(Disclaimer: I'm writing this from a great office with a window overlooking beautiful blue skies and greenery in an antiseptic office park. How boring.)
Some of my favorite memories:
1. 4 of us in a nasty "war room" without windows for 6 months, 12 hours a day, eating junk food when we could, and writing an incredible back office system. We knew what time it was by the sounds of the Winston drag races at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.
2. 2 of us in the back room of a deserted warehouse writing an e-commerce system because nothing else could handle our client's business. We walked 4 blocks to the Whistle Stop to get sandwiches or use the bathroom (because we didn't have one).
3. 3 of us writing some incredible call center software in a back hallway of a warehouse in an office park. The area was condemned for mold, so we had to work out of the deli across the street for a month.
4. The basement of a dental office. I can still hear the drill.
5. 2 of us in the janitor's supply closet. 2 desks and a sink with a mop in it. We launched a programmer's utility startup from there.
In every case, the companionship and work were so good, we barely noticed our surroundings.
I have never deleted an email, and now I'm so glad. Just reading through some of the mundane details of these old projects gets my heart racing. I wish every project could be like these.
No matter what else I have ever done, nothing was as exciting as doing great work.
As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team. It's not that we don't work hard to find motivated and talented hires, but it doesn't matter. I don't think it's possible to completely align the incentives -- if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers. It's a subtle difference, but as a founder the company failing is an unthinkable, unspeakable horror. As an employee it's a pain, a little bit sad, and you'll have to spend some time finding a new job. Employees can afford to be rational and pragmatic about it, founders often can't.
As they say, "You'll never get as high as your first hit." Think of Apple when its only two employees were Jobs & Woz, or Microsoft when it was just Gates & Allen. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to grow and to work with people who are masters in their respective fields, but there's nothing quite like working on a team that's small and dedicated.
Scaling a team is hard -- especially when you don't really know how to do it. Not only is it hard as a co-founder to not "touch" every line of code that goes out, but your job turns to hiring and making sure the rowers (which you can't always be a part of) are turning the boat in the right direction. We try to keep the project management very minimal, but there's no way I'm aware of that you can get by without quick meetings people end up calling "scrums" (even though they're not) and relying way too much on a Trello board. At least not when you need everyone on exactly the same page and to be shipping product quickly. Maybe I'm not a good manager (I know I'm not in some aspects), but it's a lot harder to turn a bigger ship than the little inner tube we used to have. It's easy to see why startups can out-innovate and out-work huge companies. The irony is that if you do that well, you become a huge company. The startup circle of life, I suppose.
It's important to recognize the flip side of the coin (based on my own experience):
If you aren't articulating your vision well, then of course early employees won't be doing what you expect--and if you don't document what your tech is, of course they will just roll their own.
If you don't give them a reasonable stake in the company in real stock or revenue sharing, then of course early employees won't put in the same work.
If you wasted a lot of effort learning things the hard way about your tech or your business, and you hire early employees that already knew how to do things the right way, of course they won't appear to be working as hard.
It can be really sad watching cofounders screw over early employees all the while wringing hands about "dang, these folks just aren't as committed as we were". Early employee at a startup sucks, because you don't have the financial security of being a cog, you don't have the respect or payoff of being a cofounder, and you do have to clean up after the cofounders messes and grow the business.
> As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team.
You should look at this as a feature, not a bug. Employees who will never be as invested as the founding team are like thermometers. Take their temperature on a regular basis and it can reveal important facts about your company that you'd probably be blind to otherwise.
> ...if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers.
Not all of the smart and talented people out there are Google or Facebook material, which is one of the reasons startups should stop trying to build the New York Yankees. Don't exclude people with potential. With a focus on employee development, you can grow great employees who are going to be far more loyal to you because you gave them an opportunity.
Yep, you can't red line a engine forever. Sooner or later something gives, and likely it will be at the worst possible moment. Demanding constant sacrifice seems like a recipe for a revolt amongst the gladiators...
Your founders. You pay nothing to acquire your stock, you probably avoid AMT brain damage because you avoid a cost to acquire your stock, you have little restrictions on how you sell your stock compared to employees and as founders your stock portion will be bigger than the entire employee stock option pool for the life of the company.
Of course they are not going to be as motivated as you are. And as a founder of a failed company, you too can go work at Goofacesoft too afterwards.
It's also your baby, your the one who can be emotionally invested in the company %100 because other than investor hostile takeover or founder politics, your not going to stop being the one who has ultimate ownership of the company. Employees learn after a few jobs that being emotionally invested into a company %100 is not good, because you don't have ultimate responsibility and ownership of it and it easily can be taken away from you.
I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization structure, the first big thing to notice is probably when "everyone" can't be together anymore and you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore
> I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization structure
Yep. It is the flattest it can ever be. There are also psychological dynamics in the average basement startup:
Things are usually informal, meritocratic, ambitious. Crunching together in such a setting will also usually create very strong camaraderie even among personalities that in a larger organization would just keep away from each other.
> you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore
Even with perfect information/openness - just the fact that there's now an "us" and "them" starts being.. divisive[1]. Apply enough times and you can't keep up with how many "thems" there are to an "us". When you've been there since the company was 4/8 people in a large room, it would be strange not to feel nostalgic.
[1] I self-nominate for platitude of the year 2015. It's early, but I'm ambitious.
This is why I fucking hate it when, at one company I was at, the language in all the communications and meetings was "Management has decided...", "Talk to your supervisor..."
It's like, "Dude, there're less than ten of us, and half of us are building product, and the other half are sucking at sales. You aren't managing shit."
Little us-vs-them bullshit like that hurts everyone. :(
Yes the "us" and "them" feeling is hard to handle, it's the same in every kind of organization(sports, hacker group etc) where some people have been around for quite long and invested much time in different things even if the formal roles are different
I find myself reminded of a claim that a issue with the early leadership of Jobs at Apple was that he was instigating competition between project teams. In particular surrounding Macintosh and Lisa. While the Apple II (with Woz) was off in a corner, keeping the ship afloat.
I miss the excitement but not the uncertainty. We did succeed into becoming a big company with huge revenues, but most startups never leave the basement, we knew that back then, maybe it's just me not missing those times, maybe because I wasn't such a kid anymore, I was 29 at the time we got started and already had my first kid on the way(2 years before that I was working at another startup that failed big time but I really didn't care back then). I loved the work and truly believed we would make it, but it was hard work, taking time from my family, specially from being with my newborn, so yeah I'm good now with being "just an engineering manager" knowing my job is safe, my future is safe. I still work hard but it's different when you don't have to wonder about the company's future I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. I might be alone here, but I don't miss a thing.
The vast majority of companies are perfectly fine staying at "basement scale" for decades. Fuck, for many types of businesses (including much of the tech industry), that is actually the perfect scale.
This is all Silicon Valley navel gazing. If you want to stay in the basement, stay in the basement. Very little is stopping you, most business models are not based on explosive growth.
There's more to "the basement" than keeping it small, I think. There's also the aspect of dreaming; of shooting for something really, really big & exciting. There are a few businesses that scale without growing the size of the team much, but it's still extremely hard. For the most part, either you stay small and lose the ambition-excitement, or you get big.
Personally, I'm really not convinced that one is better than the other.
The dreaming is important. I'm now in a startup past the phase of "changing the world" and into "finding any small market to keep us afloat". The excitement is definitely gone. I find myself buying a coffee, taking a walk, pretty much anything to avoid actually getting to work in the morning. Because once there I'm doing little that anybody will care about. Except our investors of course.
I think optimally, if you like the basement and your business is growing out of it, you sell it to someone else who likes big, and find yourself a fresh basement.
Trying to sell a product that barely works. Trying to recruit people to work for no money. Worrying about how I'll pay my mortgage in a couple of months. Oh yeah, I'm having the time of my life. :)
What gets me? Right now, when there's no money and more vision than product, engineers are volunteering to help, because I'm building something designed specifically to solve their most frustrating and unproductive problems. I suspect that in six months or a year, when there's money for salaries and a decent number of actual customers, those volunteers will dry up. :) But I suspect a different kind of volunteering will happen, maybe with different people.
Oh, do you work on a large (multiple teams) software project? Want to know how I plan to make your life suck less? Get in touch!
I tell people all the time that some of my best years were being broke and working 7am - 7pm on my failed startup. We had a preverbal basement in the form of a small business incubator, it was great. I miss those guys. I miss talking about their products, working through some rough decisions with everyone in the office. I haven't left the basement yet, mine is just a little more comfortable and only open when I'm not at work. I'm sure I'll miss this phase in a few years time. Good post
Yeah a great way to really know people is to work hard and much together, then you know how they handle stress and situations where the hope about getting something delivered on time / getting payed on time is small
I remember the fun times of being in the basement.
But I also remember the sleepless nights, the 24-hour cycles around a launch because between the N of us, none of us had either process experience or the knowledge to choose a better one, and the resulting shouting matches at 3AM because everyone was on edge and nerves were frazzled.
More importantly, unfortunately, my stomach will always remind me of those things. I got out of the startup scene for my health; some people just don't cope well with that kind of stress.
Six months in the "wasp waist" of the Bank of America building on Castro street (440, I think). Air conditioning and heating that never worked (our office temperature would go from 60 degrees in the morning to high 90s in the afternoon). Once a water pipe cut loose and sent a river down the stairwell we used. There were power outages (everyone in our small company had a UPS, and this practice saved us...), and there was a spectacular chimney fire in the Chinese restaurant across the street. Jimmy Carter visited the Performing Arts center one evening, and we were asked not to go out onto our roof / balcony and it seemed like a good idea not to make the fellows in dark glasses nervous.
Castro street is (and probably still is) Asian culinary heaven . . . except that my boss would only eat at an Italian place near the railroad tracks, or at the evil hot-dog place where all the employees hated their lives and let you know it, every order.
We moved to a set of offices on Landings Drive. This was when SGI was still around; we used to walk over to their cafeteria and just use it -- nobody seemed to care -- and I'd say "hi" to some of my old Apple co-workers who had also moved on. I learned how to punch down phones and install networks, and buy cubicles and get cheap $10 whiteboards from Home Depot.
I wonder if the author considers the work environment and culture he describes as inherently unscalable and also unprofitable. One could imagine a workplace that maintains this kind of ethos while also making money but while remaining small (EDIT: 37 Signals is a possible example). I think it is an open question as to whether an organization can be all three - large, profitable, and 'a basement', to use the metaphor.
Great point, but as a general rule what you don't see in the wild is probably not possible for some reason. I would wager that since increasing growth requires increasing bureaucracy, there's your culprit.
It's also possible that big orgd are big because they overshoot their optimum riding a rocket of early profit, and slowly colldose under their own gravity to chase ever marginal returns.
Is Larry Page getting richer at 50000 Employees that he was at 10K?
I've also thought about literally working out of my basement (nice and cool in summer), but there's a bit of a social stigma attached to working out of dirty storage space :)
In UK older Victorian and earlier houses sometimes have cellars. Some people leave them as slightly damp cold spaces, other people do them up and gain an extra room.
I worked in a back room of a storage room of a shop in a basement for a while. The pro is that in summer I didn't get subtracted because I wasn't aware of the nice weather outside ;)
I do share very fond memories of that period like what Zach is talking about.
I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged about the oxymoron that is "Creative Industry", is how Capitalism robs creativity of any and all integrity. Exploring ideas for the sake of creation, for any reason beyond money-fetishizing, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.
Imperfect as it is, money is the best available measurement of usefulness of a product or service to other people. There's nothing wrong with doing useless things for the hell of it, but attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous.
> attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous
Is it?
In my view, organizations are almost living entities in and of themselves. They can become more ruthless than any individual because of their critical mass and "mission".
Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but we have org A ("business"), primarily self-interested, and org B ("non-profit"), which isn't. Sure, there's potential for evil and corruption everywhere, but that doesn't make their two starting points one and the same.
Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations?
> Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations[1]?
No, certainly not inherently. Even if we define moral ground as the degree of altruism of motives (which is way too narrow in my opinion), non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals, but rather non-monetizable goals.
But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money while all some non-profits can show in their defense is abstract ideas. KKK is a non-profit.
But if we define it as something that the society should
encourage because it's beneficial to the society then
for-profits are arguably on a higher ground ... KKK is a
non-profit.
And Comcast is a company. Just because people give money to an organization and extract value from it doesn't mean society should encourage that company's behavior. Your argument makes no sense. You're saying:
1. Moral ground is "something society encourages because
it's beneficial to society"
2. People give for-profit companies their money
3. Therefore, companies have a higher moral ground since
companies are "demonstrably beneficial to people"
How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion? You then throw an example of a bad non-profit (KKK) as I can equally give you an example of a bad company (Comcast) that takes people's money, provides a necessary service to their customers, but is by all accounts one of the worst, most parasitic organizations on the planet.
The reason you don't understand my argument after reinterpreting it is because you have for some reason excluded a few important words from it: "inherently", "should" (as in "should encourage") and "willingly". I am inclined to think your confusion is intentional and therefore explaining myself will be a waste of time.
Please, that's a cop out. I didn't re-interpret anything and "should" doesn't add anything to that sentence.
"if we define it as something that the society should encourage
because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are
arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial
to people who are willingly giving them money"
That's a direct quote from your comment. I merely asked how you got from A to B. How are for-profits "demonstrably beneficial" given your definition of moral ground? You're stating a definition and just stating a conclusion you draw with no actual substance into how you're making that conclusion.
I challenge your statement that for-profits are "demonstrably beneficial" merely because people give them money!
Technically, yes, but definitely not what I was talking about, as I defined non-profit as an organization which isn't primarily self-interested. The KKK isn't for-profit, but it is for-power, and definitely self-interested. I also included "Sure, there's potential for evil and corruption everywhere" to avoid such a strawman argument.
> non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals
They usually do. But we seem to disagree as to what a non-profit is, so for the sake of the argument, I'm talking about altruistic non-profits, not the KKK. Let's include non-power in that non-profit definition.
> But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money
Willingly? In theoretical economics/free markets/etc, sure. In real life, there are monopolies, lobbying, politics and all sorts of bullshit. You are surely aware that as a consumer you're often stuck with picking the least-worst of your options. If there's one ISP serving your area and you hate them, your free will spans between 'no internet' and 'pay those scumbags'.
"Organizations" includes businesses[1]. I'm making a distinction between for-profit (/for-power?) organizations, vs. not, in order to compare their baseline "moral ground".
...yet the same blacksmith could turn a sword into a plowshare and make society a better place.
Straw-man arguments might have their place but they are still straw-man arguments. Not every businessman starts out being mercenary, and not every practicing tradesman cares naught for his art.
I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged is how Socialism and Anti capitalist ideologies rob creativity of any and all usefulness. Exploring ideas for the sake of solving real world problems, making people's lives better, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.
> I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged is how Socialism and Anti capitalist ideologies rob creativity of any and all usefulness.
Socialism?
I think you meant 'communism' as practiced by those countries that have hi-jacked an otherwise pretty good idea to serve the interests of a select few fat cats.
I think you're reading too much into the parent poster. It's possible to point out negative properties of something without advocating for a radical shift, or any shift.
Business incentives stifle creativity; even in creative products. It may wax and wane depending on context, but it's a pretty uncontroversial idea. From the high end of LA creativity-through-the-sausage-machine film and tv, all the way through to the low end, where nobody wants to attend my one man show.
But the parent poster used the HN tigger word "capitalism" when discussing the idea, so lets down-vote the shit out of him! /s
People working on open source projects often solve real problems and make other people's life better, yet some of them consider themselves anti-capitalist or even socialist.
Many successful open source projects have a corporate backing to them, driving resources and energy into them.
Open source isn't anti capitalist. It's capitalism at it's best form. People join at their own free will, the rule of contracts (open source licensing) are strictly enforced, and there are lots of ways people can profit from open source.
Do that without expecting financial reward, and your soapbox would hold some meaning. "Usefulness" is not synonymous for monetization. Making the world better is not synonymous for making a few people that much richer.
That's not how Human nature works. The world is filled with failed experiments of "Just do good without expecting anything in return".
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has failed utterly, at every scale. Be it the soviet union, or small bankrupt "kibbutzim" in Israel.
Capitalism is much more than "expecting a financial reward". It's a complex system of signals which let producers determine what is the most valuable and efficient use for their resources.
What Should I build in my basement? A sous vide cooker? A drone with a camera? A computer game or a new social network?
Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need?
Agree with everything you say, but would like to comment on this: Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need?
Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements.
Capitalism provides one set of signals, an overpoweringly large one at that, but it does not provide a complete picture of value to humanity.
> Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements.
You're taking the exceptions (and actually Bach earnt quite well from music). Van Gogh was almost unique among his painting contemporaries, partly because his paintings were, by the standards of the time, weird (I suspect this applies to Kafka as well). And what vindicates him now is an ultimately capitalist consideration - his works are popular, people pay for copies of them. Nowadays there are capitalistic art speculators who will buy the work of underappreciated artists if they like it themselves - see the recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8829277 - which would solve that problem.
As for Kafka, he had a famously... weird approach to his work. IIRC he wanted his works destroyed; it's only the capitalism of his descendants that means we're able to appreciate them.
Art isn't the only place where people can be ahead of their time. Xerox PARC had a lot of good ideas, for example, but were only appreciated after some folks reappropriated them.
Gov't incentives meanwhile often create unintended effects. For example, incentivizing investment in the arts leading to rich people creating their own private museums, often inaccessible to the public, and using them as convenient funnels for tax deductions while still enriching themselves.[1]
Ok I'll try. All these people you mention are long-dead white men you are 'supposed' to like because it gives you social status. If they didn't exist there would probably be others you should like to give you signal how cultivated you are. You are forced to partake in their creations in school because of some mistaken cargo cult thinking "successful people like these artists so if force every to read/listen to/look at their creations they will be successful too!"
Contemporary pop art, on the other hand, entertains huge masses of people, gives them pleasure and delight, and makes their days happier.
I think economic theory explains that case as well. Simply put, the value of "making art" was worth more to those artists than the value of whatever money they could have made doing other things. So of course, they weren't trying to satisfy some latent global need of art, they were just doing what they preferred.
Just as a farmer is not trying to satisfy the world's demand for food, monitoring which crop is most needed. All the farmer does is he prefers a certain amount of money over a certain amount of labour and grows crops that maximize that amount of money. The world signals their demand by price.
Some of my favorite memories:
1. 4 of us in a nasty "war room" without windows for 6 months, 12 hours a day, eating junk food when we could, and writing an incredible back office system. We knew what time it was by the sounds of the Winston drag races at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.
2. 2 of us in the back room of a deserted warehouse writing an e-commerce system because nothing else could handle our client's business. We walked 4 blocks to the Whistle Stop to get sandwiches or use the bathroom (because we didn't have one).
3. 3 of us writing some incredible call center software in a back hallway of a warehouse in an office park. The area was condemned for mold, so we had to work out of the deli across the street for a month.
4. The basement of a dental office. I can still hear the drill.
5. 2 of us in the janitor's supply closet. 2 desks and a sink with a mop in it. We launched a programmer's utility startup from there.
In every case, the companionship and work were so good, we barely noticed our surroundings.
I have never deleted an email, and now I'm so glad. Just reading through some of the mundane details of these old projects gets my heart racing. I wish every project could be like these.
No matter what else I have ever done, nothing was as exciting as doing great work.
Thanks OP, for the memories.