Your Job as a Founder Is to Create Believers
josephwalla.com
josephwalla.com
You have to be a little insane to start a company, I totally get that. But you're truly doing yourself a disservice if you're attempting to amass a legion of followers.
A good developer might not give two shits about your carefully crafted mission statement, but she'll do some kick ass work. Isn't that good enough any more? Why is "startup culture" so obsessed with maintaining the appearance of success rather than focusing on creating something amazing?
1. If they are offered an identical position at a company they believe in, they will leave. You won't be able to do anything to keep them around, so you have less ability to retain valuable employees. Hiring and training new employees is expensive.
2. They won't push back when bad decisions are made. Would you waste your time arguing about a bad decision if you didn't give a shit about the company? You want people who will work for the best interest of the company. Granted there comes a time when you need people to accept a decision, but you want their to be a discussion around those decisions.
3. They will negotiate for more salary than equity/options, giving them less incentive to help make the company succeed.
4. They are less likely to convince their friends to join the company. Stripe built an incredibly talented engineering team through mostly referrals[1]. You lose that if you are hiring people who won't convince their friends to join.
I'm sure I am missing many others, and all startups may not need a team so dedicated that they would give up their salary, but having a team who believes in your company does have real benefits.
[1]: http://firstround.com/review/How-Stripe-built-one-of-Silicon...
2. Yes they will. You'll spend time arguing about a bad decision because it has an effect upon your life.
3. Salary is an incentive too. I like mine to keep coming. Those of us who aren't terminally naive regard equity as nice to have, but generally worthless unless we get extremely lucky.
4. If you are a good founder and boss who has a good company that's a nice place to work, they absolutely will. A company, not a church.
You can't scale a company entirely with believers. You can do just fine with mercenaries. You just have to treat them as rational actors, which isn't so hard at all if you're a good leader.
You have to define 'bad'. If you've drunk the kool-aid, you won't see decisions XYZ as 'bad', so there wouldn't be anything to push back on, even if they are objectively (or reasonably apparently) not good decisions.
"They will negotiate for more salary than equity/options, giving them less incentive to help make the company succeed."
Unless the 'equity' gives me the ability to actually change direction on patently stupid decisions and make course corrections, it's a lottery ticket. If a company is willing to pay me above market rate, I have far more immediate incentive to do what's necessary to keep that gravy train going, vs "hey, if we get sold for $100m, I might get $700k 3 years from now and be handcuffed for the next 2 years to some company who acquires us!!!" level of 'equity'.
If you do things well, it won't be a matter of 'believing' someplace is a good place to work, or they're doing good, or killing it, or whatever the metric is - it will just be factual, and won't require 'belief'.
First, this is an expensive place to live. A really expensive place to live. Oddly, my landlord doesn't take options.
Second, options are binary. There are very few outcomes for a company where the amount of options you have matters. Either you make a couple million dollars or you make very little/nothing. Cash now and $2mm instead of $3mm in an extremely unlikely future is a good trade.
Your developer will leave if they are offered a better paid position at another company. It's because that company values them more. "believing" is just more nonsense thrown at inexperienced developers who don't know they are being hoodwinked.
Ergo, the reason startups like their employees to believe is so that they can retain and control them more easily.
On the flip side, if a startup that "believes" is more effective (or more likely to survive) than a company that doesn't, this could benefit the employees. Whether this is the case or just ideology, I think it's difficult to know.
The way I see a position is a combination of money, culture and people. It is possible to surpass money. Sometimes people leave for that. Sometimes, your best friend leaves and you move with her. I have never found a company where all three things are replicated elsewhere.
I identify as a mercenary more than a missionary, and believe in professionalism independent of passion, but you don't want to be caught saying that out loud here.
The idea behind it is that as your company grows you end up making less of the decisions yourself. Setting a framework for employees in making their own decisions maximises the chance that they would make the decision you might want them to make if you were directly involved.
Zuckerbergs 'move fast and break things' is the perfect example of this. It gave him the chance to set the tone for developers for years after he ceased writing the code.
Where companies go wrong with this is just dishing out the guidelines without explaining the reason behind having them. Doing that leaves everyone thinking it's just some management bullshit.
I worked for a company who decided to try and build their own gaming console. As hard as that is, it did make some sense since the company was contracted to design and develop some of the hardware and low-level software for a major gaming console (will remain nameless). The project failed for several reasons, but one of them was that only a couple people on the team understood games and the gaming industry. Even though from an engineering perspective we could easily build a console, we also had to make a great user/gaming experience which we had no experience with as a company. The result was that great engineers were making horrible product decisions because they didnt understand video games.
The solution to that specific problem would have been to hire good people who understand games and teach everyone else about games and the gaming industry. That way the great engineers would be able to make great product decisions within the context of gaming.
Or more generally, one of the jobs of a founder is to build a business whose culture is more likely to produce good product decisions given the context of who the users are, the product, and the industry. One of the ideas I like a lot to accomplish this is to make engineers do customer service. When an engineer gets the same bug report three times, they are more likely to fix it sooner rather than later.
I think forcing engineers to do customer support is a bad idea as well. You're using something that should be seen in a positive light (helping the customer) as a punishment.
In both of these cases it seems like the solutions to things are to try to excite engineers about doing things they were not hired to do. Hire customer relations people to fight with the engineer FOR the customer. Bring in consultants to help plan what and how the gaming console should be done, and let the engineers code it. But of course there are no real "rights" or "wrongs" in any of this. It's all opinion of whatever the real boss (the manager of managers) can be convinced to do.
> I think forcing engineers to do customer support is a bad idea as well. You're using something that should be seen in a positive light (helping the customer) as a punishment.
Not necessarily. Sure some engineers dont want to do customer service at all and would view it as a punishment, but then they shouldnt work there. Creating a good culture doesnt mean making everyone happy. Creating a good culture means finding the people that will thrive in that particular culture and only those people. In the customer service case, that means finding people who enjoy it or at least don't mind. And if someone hates it, then they should leave. It is not good for the person or the company for them to stay just for the money or benefits.
That's a bit short sighted. It might be perfectly good for the company to keep people with skills XYZ employed. Not everyone is going to do customer support. I'll be pretty sure even where some CEOs do actual 'customer support' (in whatever capacity) the janitors and CFOs and in-house legal counsel aren't also manning the email support desks.
So then we're left with "well... some people should be doing customer service along with all their other duties". It's an arbitrary line.
I do agree that having most staff do some support work in many companies (or, at very least, shadow support staff for a week or so) can have a lot of benefits - you see things from different perspectives, you get to know what the real problems are, how people are using your product and how people view your company, etc.
Agreed.
I think this is spot on. I used to hate the ideas of values, since I only saw examples of it done incorrectly. I’d see corporations create values or frameworks and it was obvious that they never adhered to them. So, we didn’t have company values for the first few years of the company. Then, a group of people on the team came to me and said we needed values to preserve our culture as we grew. The idea to create values was a grassroots effort at HelloSign. Then, we went on a retreat to create them. A year later, the team was absolutely right. Values have been hugely helpful in sustaining our culture as we grow.
I don't care about changing the world (and honestly, your startup isn't doing that at all). I don't want to help you create the next Hooli (because what makes you better than them?). I just want to get paid.
They appear to have tried to imitate Facebook's culture, with the infamous "Move Fast and Break Things" slogans plastered everywhere.
This is part of the reason why startups-imitating-successful-startups is bad logic and a perpetual problem.
Let alone a company always hiring people dumber than its founder couldn't be doing too well.
To clarify - for awhile, I just thought growing revenue was important and having a business model. I was skeptical of the idea of ‘believing’ as well.
Over time, I realized that great people want to work on something with a great mission. I remember seeing a Stripe pitch about how they wanted to grow the GDP of the internet. They were a tiny company at the time, but you couldn’t help believe that they were going to build something great. They also built a phenomenal product. That’s the kind of belief that I’m talking about.
getting everybody to drink the kool-aid all the way to the bursting bubble isn't that appealing outside of the silicon valley cloud.
you might as well work for IBM if you want to follow platitudes from disengaged senior management. at least they prioritize making money over 'changing the world'
For that matter, joining an early startup at any point beyond employee #10 has a expected return that is way lower than being an employee at a major company. So why would anyone do that in an efficient labor market?
You can quite easily argue that growing revenue is not the reason for existence of say Nike. The reason for it's existence, as far as society is concerned, is making shoes. That they make money from it is the incentive and society's way of indicating that what they do is valuable to society. The whole "creating value" thing, in economist terms.
For some people it really is true that money is to companies as rocket fuel is to rocket ships. Doesn't mean you need to join a cult or "convert" to the founder's "vision" of what the company will/should be. Just be "ok, I like working on this problem, I think it has future and they are paying me for it this much, let me balance it against the my level of interest and potential financial reward from all this other projects that interest me. Also, let's account for how much overtime and weird commitments my boss demands and which benefits I get in practice (e.g. real vacation time vs 'theoretical' vacation days)".
Because they're being paid a significant portion of that money?
"You can quite easily argue that growing revenue is not the reason for existence of say Nike."
I really don't think you can. Otherwise they wouldn't be charging as much as they do for what they sell, and wouldn't be spending so much on athlete endorsements.
If you have to tell employees to engage, you're doing it wrong. If you have to keep telling them, you're doing it very wrong.
If you show people the company they work for is awesome by doing awesome stuff for them and for customers, they're more likely to be impressed.
This is not at all easy - which is kind of the point.
US business culture definitely has a dumb socially inept gene which thinks you can manipulate people into doing what you want by browbeating them with "culture." Of if they're customers, by browbeating them with "marketing."
It's incredibly offensive to everyone involved, and ultimately counterproductive.
The truth is that when companies are genuinely awesome, they inspire genuine loyalty. Ultimately the buck stops at the C-suite and the board.
If they don't have what it takes, there is no strategy that can convince employees otherwise.
In short, no.
I think some companies can get it wrong. I think others do a phenomenal job. Companies like Stripe, Twilio and Airbnb have incredible missions that tons of people love to support - even people who don’t work there. I think that’s an incredible thing.
To destroy the idea of civil society and collaborative neighborhoods (even moreso than already done) and inflict the effects of negative externalities on people not involved in the transaction? If I were a cynic (and I am), I would say that belief in this "incredible mission" is a good way to undermine basic social responsibility.
It's not brainwashing, it's selecting for shared values.
I became part of a company whose vision tactics I had to deal with, as the ultimate skeptic. At first I was like you, "No one's going to tell me..." Then I put myself in the shoes of the founder and decided that his vision was, in fact, acceptable. What you call brainwashing was simply reducing friction for those who would benefit from a little perspective.
Believe me, I was skeptical far into my employment. But I didn't obsess on the tactics, I focused on results of the company and myself.
If you're seriously calling for class action, you're beyond hope. And I'm about as far from a John Galt, pro-capitalist shill as you can get...
Cause working for a company offers health insurance. Starting my own doesn't give me that.
We're all just people who want to spend our days doing and making things in a way that feels valuable. That's why I code, that's why a founder..um..founds (?) Why can't we just leave it at that? Why do we have to bring faith and belief structures into it?
This means you believe in spending your days doing and making things in a way that feels valuable.
The belief systems are there even if you ignore them or use other language to describe them.
Or, as the joke goes: "everyone should believe in something... and I believe I'll have another drink!"
"doing and making things in a way that feels valuable" requires a belief that the things your company do are valuable.
Agreed. The mission becomes key in having everyone focused and going in the same direction. Startups are really powerful when you have a small group of people are highly focused on solving a specific problem. That’s how they can compete against massive companies. They lose that power when everyone is going in different directions.
It isn't about the statements (our core values sound dumb and Like a slogan when read out tbh) but it is about what the underlying culture that caused someone to write those statements are about. we don't ship until it is great. Having a CEO who consistently make multimillion decisions of not shipping because the product is just good is what it is about. One of the core values sums that up in a slogan matters because what it conveys is that we are so proud of our products that we will eat a big loss rather than selling something that honestly most people would be happy with but still be left with a feeling of "they cut a few corners there". If it's not great quality, top of the line, it doesn't go outside our doors. And the entire company is bought into that. That's the real meaning of the slogan. And that is important even tho the exact words aren't.
1. To yourself and your family
2. To your career and professional development
3. To the company
It would take an exceptional company with a grand vision for me to swap 2 & 3. I could see myself doing that if I worked for Seymour Cray's companies in the 60s and 70s, or Bell Labs in its heyday, or a company with a grand vision like SpaceX today. But for the most part, you are right.
1) If you as the creator don't believe in it, you're probably going to have more trouble convincing others that it's worth using, unless you have some kind of interesting personality quirk.
2) The value of something - and it may be very valuable - might not immediately be obvious. AirBnB, for example, sounded insane to many people before it caught on. The founders had to believe in it, and they had to convince others to do so.
3) For things which are purely subjective (and I know some do find this distasteful, for sometimes good reasons), convincing others of its value is the entire point. Think about things like fashion, music styles, toys / novelties of various kinds - even certain kinds of technologies which only shuffle the deck in terms of functionality / UX may need to have users convinced. The effects of this one can be net positive (something starts out looking like a fad, turns into incredibly useful thing [Twitter]), net negative (unhealthy fad diets), or neutral (Webkinz? Furbies?), but even if you hate these things, you can't wish them away or deny they exist.
But why should you care as a founder if your employees believe in your product? Your employees are professionals, pay them to get shit done and that's it, why do they have to believe in your idea of "Uber for strippers", or "twitter for baby sitters"?
The only ones who have to believe are the ones who put their ass on the line for a potential big reward. And startup employees are not in this category.
So what's the difference between and "employee" and a "mercenary"? If you believe there's any appreciable difference, then I'd argue you already have the answer to your question. If you think there is no difference, then I don't really have much else to say, other than to ask if you can recognize the difference in the way you felt about working on something you really cared about, versus something where you only got money for your work.
Ultimately, it's down to intrinsic motivation[1] versus extrinsic motivation[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Intrinsic_motivatio...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Extrinsic_motivatio...
I also believe that you don't need to be excited about the industry you work in to be excited and stimulated by the technical challenges. A lawyer can be excited about using the law to win a difficult case without caring for his client.
Just to be very clear, I don't blame people who believe in what they do. That's great, but I don't recognize that deeply caring is a requirement to be a good, productive employee.
And I'm not saying that "deeply caring is a requirement to be a good, productive employee" either. However, I will contend that - all other things being equal - a person will be happier, more content, and derive more enjoyment from their occupation, if they "deeply care". How much so is, obviously hard to quantify and this probably matters more to some people than others. I'd also posit that, in general the employees who "deeply care" (or however you want to phrase it) are likely to do better work to at least some small degree, just due to the whole "intrinsic motivation" thing.
I know for myself, I have professional pride in any circumstance, but there's no question I do better work when I actually care about the work, as opposed to when I'm just collecting a paycheck. OTOH, I recognize that I am not a representative sample. :-)
You bet you will. I chose not so long ago to refuse to be exploited by whoever's paying me at the moment, and that makes it really hard for an employer to make me hurt myself for a company's "mission". Or for the paycheck.
It's a much, much better life for a worker, and I can understand why founders would hate it.
More generally, this is known as alienation of labor. Many humans, when they are reduced to pure commodities, don't feel too great about it and may begin to suffer mentally and physically as a result.
The big reward is a big chunk of money. Employees very rarely make a lot of money after an acquisition.
> More generally, this is known as alienation of labor. Many humans, when they are reduced to pure commodities, don't feel too great about it and may begin to suffer mentally and physically as a result.
I never said that. People may not care about your big dream of saving the world and still be experts in their domain and be excited about the technical challenges that come with your idea. I've worked in many industries without caring at all for them (think finance, gambling, advertising) but I was still very stimulated by the technical problems to solve.
There is a big line between not drinking the kool-aid of "we're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility." and alienation of labor.
Yes, I believe that is what you claimed previously. You also seemed to suggest that it was deservedly so (that employees not share in the "big chunk of money")?
> People may not care about your big dream of saving the world
You're changing the parameters. I'm assuming you only care that your product is going to "catch on and make a shitload of money".
The employees are manifesting the product and are the ones who have invested their life in the company. I believe you claimed that employees do not "put their ass on the line" and therefore don't get to share in the "big reward"? What qualifies as putting your ass on the line?
>I never said that.
I didn't say that you said that. I'm saying that what you are describing fits into the more general framework of alienated labor. Feelings of alienation occur when there is little to no connection between the one doing the work and the work itself, which sounds pretty much exactly like what you described. If the game is reduced to "shut up and do what you're told because I write the check" and the employee requires that check to survive, the employee is at high risk of losing autonomy over their work as they may become ever more dependent on their founders and investors (founders and investors may openly exploit this fact). At the same time, the founders and investors may be extracting ever more value from from the company (by which I mean, the employees).
I don't think alienation of labor is a single binary condition. Some work is more alienating than others for various reasons, including founders, investors, managers, colleagues, product, workplace conditions, tasks assigned, etc.
Many people find it alienating to hear founders and investors talk about how they are going to make a shit-ton of money all while claiming that the people doing the actual work haven't put their ass on the line and won't share in the big reward that they are all working to realize.
Despite what most startups say, a minuscule amount of them are actually trying to do this. Most are just trying to make a small group of people rich.
If they believe, then it's easier to exploit them.
No, airbnb founders did not believe. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg did not believe either. Nor did Larry page.
They got there by learning from user, questioning their "belief" and iterating.
Nate: '... so I at this point decided to move to Boston. Had other priorities in my life. And pace suddenly slowed down .... Have you told Michael that I am working on other things?'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya0I6oz7q9U&fea...
Mark: '.. well, it does not have to be anything more than a college friend website. That is a great product.' https://youtu.be/aQ5otpv6kTw?t=252
Larry page: ... tried multiple times to license their technology and later sell the company for a few millions and later for a few billions. The gap in their asking price and market offer kept them going.
This is excellent validation.
There seems to be something especially grandiose about internet startups to a lot of people. 15 years ago I bought into it (I was a fan of Wired's long boom prediction). These days, I'm a bit more jaded. Starting an internet business these days feels a little like starting a rock band.
The basic facts of life are that we're born, we eat, we sleep, we shit, we piss, some of us reproduce, and we die. All other meaning beyond that is socially constructed, from religion to power to currency and wealth to corporations, cults, voluntary associations, friendship, identity, and so on.
All history has been the story of one social illusion replacing another. For a couple millenia the church was dominant; for some period within that, it jockeyed with the kingdom. Starting in the 1800s, the nation-state became dominant; people have been increasingly losing trust in them since Vietnam. The traditional big corp died, as a source of allegiance, in the 1980s. Startups are moving in to fill a void - and, as productive organizations that rely upon peoples' consent for their existence, I think they're a lot better than many of their predecessors.
As a bonus for portfolio optimization and market experiments, they are more disposable than their predecessors.
The half-life of socioeconomic belief continues to shrink.
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/run-startup-like-cult-heres/ http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr...
Steve Jobs obviously stands in a class all his own.
I'd think of it this way, startups and tech disrupt easy things first then harder things. The Newspaper industry was easy pickings, tech devoured it. Now it's working on eating the taxi industry[Uber,Lyft], the auto Industry[Tesla], and the monetary & financial system[Bitcoin]. Once it devours money, which has been the traditional exclusive comport of governments, government itself will be next. After that . . . Religion.
This pattern makes sense, pioneering West was often driven by a religious sentimentality. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe we will start calling them NRE's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_religious_movement
I'm not interested in spending my life doing that, but someone simply needs to show a counter-example to force me to drop the theory :P
Why can't founders understand that employees are there for the paycheck? And rightfully so. "Guys, it's your company too! Let's do great things together and make the world a better place!" Yeah great. And for the next round of funding is it gonna be "my company too" or is my 1/10th of a point gonna be diluted?
When I started at the startup I previously worked at, while we were working for pennies and not making money, it was "our company" because I had equity along with the founders. Once we started making money and could have reasonable salaries it went from "our company" to "my company".
r/node was a big help. I also make sure to learn JavaScript, not NodeJS exclusively. A firm understanding of JavaScript is the best way in my opinion. So start using frontend JavaScript stuff. Angular, React, etc. Once you're very comfortable with that, start building your own stuff. Ignore the "but why would I build my own when so much better exists?" because it's not about building something someone else will use, but to help you understand the workings of what you're building more.
Once you are comfortable in the frontend, NodeJS is just as easy.. Learn the core modules, and ecosystem.
On the frontend you should already be using something like Browserify or Webpack, so you'll already be familiar with using CommonJS based requires.
What do you think about Rails vs Node/Express/etc when it comes to startups? Are more choosing Node lately, or is Rails still the startup gold standard?
This is the comment I've been responding to btw:
> I've been a PHP developer since 1997. December of 2014 I left PHP completely for NodeJS. Best decision of my life.
Can I ask why you feel that way?
Sorry for the interrogation, I'm just really curious and thinking of a transition myself.
No worries, keep asking all you want and I'll do my best to answer them.
> Can I ask why you feel that way?
Mostly because I was getting burnt out in PHP, the community was getting pretty hellacious, and because I wanted to do something new.
Regarding the Rails question, I actually when decided to leave PHP I was debating on learning Rails/Ruby or moving to NodeJS. But because I had been tinkering with NodeJS already (I wrote a pretty extensible IRC bot with a few friends to get the hang of things) and because I already have an understanding of JavaScript I would go NodeJS.
It helps that I'm not jumping between 4 languages in my stack, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS to 3 languages.
Why I feel it was the best decision is mostly because it made me a overall better developer. I started learning a lot more stuff, and found out very verbose things in PHP are simplified in JavaScript.
I mean, look at popular PHP frameworks vs popular NodeJS frameworks... Laravel and Symfony are orders of magnitudes bigger than Express and Hapi/Sails.
PHP while getting better at it, has the NIH mindset whereas NodeJS is about building small packages that do one thing and one thing only and everyone uses them.
> What do you think about Rails vs Node/Express/etc when it comes to startups? Are more choosing Node lately, or is Rails still the startup gold standard?
I think NodeJS is a solid alternative. There's huge companies using NodeJS now, Walmart, Netflix, PayPal just to name a few. And with the fact that NodeJS and iojs team have come together and the Node Foundation exists is great. iojs has been expanding heavily and that's good. NodeJS v4.0.0 is due out in the coming weeks and I can't wait.
Now, would you rather hire the dummy who has no clue how to get shit done but believe in your "LinkedIn for puppies" or the expert who will take you there without caring for your idea?
This post makes it sound like it's a requirement that employees believe deep down in their soul in your idea, while it is not at all required to do a good job.
Given the choice between the two of them, I'd rather take the reasonably competent person who's really excited to be doing the job, rather than the expert who's halfway interested. You can train technical skills; you can't train motivation. And someone who's motivated will usually improve rapidly, so after a year or two, you may very well have an expert that's highly motivated.
That's where that pesky paycheck comes in.
True believers are not what any company needs, but it's all they want.
The problem is - where to? A good start-up is hard to find. Sometimes you just have to suck it up to pay the bills.
As it turns out, great sellers aren't in the business of convincing people. Persuasion is the craft of a mediocre salesman.
Hence, I think this is more accurate:
"Your Job as a Founder is validated by the believers you create."
There is always something in between, such as a vision, a demo, a product, an experience, a great speech, revenue, and so on. But founders don't create believers per se. They generate them. I feel this distinction to be quite important.
Airbnb, Evernote, and Twitter are outliers from a nicer past.
[0] http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm#ad...
Anyway didn't take me too long to realize that all those claimed values where just empty words and the new place was exactly like the old place, and that certainly wasn't good for my moral.
The truly job of a founder is to focus on what really matters: user satisfaction. Working on the features they need, creating a 10x quality product, being the best at the specific area your startup is aiming at. Everything else will follow.
Their response: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And try again. And keep trying. But don't be a damn fool."
What I am worried about is that maybe it is sometimes taken too far, into some kind of religion at which point it is destracting from the actual practical goals of the company.
blind faith vs. logical rational ... being in the in the first business of selling to people(or employees) that work off of blind faith has always been way more profitable in at least power, and sometimes even money.
In the run up to its 2004 Series B funding Pandora was running on financial fumes. Pandora wasn’t able to pay its employees for an astounding two years between 2002 to 2004 while it worked on producing a viable commercial product. Not paying full-time employees is very, very illegal in California, where Pandora is based.
“We had no idea we were breaking the law," Westergren said.
Over that period, Pandora accumulated $2 million in back wages owed.
How this story did not end with Pandora getting nuked from orbit in a court of law, I have no idea. And the bit about Westergren having "no idea we were breaking the law" (wink, nudge, say no more, guv!) is the perfect cherry on top.
I guess we're supposed to celebrate not paying your employees for years as some kind of Triumph of Entrepreneurialism, though. And I suppose it is, if you're Tim Westergren! (Not so much if you're one of the employees who he essentially strong-armed into loaning him tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at zero percent interest, but who cares about them.)
Having never run up that kind of debt I don't know how easy it was for Westergren to do that. But it seems to be a lot of operating cost and wages were being covered by personal debt the founders took out during this time. That or he lived a rather lavish lifestyle.
While I hate the dishonesty and treatment towards employees it seems like Pandora was guilty of, I think some of the numbers are hyperbolic and while the situation was really, really bad, its not as bad as your comment made it out to be.
If the story is at all accurate, these are numbers that Westergren himself was giving in a presentation to a conference. If there's any hyperbole involved, it's his, not mine.
In the world of tech having more suckers than your competition is often the difference between winning and losing. What sane person would give up years of their life to enrich some investors they've possibly never met and one or two founders?
Always be selling.
Always be fund raising.
Always be improving the product.
Always be creating believers.
For each of the above, it is 99% of being a successful CEO.
Right! Now how to cram 4(99) into 100!
Somewhere in there am I also permitted to write good code?
"Getting your employees to buy into your vision is usually more efficient than overpaying them to stay."
There are many companies that don't underpay because they want to exploit people but because they are trying to stay afloat.