Things are going so well we’re doing a hiring freeze
m.signalvnoise.com
m.signalvnoise.com
[0]: http://renewablewealth.com/the-parable-of-the-mexican-fisher...
Now take it to the economy.
Economy != business or individuals. If an individual "saves" it means they forgo consumption, so that resources can go elsewhere. When the economy "saves" (and let's assume we are talking about all of earth) it means - what? The same economic activity but fewer people buy something? Doesn't quite work. We could leave resources like oil in the ground to "save".
On the scale of the economy, there is no "saving" for retirees, not unless you are looking for other nations to fill the gap (but let's look at the whole earth so that won't work unless you find aliens). The currently working population has to produce everything needed for the currently living population. How would "saving" look like, I ask again? They produce much more and put it into giant warehouses to be used 30 years later?
That anecdote for the economy could mean that you stop trying to sell people stuff they don't need (more insurance, more cars, more... stuff). you can still invest into R&D, and more relaxed and less stressed people will be much more productive in this field than stressed ones.
Looking at studies of worker satisfaction and - a bit more unscientifically but still enlightening for its popularity (this and similar ones) - Dilbert cartoons, and also reddit or HN anecdotes and what I see for myself, a sizable amount of the workforce thinks their work contribution is rather meaningless. Still, we are forced to keep going. There is no option to stop and think "hey, my job is actually pretty useless". If you act on such a thought you will be severely punished by society. Anyone who claims that "the market" takes care of all those inefficiencies... well, okay then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbei...
Arbeitsmoral means working morale. Senkung means reduction.
[0] http://jameszol.com/stories/infamous-fisherman-parable-now-w...
Edit: you fixed it, thanks
- Less is more. Jason Fried is such a minimalist, https://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-f...
- Few formal meetings.
- No full-time managers.
- In fact, just about everything in their books Getting Real, https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real, and Rework.
They do things that I've always felt are right but could not well argue. They are the opposite of most companies in so many ways, especially big corporations.
If you haven't read their books, you might tell me, just work at a start-up. But you really have to go through Getting Real to see how much they differ from everyone else, even your typical start-up. The chapter about doing less than your competition is particularly devastating, different than even most start-ups.
I like to think that Jason Fried/DHH went to the bother of writing all these books and blog posts because they legitimately want to see more businesses run like theirs in the world.
As an employee for a larger company, if your manager tells you to do crap you don't want to do, well you generally have two choices: do it, or quit.
If you're running your own thing, you suddenly have a few more choices: you can reassess whether that thing needs to be done in the first place. You can suck it up and do it yourself, but perhaps you're a little more motivated than if it were your boss at $megacorp telling you to do it because you directly understand why it needs to be done. You could also delegate it to one of your employees, or to a contractor. Etc.
I've been in the industry for about 10 years - at tiny startups, growing startups, mid sized agencies, large companies - and I'm realizing more and more that the odds of running your own thing seem more favorable than the odds of finding the perfect team with a delightful manager where you will only ever work on the things you want to work on, in the environment you want (maybe you want every other wednesday off to hang out with your kid. maybe you don't want meetings after lunch because that's when you're the most productive. etc.)
Of course, that equation is different for everyone - depending on your priorities and interests, you might be better off just working for $megacorp, taking the good with the bad.
But I find it a little mind blowing that my comment is so controversial (currently at -1, with only dismissive replies) on a board dedicated to entrepreneurship.
I will also add (and I'm not saying anything new here, just parroting what 'patio11 and others have said over and over over the years) that most programmers are better equipped than they think they are when it comes to generating meaningful value that can be turned into, at the very least, a living where they get to call the shots.
Not to mention, this is "Hacker News", not "Entrepreneur News". While there is a good deal of overlap, most of the content here is technology related, not business related. I don't see many articles being posted here on how to choose a health plan for your company, for instance.
"That, combined with the kneejerk response of "start your own company!" combined with the fact that many of us just plain don't want to do that; we don't want the assload of hours and commitment it comes with that we'd rather spend with our families generally means that such suggestions do not contribute to the discussion."
Again, not sure what makes it a "knee jerk response"; pointers would be appreciated. As far as the "assload of hours", "never seeing your family", etc... this is exactly what Jason Fried and DHH are writing about. These are _not_ requirements to running a sustainable business. If you read Fried and DHH's writings and find yourself nodding in agreement at every word, I guess there are 2 takeaways one could get from it: the obvious "I really should work at Basecamp!", and the perhaps a bit less obvious "whoa, you can run a sustainable business without killing yourself, and those 2 guys are documenting their process - I could do the same!". I think the latter is not to be overlooked.
If you feel strongly that starting a company isn't for you, nothing wrong with that. But harshly attacking HN posters who merely suggest that this could be a worthy option just defies common sense and civil discourse.
And you weren't "harshly attacked." You were called out for putting too much into the cult of the startup. And yes, at the beginning, you do have to put in those hours. Ask the people who started Basecamp; in the beginning they did put in those hours. Once those hours were no longer necessary, then they eased back.
Man, seriously, not everyone can, or even should, run a company. I like to write code, I don't like to run a business.
That is such a silly, extremely silly thing to suggest.
Work at Google? Why? Start your own Google! For realz?
As a result the original fisherman finds his fish stocks are sapped by the growing fisher man's venture, and, unable to afford a boat to go into deeper water, finds himself bankrupt and working for the businessman who would have been his partner.
The issue with that version is it ignores that you aren't just sitting on your hands but rather ensuring that your customers stay your customers. But it does beg the question - Are you growing to a better future or just improving the same day over and over?
That the community would be hit by a natural disaster but the prospering fisherman provides the influx of cash for emergency relief whereas doing nothing meant no means of recovery.
The story of preservation/destruction of habitat, the community improving/declining, the prospering fisherman rising but still (not) finding time to enjoy chatting with friends, and other dramatic flairs to help sell whatever flavor of capitalism you believe in.
Neither the fisherman nor the banker have it right. You see, the banker may be overly ambitious, but the fisherman is not taking precaution against future's uncertainty. You can be sure DHH has enough money and he doesn't need the headache of running a big business. The fisherman, on the other hand, may want to consider the day he cannot fish and not expect the seas to provide until his very last day.
The banker relies on a socialized bailout.
The banker is happy to be getting on with business as usual.
I want to work at Basecamp even more now, haha.
Engineers sometimes consider those companies uncool, but that's just because they usually can't pay market rate for the best engineers.
If it were simply as easy as building 17 solid startups to just 4 failures, I'm sure there would be more investment in that area. It seems much more likely to have maybe 5 solid startups (20% annual profit), 5 with possibilities (losing 20-30% per month) and 11 failures.
Entrepreneurs suffer from their biased perspective; of course my startup could be solid and profitable, because otherwise why would I continue working on it? Therefore it seems rational to assume you can identify prospectively profitable startups.
My opinion is that VC investment is a crapshoot, where nobody knows the odds of a given company. They're buying lotto tickets, and they'd rather buy $5mm tickets that have a max prize in the billions, instead of a $100k ticket that has a max prize in the millions.
To change the current system, all we need to do is come up with a guaranteed way of evaluating whether a startup will be profitable.
Having 20x small, profitable companies netting say 1-5M/year isn't their modus operandi.
If anyone could identify early-stage companies with a 75-100% chance of being profitable, wouldn't we see an investor niche that supports this?
(I can think of one counter-counter argument: the hype created by VCs is so big that the investor and founder markets are acting irrationally.)
Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts on this.
We can't do that for the current style of VC investing. Why would we need to do it for a more modest form?
The other bonus is that profitable startups usually need less VC money. So given the same amount of funds, VCs could spread their investments out over even more companies.
I guess I was asking if there are other explanations for why this is, or if the strategy appears to be optimal to others.
If it is the best strategy, any discussion about unicorns versus profitably invested smaller startups is moot, because it's based on the assumption that the investment class should do something that's strategically suboptimal.
Duh? You say that as if it should be considered surprising. It would be surprising if it were an irrational preference, not a completely rational preference.
The real question is why the economy is geared towards such an uneven distribution of returns. I don't think it's a law of nature (e.g. economies of scale) because for pretty much all corporations there are massive diseconomies of scale that offset that. You just have to work at one of them to see how manifestly inefficient they are, and yet they still dominate and investors still exhibit an exceptionally strong preference for them.
I think may be an artefact of the American tax and legal system which allows the use of size and wealth as market leverage to an extreme degree. Investors prefer to see one big Uber/Microsoft/Google over a hundred smaller Uber/Microsoft/Googles because that one big company, can legally use its size to crush smaller, more efficient competitors and thus achieve monopoly or oligopoly power which it can safely use to wring profits out of customers without fear of being undercut.
If the legal and tax system cracked down on this phenomenon instead of covertly encouraging it (e.g. with stuff like tax holidays for Apple) I think VCs would probably adjust their preferences accordingly.
This is an interesting discussion; is it shapeable market forces (US tax and legal system) that creates these incentives, or is it something more inherent to trying to predict the outcome of a really complex problem?
It sounds like you believe it to be the former, whereas I believe it to be the latter.
Yes, my whole point is it is an inevitable outcome of the the confluence of immutable randomness, immutable human nature and the structure of our economy.
However, that doesn't mean that it's a fait accompli - the structure of our economy is mutable via law and taxes. That tax system and laws help discourage lots of competing Ubers and encourage one big monopoly Uber. The question you have to ask is - is that really the most desirable outcome?
>whereas I believe
Belief is for gospel preachers and anarcho-libertarians. It's not rational to apply it here.
Tricky part is that companies that have the potential for hypergrowth look awfully similar to terrible ideas that will clearly crash and burn.
Lately I've really noticed that you don't just get advice anymore, you also get a little bit of commentary on how the rest of the tech industry is dumb or insane or both because those fools are doing it the old way and we're doing it our own progressive and enlightened way that we figured out on our own after we sat down, put on our critical thinking caps, and tried something different, and lo and behold it worked.
This latest exercise stands out as particularly offensive because there really isn't any advice or wisdom worth sharing. They're just telling us that Basecamp had the best year ever and they don't feel like improving on it so they're not hiring at the moment. Correction, it's actually a hiring freeze. Same thing, except the phrase "hiring freeze" is normally used in the context of something bad. They're going to use it in a different context to, you know, get more claps on Medium. On top of all this they felt the need to do a little compare and contrast between what they're doing vs what the rest of those unenlightened fools in the tech industry are doing, i.e. reinvest profits into new ways to grow.
Whatever. There are plenty of businesses that are happy with where they're at and settle-in, Basecamp is different because they're a tech company and they feel the need to blog about it. As for those companies that are growing, well, I think it's perfectly fine to keep growing, just don't turn your company into the equivalent of foie gras.
It's just disappointing. I looked up to them, still kinda do, but this is just marketing spin designed to make something boring and innocuous look radical.
And I'd highlight this...
> They're just telling us that Basecamp had the best year ever and they don't feel like improving on it so they're not hiring at the moment.
And...
> There are plenty of businesses that are happy with where they're at and settle-in, Basecamp is different because they're a tech company and they feel the need to blog about it.
I do enjoy their approach, quite a lot actually. But I'd enjoy it more if they spent more time sharing real experience and learnings (and failures), and less time projecting often absurd things on mainstream "entrepreneurial culture" while telling me how they're so much better.
Here is what I found: "Broadly speaking, the award of a residence permit depends on two things: your country of citizenship and your ability to financially sustain yourself and any dependents. This generally means you need a job offer, or you must prove financial sustainability if you are coming to Norway to study or for some other reason.
It is possible for some people to move to Norway as a job seeker, but this is only allowed for a relatively short period of time. If you don’t manage to find employment during that time, you will have to leave the country, and there is a waiting period before you will be able to return." - https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norway-immigration-guide/
There was never anything specific about Norway (as compared to the other Scandinavian countries that generally top happiness indexes and such) just that the article said that I _couldn't_ live there.
It seems to me if one gets a real job offer then there is a good chance to get a work permit.
By American standards Norwegians are all racist assholes.
Smart guys.
(This is a slightly reworded version of my initial question... Who uses Basecamp?)
this is just an excuse to extract more profits coated in technofounderbabble.
If you are an owner, #3 will not only improve your products, but also likely to make your entire company much more valuable over time. If the staff are also owners or there is a system in place such that the staff benefits when the owners benefit, they will likely be on board for #3 as well. If #3 is not sufficient enough to provide support, then hiring should be done.
I imagine customers are pretty happy too knowing that they aren’t at risk of the company being flipped and the product discontinued or bloated in order to attract the next order of magnitude growth from corporate buyers who will themselves never use the product.
Your last sentence is the most laughably ironic since the entire VC game is to extract value from the energy and drive of young people with the promises of Facebook riches which will only ever materialize for a vanishingly small number of individuals, especially amongst the rank and file.