Hacker News Reader

Comment by riebschlager | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a stretch at a startup where I was asked to "believe". The company's core values were made into wall artwork and recited aloud at staff meetings. It was all eerily similar to my Catholic upbringing. Including the guilt. "Oh, you want to leave work at 5? Yeah, that's fine. I just thought you really believed."

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?

View on HN

A few potential downsides to an employee not believing:

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...

1. If you cannot offer something better, you don't deserve to retain valuable employees. You need to be a better founder and boss.

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.

agree, there's a difference between "believer" and "gullible". And regarding 2), I suspect a sane dose of skepticism will do more to avoid bad decisions than drinking the company cool-aid

Agree. And a business that's a "nice place to work" for awesome people is hard to find I think. If you've made one of those it'd be hard for employees to find one elsewhere.

Particularly regarding #4, a friend observed that, "people join startups for the vision. They stay for the culture (#4)"

... probably not the least because "the vision" tends to get lost in pivots and priority shifts

1 and 3 would seem to be upsides for employees, though.

No. Number 3 is flat out wrong. Most people will negotiate for more salary because they understand that options will just fuck them over. Money won't.

"They won't push back when bad decisions are made."

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'.

You could replace "not believing" with "being a gullible idiot" and all of what you just wrote would still be true.

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.

Each of these points pertain to the startup gaining leverage over the employee.

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.

> If they are offered an identical position at a company they believe in, they will leave.

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.

#3 is silly.

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.

Indeed. I work for a large tech company that values excitedness about the company over skill. We reject perfectly good engineers because they don't display sufficient excitement or (gasp!) want to be sold on the company in interviews, rather than grovel for an opportunity to get near us.

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.

I was watching those stanford videos YC made last year recently and in one of them they encourage founders to write down a set of values, principles, beliefs etc that employees should follow. Then drill it into them at every opportunity.

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.

That's confusing. Don't you hire people that specialize in their fields as you grow, so wouldn't you want them making the decision that THEY would make, and not your shitty decision? An example being that you don't really want your DBA to "move fast and break things"...

It is about more than which algorithm to use, etc. Let me share an anecdote.

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 don't think you can nail down a specific solution to your anecdotal problem. I suspect if only a few engineers on the team actually enjoyed games and they were forced into a "gaming company" atmosphere they likely would have started putting in resumes after feeling like they were part of a "bait and switch". You hired them to do one thing, and now it has become something else. There are other factors around the gaming industry that might cause them to jump ship (it's well known amongst engineers that gaming companies are typically high turnover and low chance for long term success). Those engineers wanted to work on embedded systems and firmware, and have no desire to learn about gaming, so forcing them into it might backfire as "just more bullshit from the manager".

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.

Your first paragraph is full of really bad assumptions about the situation.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

Agreed.

Joseph here again. I wrote the post.

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 want to believe. I just want to make a lot of money to provide for my family. Maybe even cash in a lottery ticket on these options and punch out of this rat race.

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.

Yes, but the perspective you should be thinking about (and to steal from my own comment) is having employees believe that their lottery tickets have the winning numbers. You want to get paid, but how much are you willing to hedge that your options will be worth something in the future? That I think also very much falls under "belief" in the company.

It's gigs, all the way down. Take a look at the market you're in; is it relevant 10-20-30 years from now? Seriously? If not, it's a gig, and mercenary attitudes make sense. If it is relevant when you're 30 years older, then find the vision that sustains you...there are a lot of "gig takers" in this thread.

> I worked for a stretch at a startup where I was asked to "believe". The company's core values were made into wall artwork and recited aloud at staff meetings. It was all eerily similar to my Catholic upbringing. Including the guilt. "Oh, you want to leave work at 5? Yeah, that's fine. I just thought you really believed."

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.

In my point of view, founders who believe that kind of "tactics" send me the message that they, either unconsciously or consciously, believe the people they hire are intellectually inferior than themselves. It's like they don't expect a fair and mutual beneficial transaction with their business counter-parties. I would personally take that as an insult if they treat me with that.

Let alone a company always hiring people dumber than its founder couldn't be doing too well.

The word "belief" can cover all the ground between "buying into some grand vision for the world" and "belief that you'll get paid next week". When you're starting at square zero, it's useful to treat this whole spectrum as the same problem. Your kick-ass developer doesn't need to buy in some lofty delusion -- she simply needs to believe what you're working on is a stable, useful thing worth contributing to.

Joseph here, I wrote the post.

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.

growing revenue is not just important, it's the reason for existence of every business!

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'

On the other hand, why would anyone dedicate most of their waking hours to something which has making money as its sole objective and output? I mean, if you wanted to do that, there is the algorithmic trading 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)".

"On the other hand, why would anyone dedicate most of their waking hours to something which has making money as its sole objective and output?"

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.

Isn't this just survivor bias, though? How many startups out there really believe and still fail hard? It's very easy to look at Stripe and say "they succeeded because of X", when in reality they succeeded because of a wide variety of factors.

Well, as long as you take OP's article as a reflection on one of those factors then all is well. The problem becomes that many people want to fixate on a particular thing as their elevator to success.

<strike>You mention Stripe twice now.</strike> (Sorry, the first mention was by someone else in a comment above). If their offices were located in my city, I'd jump at a chance to work there. It has nothing to do with belief. It's an interesting and unique product. Really wanting to work on a product doesn't require drinking the kool-aid of PR hype. Companies who try to force the kool-aid down their employees' throats are not to my taste. If Stripe is like that, the bad kool-aid would win out over my severe interest and I would leave.

Is it that unique of a product? It's just payment processing. It's done quite well, but it's not as if they're the first to do payment processing on the internet.

(A late reply here) Maybe you can think of this as 'earn their belief' instead of 'ask them to believe'. The end goal is believers - but how you get there matters too.

The old saw is "Show, don't tell."

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.

I am grappling with salary and equity below what I know I am worth. It's not ridiculous, but I am struggling with feeling undervalued, and interview regularly with other companies. The problem for me is that I believe in what our company is doing, and the vision the founder has laid out before us. Or, to be more frank: I truly believe my lottery tickets have the winning numbers. As much as I wish it were not the case, that is having true power over your employees. The One Ring ain't got shit on having your employees really believe in what you're doing. FML.

Couldn't agree more. These brainwashing tactics are used throughout the industry, not just startups. It's a disgusting approach and be responded with firm regulation and, where appropriate, class action.

In short, no.

Joseph here. I wrote the post.

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.

> Companies like [...] Airbnb have incredible missions

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.

We're all grownups. If you can't follow someone who leads through vision, why aren't you starting your own gig, with your own vision?

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...

"If you can't follow someone who leads through vision, why aren't you starting your own gig, with your own vision?"

Cause working for a company offers health insurance. Starting my own doesn't give me that.

I think this means that you were at the wrong company. Maybe everyone there was. That can happen. You should find a company where you do really believe

The idea that everyone can and should work at a company where they really believe in the mission or culture of that company seems at least somewhat idealistic and naïve.

Absolutely. Also, that choice is luxury that many of us have access to but most people don't.

It's a ideal you should always be pushing toward even if you can't ever actually achieve it completely. If you let up pressure for just a moment, the pendulum will swing in the other direction. And you definitely don't want that.

Joseph here again. I wrote the post.

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.

You can be highly focused on solving a problem without drinking the koolaid. It's not a requirement. Nothing wrong with kicking ass from 9-5 M-F consistently while your less effective coworkers struggle over long hours and through the weekend.

I certainly was at the wrong company. But I didn't leave for a company I believed in more. I went to a company that allows me to make things I enjoy making. Then we get paid and I get the chance to make more things. We're not trying to change the world or "disrupt" anything. And I'm truly grateful that I haven't heard a single person utter the phrase "corporate culture".

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?

"We're all just people who want to spend our days doing and making things in a way that feels valuable."

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.

There is a qualitative difference between using the language of "belief", as in "a founder must create believers" (or to "believe" in a "vision" or "mission statement"), and simply saying you believe you are doing a good job and that you deserve the next paycheck. They require different mindsets and it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Or, as the joke goes: "everyone should believe in something... and I believe I'll have another drink!"

The main difference is one of perspective. From the inside, it is simply belief; you believe what you do, and there is no need to argue it. From the outside, it's "belief", because others do not necessarily believe as you do. The article is targeting unbelievers and so needs to use the language of "belief". The main job of a startup founder is to turn "belief" into belief. Staying at stranger's homes was crazy 5 years ago; now my wife and I do it every time we go on vacation.

> We're all just people who want to spend our days doing and making things in a way that feels valuable

"doing and making things in a way that feels valuable" requires a belief that the things your company do are valuable.

I don't think the OP meant believing in a set of made up "core values" or even in a marketing message but rather in the vision. It shouldn't be something that can be leveraged against anyone (i.e. Staying late) but it should be what drives you to push forward when there's no other tangible return in sight.

Rands has some good articles about culture. http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-culture-chart/

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.

if 9 to 5 job attitude can create any amazing startup, please give an example.

get the term "9 to 5" out of your head and start thinking about life balance. Startups that believe you need to dedicate your life and soul to them to be worth anything need to go back to the drawing board on 'culture'.

Fog Creek/Trello/SO

Reply on news.ycombinator.com