Things startups do and don't need | Hacker News Reader

Things startups do and don't need

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16 pointsneilc22 comments

I respectfully would swap "Need: Beer on Fridays" with "Don't Need: Aeron chairs." If my back is killing me because of crappy chairs, no amount of beer is going to stop me from finding a new job.

agreed. if company provides an office, providing great chairs goes a long way to increasing health and morale, and it's a company asset that can be reused by various employees, etc. beer is relatively cheap, a consumable, not an asset, and adults expect to buy beer on their own dime and time, if at all. chairs are a business tool, beer is not. do you need Aerons at launch? no. but that's a more substantive benefit for your employees that beer.

If I like the people I am working around then most of that stuff is nice but not necessary, except maybe for the back and the chair thing. I would add a quick commute in the first list and a work at home option.

Agreed. If I want to encourage somebody to sit in a chair for 8-12 hours a day, it's reasonable for me to spend $1k on that chair.

Even if I said the chairs were getting replaced every three years, it'd be a pittance. The comfort would need to get me an average of $1 of additional productivity, per employee, per day, to pay for themselves.

If they save a few people back problems, they're more likely to get me, far, FAR more than that.

(Posted while sitting on a Steelcase Leap)

From my reply on my blog (http://bit.ly/4RCZYi):

Things startups do need that are missing from the original list:

* Revenue Because you’re a business first and everything else second. And once you have that, profit.

* Technical talent If ideas are worth less than execution, then you need the best people you can get to execute.

* Passion Nothing is better than working on something you believe in. It just doesn’t feel like work.

You need Microsoft products if your company sells to medium/large businesses.

You need business cards if you do direct sales or consulting.

You need air conditioning, perhaps more than heat, pretty much everywhere in the US.

Why do you think that Microsoft products are necessary to sell to large businesses? There might not be any large businesses that don't have any Microsoft products, but I've seen several successful sales to very large business by small companies without Microsoft products.

I thought so, too; I work at a web design / marketing company, where I assumed we could use whatever we wanted as long as the site worked in IE and FF. But our clients send site copy revisions in Word, and screenshots of bugs in Powerpoint, and they want hour estimates in Excel.

I tried using OpenOffice for about a week, but having 99% of MS Office left me 1% short.

>"Democratically controlled music system"

Please, no. How about headphones?

One of my old startups in 2003, we made one of music system from spare parts and one guy wrote an web base controlling daemon for it. Then we contributed our collection of CDs. We can use web interface to control the system and up/down or veto the music. And we also have an anthem around 4pm. (The whole Coffin for Head of State by Fela Kuti). It becomes like a ritual.

It creates a bond among people because we know what music that each of us likes. We did not play pop charts or technos, but more like Jazz, Punk, Art Rock and any fun but not mainstream popular songs.

We have almost 128 GBs of mp3 after 3 years. That was one heck of good memory than listening through headphone.

You need a license for workplace music in the UK, also copying a CD for any reason is illegal over here, we don't have a [fair use] backup facility in our legislation.

I work out of a co-working space here in Boston that has Airtunes hooked up. I like it. Sometimes people are on the phone or playing something I don't particularly like so I throw on headphones. Other times it's nice to remove myself from the headphone bubble and interact with the world a bit more. I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss out on any interesting conversations when wearing headphones.

i roughly agreed except certain items like the beer and music sound juvenile and clearly are not needed for a startup. i would add something like oh say, call me crazy, but I dunno a business model, and understanding how long your runway is. and while you don't need a formal vacation policy, i'd say that you need some understanding of who contributes what, roughly how much, and when. That's way more important than "sunny offices", windows that open, etc.

I hope nobody takes this blog post at face value.

You may, depending upon jurisdiction, be legally obligated to provide the following:

* Vacation policy

* Phone system

You may need to have the following documented, to comply with labor laws:

* Set time you need to arrive in morning

I, for one, have never worked anywhere that had:

* Windows that open

* Democratically controlled music system

* EVDO cards

* Gmail and Google docs

What legal jurisdiction requires phone service for all employees? And which labor laws require that there be a set time of arrival in the morning? (I can understand laws requiring a documented number of hours worked per week, of course.)

I thought "phone system" referred to "a number the business itself can be reached at, as opposed to any individual member of said business."

Mountain View requires phone systems to pass fire inspection in office buildings. Employees generally need a system by which to contact emergency services.

Labor laws in some jurisdictions cover employee expectations by the employer. If the employer is shown to have arbitrary expectations of their employees (like "soft hours" or flexible work schedules), those expectations need to be somewhere in writing or you can get in big trouble. I've heard of engineering firms being totally screwed (into bankruptcy) by overzealous labor law enforcement when it was discovered that they, for example, had policies like "work whenever and however you want, as long as you get your job done."

You certainly don't need google docs, and you certainly do need IE, if only for testing.

They need heating, but not air conditioning? We can guess the type of climate this person lives in...

I think all of the items on the first list can safely be moved to the second.

You do need "Mac laptops" but you don't need "Microsoft products"? I call fanboy bullshit. Strike "Mac" from the first list and I might be persuaded.

Wait, I missed this. Health care plans, but no dental?

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