a homepage widget. The whiplash is real. The vocabulary tax is enormous. The actual job — making something a human can use without dread — turns out to be exactly the same.

That last part is the trick.

The first thing the two-career setup teaches you is identity laundering. To civil servants you don't say 'shoppable widget.' You say 'embedded customer-content component.' To an investor you don't say 'S/4HANA platform.' You say 'the largest enterprise software company on earth.' You become bilingual in a sense your school's languages programme did not anticipate.

The second thing — and this took me three years to admit — is that 80% of the SAP world's hard-won wisdom is also true in startup land, and 80% of the startup playbook also works in SAP land. Both worlds sometimes refuse to acknowledge this. That's mostly ego.

Three places they overlap, completely

• —Shipping is a moral position. SAP teams who ship slowly hide behind 'complexity.' Startup teams who ship slowly hide behind 'polish.' The customer never asked for either.
• —The user is the system. The civil servant filing a planning consent and the DTC shopper buying a yoga mat are, design-wise, the same person: tired, in a hurry, judging your interface in three seconds.
• —Boring is underrated. The most powerful enterprise stack I ever shipped did one thing very well, with no novelty. The most loved startup feature I've shipped also did one thing, very well, with no novelty. Boring scales. Novel breaks.

The Venn diagram of one is lonely some days. I've found peace with this. The alternative — being entirely fluent in only one of these worlds — sounds, honestly, much more boring.

Also: nobody asks me to come to their team-building offsite, which I count as a structural advantage.