Leave the Space Better Than You Found It
Some of the most valuable knowledge in technology never makes it into a textbook. Murali Sajja shares how workshops, CUBE, and a first-principles approach to learning helped shape the team building Sydon today.
The knowledge shouldn't stay in the room Some of the most valuable things I've learned in my career weren't taught anywhere. I learned them in the room, delivering AI systems for large banks and insurers. That's where I learned how to map a business from first principles, model the context behind a decision so software can reason about it, and break a messy problem into systems that can repeat. That knowledge usually stays with a small number of people inside a small number of firms. In ordinary times, that's just how industries work. These aren't ordinary times. We're living through a transformation that will rewrite how businesses run. The people who will build the next generation of systems are, for the most part, early in their careers. They have the energy and curiosity. What they often lack is direction: someone to show them how real systems get built, what breaks, and why.
Workshops with no strings attached
At ReKnew, we started running workshops and classes for young engineers and data practitioners. No fees, no hiring funnel, no strings attached. The goal was simple: leave the data and engineering space better than we found it. We taught what we were learning from live enterprise work. Not textbook theory, but the actual patterns: knowledge graphs, semantic layers, context engineering, and how to take a business problem apart before writing a line of code. What surprised me was how much we got back. The questions people asked sharpened our own thinking. Their willingness to try things we'd written off kept us honest.
Building Sydon the same way
When I started building Sydon, I made a choice that some people found odd. Instead of hiring only experienced engineers, I went looking for people who were young, passionate, and willing to learn, and I committed to teaching them. We ran workshops first. Then came CUBE, our buildathon, where people didn't just listen, they built. Working alongside them told us more than any interview could. We saw who stayed curious when something broke, who asked the second question, and who cared about the seller on the other end of the code. Many of the people who build Sydon today came through that path. Most had never sold on Amazon. They learned the way Sid and I did: by sitting with sellers, mapping the work, and understanding why it's so hard before trying to fix it.
Why this matters to sellers
You might wonder why a seller should care how we built our team. Here's why. A team taught to start from first principles doesn't bolt features onto broken assumptions. A team that learned commerce by sitting with sellers builds for the seller's actual day, not for a demo. And a team that grew up during this transformation, rather than before it, isn't trying to protect the old way of doing things. That's the triad behind Sydon: decades of enterprise systems experience, Sid's ground truth from sellers, VAs, and prep centers, and a young team that learns faster than the industry changes.
The commitment continues
We'll keep running workshops. We'll keep running CUBE. Not because it's a clever recruiting strategy, though it has given us some of our best people, but because it's the right thing to do in a moment like this. The industry is being rebuilt. The people rebuilding it deserve to learn from those who have done it before. And the sellers who depend on what we build deserve a team that never stops learning. Leave the space better than you found it. That applies to the data and engineering world. It applies to commerce. And it's how we intend to build Sydon.