Hire Family People
37signals.com
37signals.com
I've always found pg's essays to be motivational and inspring, but there are two things that always turn me off; 1.) I don't live in San Fransisco, and probably never will, and 2.) I have a family. I often feel dismissed by PG and his disciples. DHH's stuff gives me hope that there's still a chance for "fogeys" (cripes, I'm only 33!) like me.
I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. Is that fair?
I stay up late into the night hacking after the kids go to bed, and I'm in the office hours before other people are there so I can do some extra hacking. Am I not motivated enough? Can I not be passionate? Perhaps DHH is onto something. Perhaps balancing the challenges of work and family five you a healthy dosage of time management and prioritization skills.
There are some interesting comments on DHH's site - several presumably young, single kids are crabby and crying "discrimination!" (e.g., "Wow, that’s actually offensive. And illegal in BC, Canada and I hope other enlightened jurisdictions.", or the more eloquent "I’m single and you can kiss my ..."). I wonder if these people have ever noticed that the discrimination often goes the other way, against the thirty-something parent crowd, too.
We don't ask on the application form if people have kids, nor as far as I can recall have we asked anyone in an interview. The reason most of the people we fund don't have kids is simply that most of the people who apply don't have kids.
how do you know if you don't ask?
From a lot of unfortunate experience: tech people suck at following these rules.
You could see what neighborhood someone lives in because that will also be typically included on a resume too. Why would you hire someone who can't even put their street address on their resume? Sure, a street address doesn't have much significance to /most/ hiring decisions, although if you knew a candidate would have a 100 mile commute each day, choosing someone who lived around the corner would make a lot of sense if the job required call-out or easy access to the office.
And so it goes. You'll see someone's race at interview. You can probably even figure out if someone's married (presence of a ring). It seems crazy to make it illegal to ask these questions. Instead, it should be law that it's optional for the candidate to ANSWER them.
What I'm asking is, one reasonable person to another, what possible reason could you have for wanting to know the age of an applicant? It is legal to ask if a candidate can legally work full time for you. Why would you ask anything more?
That opens another can of worms. Any refusal to answer implies something to hide, which would be an immediate red flag.
I mean, women do it all the time.
Isn't every question optional? It's not like you go to jail if you don't answer a question. It's not a good strategy, but AFAIK it is legal
I have no idea how you could possibly say "No it doesn't".
It is probably true that people with more fiduciary responsibilities have more to think about when taking the plunge, but that is a tautology. People with more responsibility have more responsibility.
My point is that even if you have a house, cars, kid(s), student loans, etc. you can do it. It just takes a bit of planning a maybe a little help from your friends & family.
Plus, I don't know about you, but I have real world experience about a boatload of pitfalls that I know to avoid that I wasn't aware of 10 years ago. That is a potential source of significant efficiency.
37s viewpoint is more about a sustainable "small" business. Both are valid.
PS I am 33 w. kids as well, and know what it is like. In some ways, you can have a lot more time to think/hack, as you tend to spend more time at home (and quiet time is spent at home, not out at the pub).
But IMHO 37s viewpoint has little to do with startups. Sure, we could all go and build a modest business that can grow to a small/medium size, and sustain us. But I'm guessing that would count as a failure for a lot of us.
No, it is not fair for you to air that feeling here. The YC partners get enough discouragement from having to reject a lot of smart people, so why add discouragement about someone speculating they would be rejected if they actually applied?
News.yc is a handout. Take it and be grateful. The information I've gotten here has been invaluable for my own work, and it's actually possible to keep up with it. (I try to follow TechCrunch for photo-specific news that doesn't rise up here, but there's too much noise. I have a day job and 3 kids, so I have to budget my time.)
If you don't want to be dismissed, implement something great. Nobody will ask about your family status.
It's the delivery I have a problem with. More and more, it seems like DHH and his sidekick are deliberately looking for fights. Like they have something they need to prove.
Therapy?
So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk.
Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids are so great, why aren't more founders parents when they start their business" to "kids might make you more productive during regular working hours, but you need more than just regular working hours to start a business".
I'm happy to offer my thoughts on the second argument as well. I think people working on startups generally work way too much and the ones that succeed don't do so because they put in 14-hour days.
At 37signals, our "startup" (Basecamp) got off the ground on a 10 hour/week programming budget and designers who were busy doing client projects. For the first year, it wasn't the sole focus for the company.
We believe those constraints were instrumental in their way they shaped Basecamp and thus part of the success of the company.
Doesn't mean that there might not be other businesses out there where working lots and lots of hours can be beneficial somehow, but I think that it's a fallacy that you need to work crazy hours to succeed. I do believe that others believe this, though, I just don't think it's healthy or beneficial.
All of this is somewhat tangential to the original argument, though, which is that you shouldn't be afraid of hiring family people. Who should start a company is a great debate as well, though.
But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem to be a lot more startups that did than didn't.
Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time on something makes the result come out worse. Probably this also varies with the type of work. So it could be that when person = dhh and work = product design, 10 hours per week is a reasonable limit, and when it's someone else and the work = writing database software, the limit might be 70 hours per week.
In the absence of any other evidence, you have to assume that successful startup founders knew what they were doing, and that if they worked long hours it was because it paid off for them.
And we're saying here's an example of a web startup that didn't follow the traditional wisdom of "long hours necessary for business success", which is offered as one data point that perhaps "long hours" isn't the success requirement as some might think it is.
Similar to the talk from SUS on Gmail's invitation system. Just because Gmail used an invitation system and had success doesn't mean that using an invitation system will give you success.
(BTW, as meta comment, I'm incredibly impressed with the level of discussion here. It's so un-web like ;). Where are all the personal insults, the trolling, and all that which we've otherwise come to accept must be part of a open-for-all comment box. Very nice job!)
I suppose you've both seen the writings of Alan Carter (http://the-programmers-stone.com/about/) and it seems to me that it just might be a way of getting these two seemingly differing viewpoints aligned.
If stress is the biggest factor then age or marital status might have very little to do with it. At least directly. Married people might have learned to handle stress well and younger people might be less affected by it.
That is to say, you both might have seen the "less stress affected" crowd and drawn conclusions about it.
It's just that it's possible to overconstrain the solution as much as underconstrain it. In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it. As the startup gets more developed (or if you start with a simple enough problem), the amount of work needed becomes manageable enough to juggle with family life.
Same goes for having a day job. It worked for Joshua Schacter, Pierre Omidyar, and Steve Wozniak, because the focus of having only so many hours available disciplined them to work on products they could do in those hours. And the economy was such that not many other people were working on those products, so they ended up dominating their niches. But it fails for many, many other entrepreneurs, because the problems they could solve within those constraints had already been solved by hundreds of other people.
That doesn't mean that they make you net better, though. If they did, you could prove by induction that the ideal strategy in a startup would be to work an arbitrarily small amount of time per day.
For a given startup, a particular limit on startup time might actually be optimal. But I think it's pretty likely that different startups are going to find different sets of constraints (regarding time, budget, or other areas) optimal.
This sentence resonated with me as a father of two. But on second thought, I realize, the root reason I do not attempt it (again, for now) is a lack of finances and stability, not a lack of time. I lack time because I have a day job, and I have a day job because I don't have the money to pursue my own business without incurring lots of debt.
The optimal solution, for me, would be to have 12 months salary saved up, and burn through that while starting my own business. And it wouldn't be a 'startup' by PG's definition--I've learned that control is more important to me than growing fast.
I actually thought that people at Google were pretty reasonable. They weren't exactly 9-5, but most people weren't working 80 hours/week either (I certainly didn't).
What else is there to being successful other than productivity?
I'd suggest this: DHH mentions "an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear", but in a startup, often there is no "objective" - reasonably clear or not. Instead, there is something more like a search heuristic based on "the view form here". With time, the heuristic changes, and the objective changes, and the strategy changes, and the product changes. If I remember correctly, Flickr started as a Flash-based chat website. To get from there to what Flickr was acquired as required the notorious "startup hours". Basecamp went through no such life-changing make-overs, and so didn't require those kinds of hours.
To many people, being in a startup is about selling the same thing to the same people - eyeballs to VCs or Google. That's it. There frequently isn't a lot of concern over what exactly it is that draws them there. In these situations, long hours are required (or at least mandated) because the target moves so frequently because someone has a "better idea" or needs to implement "just this one thing" to appease some VC who ends up not funding you anyway. This lack of focus and constraints leads to middle of the road products that can only be worked on by people working 14 hour days to adapt to the ongoing changes.
It's sort of like when Hollywood is out to make a "blockbuster." They buy a popular comic book character, get a dozen hack writers to work on it - even while the scenes are being shot - and they put in a bunch of crap special effects. Sure, sometimes it works, but most of the time it's a bunch of dreck that will never make back its $200 million budget. Contrast that to the lifestyle business - er, independent film - being written and directed by the guy who LOVES what he's doing and making it for himself and you get Pulp Fiction.
Me, I'd much rather make "Pulp Fiction" than "Daredevil."
Funny as a joke, but a bit chilling when it's given as real advice.
EDIT: apparently the source has been revised to make it clear that the point is just to look evenly at parents and non-parents; that's OK, but I'll leave the comment above in reference to the earlier version.
See for example http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030430-000001....
The paper is "Implicit Discrimination." Marianne Bertrand, Dolly Chugh and Sendhil Mullainathan; American Economic Review, 2005, 95(2), pp. 94-98.
if you have access. Unfortunately, I don't at this time.
The basic results are that a resume with a 'black' name versus a 'white' name (and no other difference) are far less likely to fetch callbacks. Further, there's no appreciable difference in callbacks for black candidates with increasing skills, whereas there's a drastic increase for white candidates.
There are many other studies, and then there's my own, personal experience, which I'm not about to get into.
At least people generally recognize that sexism is wrong. There is a lot less raised consciousness when it comes to ageism.
You start college early, and everyone says you're too young. And then later, ironically, you find when you hit 30 that the thinking has recently shifted when it comes to start-ups, so then you're too old.
"Update: Removed potential confusion around labor discrimination."
Which is a healthy thing for Hacker News, I think, getting other perspectives.
I think what made people think DHH's advice was relevant to startups was that he was talking about starting a business to write software, which is also what most startups do. But structurally the kind of small business he was talking about was more like a landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant. Which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do; it's just not a startup.
Say like foot locker or Zappos for a "shoe store" (both big business) and say McDonald's or Olive Garden for a restaurant.
By the same measure, we're building 37signals to grow as well. Grow revenues, grow customers, grow influence. We're just not that hooked on growing head count or office space (which are often the most visible indicators of growth for a private company and thus often mistaken as the only indicators).
To me a startup simply means a new business that's getting off the ground. That business may well end up big one day and it may not, which is okay too.
I generally don't think that you can become a star by trying to be a star. I think you just try to be the best at what you do and if you are, hopefully the star part will take care of itself.
Maybe, but I didn't invent it. It's just the definition in current use. As most people use the word, it's more specific than a business that's merely new. As most people use the word, it doesn't include barber shops, gas stations, shoe repair stores, etc. There are structural differences between that kind of company and a startup. McDonald's and Olive Garden aren't restaurants, but restaurant chains. They do things very differently from your local Italian restaurant.
But that's again off topic. I do agree that the startup term is most frequently associated with technology companies, but you do hear about startups within a fair number of other lines of business too.
Sometimes the chain guys will take a restaurant that's successful and turn it into a chain, but when they do this they usually keep nothing more than the name and a few recipes. McDonald's was a burger place started by the McDonald brothers, but it only became the McDonald's we know after Ray Kroc bought it and transformed it into a chain.
I agree that startups don't have to be doing technology. I don't remember saying otherwise.
You're right; restaurants conceived as chains dominate the top of the list, with some very notable exceptions, including KFC, Starbucks, and Subway.
Something else that the top of that list shares in common is that they were lucrative for their investors.
Something else that they share is that they are all crappy. Look how far down that list you have to go before you hit something you'd actually choose freely? In-N-Out is #89.
Basically, the difference between a small business and a startup is like the difference between a shrub and a redwood seedling.
The metaphor isn't perfect, because occasionally companies are transformed from one to the other. But this is extraordinarily rare.
How many YC companies fit this definition? I thought the goal was to make the founders rich, which so far hasn't included growing into a big company.
Amer. Heritage: A business or an undertaking that has recently begun operation: grew from a tiny start-up to a multimillion-dollar corporation.
Note that's just example usage; startup doesn't denote a design to become a big company.
I thought the goal was to make the founders rich, which so far hasn't
included growing into a big company.
Also, with only minimal snark intended: you're saying 37Signals is a "shrub"?
In the Apple/Microsoft initial period, there were plenty of smaller competitors who wanted to slowly sell stuff to hobbyists and "expand naturally" and none of those companies exist anymore.
There were no desktops when Microsoft started. There was the Altair, and they started by writing a basic for it. The market was not planetary as it is now.
Apple was started by a guy who wanted to make the best personal computers
Woz was making computers for himself and to show off at homebrew. From his own words, the Apple I was a PC board they sold to hobbyists for $40 apiece after manufacturing them for $20, per Jobs's egging. You're probably right about Yahoo, but MSFT and APPL did not start out as global reach companies. They started out as local restaurants.
If that happens to lead to a billion-dollar company, awesome. But the odds of business tells us that's probably not overly likely, so we're making sure we'll be happy even if that doesn't happen.
(Who knew merely being satisfied with millions -- single, tens, or even hundreds -- would sound like a humble goal in this context.)
You've assumed that 37Signals refusal to staff up and take speculative VC rounds means they're steering the ship away from being "a billion dollar mammoth". But 37Signals is more successful than most of the companies (yes, most) that take VC rounds, and has enviable revenue growth.
I think you're seeing a business model that doesn't fit the YC get-rich-quick mold --- and that's what it is, read the essays --- and pushing it into a "small business" bucket. The real world doesn't bucket like you want it to.
We now return to your regular program...
Some times they will simply develop concepts (often 4 or 5 at a time) start one of each, and see what sticks.
I've studied the restaurant industry quite a bit and can only think of a few chains that stumbled into it.
Shiny.
That said, the things you describe closely match what I've wanted to pursue. For me, and many others, it's the more rewarding, long-term way of doing things. Your talk at SS08 was a huge breath of fresh air.
But, I don't think it's all that fair to dilute someone else's definition of a startup with your own idea of what a startup is. It might be time to come up with a different term, and let startup mean the thing that pg and the vc guys and others want it to mean.
If so, there's an awful lot of tech companies that have been wrongfully labeled as startups under this narrow definition. And you'd only be able to call yourself a startup in retrospect once you saw whether you ended up being a megabucks exit.
So 37signals would have been a startup if we sold to Google tomorrow, but not if we kept on as an independent company just making money?
Do I necessarily think that that's the only kind of "startup" that exists? No, not at all. (And I'm probably gonna get busted at some point for putting words in pg's mouth.)
But, in a nutshell, no, they're not talking about the same kind of businesses you are. Others have already made this point for me (http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/04/startup-school-surfi...).
So, coming back and saying, "No, we're talking about two different approaches to the same thing!" ... well, that's not helpful.
Again, my only point is that they're talking about a very specific sort of model when they use the word "startup". If you think your model is the same thing, I wonder how you'd distinguish between a startup and a "software business", or "web venture", or whatever. (And, I think this point is getting made by other elsewhere, not just in this thread but outside of news.yc.)
PG, who is always civil here, dragged into a stupid semantic fight?
I boggle.
"So 37signals would have been a startup if we sold to Google tomorrow, but not if we kept on as an independent company just making money?"
No, man. You're just playing semantic games, and you know it . The company would have been a startup if its founders had the intentions of being large or becoming part of something large.
Really, you have nothing better to do than to come to this nice place and crap all over it?
You're giving him more credit than he's due. He is not polite. Passive-aggressive arrogance is not the same thing as "polite".
Argh. I haven't been doing anything to the definition of the word. I'm just using it as everyone does. Think about newspaper headlines, for example. Wouldn't you be surprised if a company described in a headline as a "startup" turned out to be a shoe repair shop, or Exxon?
I got an accountant to do my taxes this year for the first time. He called my sole proprietorship a startup and did the accounting accordingly. Bootstrappers: keep records of all your expenses, even if it takes years for you to get everything going. Eventually it will all be deductible, amortized over 5 years from the time you start getting revenue.
Every startup should be free to choose their outcome, and if most choose to try and quickly flip, then more power to them. If they choose to try and build a profitable independent business, great! There is no need to turn the 'liquidity event' vs 'sustainable business' camps into warring factions, like some weird language flame war.
It was refreshing at SUS to see a contrasting opinion, but neither side is trying to argue that their way is the only way. Both ways obviously work, and I think anyone would be happy with either of them over not succeeding at all.
Zappos was also a poor choice. It wasn't as if Zappos was a small time shoe store that decided to put up a web storefront and somehow magically scaled up its operations into a billion dollar business in the course of 5 years. Zappos was started buy a guy who had 250 million dollars from selling a software startup to Microsoft. It was specifically started to corner the online shoe market, in the same way Amazon was started to corner the online book market. It was also funded by Sequoia capital, further making it more like a "startup" startup than a DHH work-life-balance startup.
And I think that's really unfortunate because controlling the language controls the thinking.
Let's face it: people (at least in tech circles) think it is very cool to be in a startup. And it is in the VCs interests to further that sense -- of being caught up in something big and exciting.
It lends a rockstar sensibility to a startup that is NOT conferred to a lifestyle company.
Even reading at Paul's posting on this tends to reinforce that subtle dig -- look at the examples: "landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant". None of those sound exciting to me.
Perhaps my issue is that the measure of "grow very large" is ambiguous. Does it mean large profits? Sorry, Facebook. Large revenues? Sorry Youtube. Spending lots of money? Yay Webvan! Perhaps it means employing lots of people -- which the left-winger in me approves of mightily!
I've always felt that the goal should be to touch as many lives a possible. That's my personal metric on which I base "large". This is consistent with Paul's examples -- you can touch a limited number of people with a landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant.
But on the web you can touch a LOT of lives with a small set of money. I would hazard that David's touched far more lives at 37Signals through their consumer products and through Rails than all by one or two of the startups on YC or part of YC.
That's large.
In my world, that counts as a startup.
Yes, the majority of breakout chains/startups are started as chains/startups.
But, plenty of breakout businesses aren't built to scale out fast. Starbucks didn't break out for over a decade. Microsoft didn't get the DOS contract until '81.
Meanwhile, lots of small businesses are small deliberately. Thomas Keller isn't franchising Per Se. Grant Achatz isn't franchising Alinea.
So what does it tell us when a company runs a single restaurant for 10 years, or refuses to take VC funding or hire ahead of revenue?
Exactly nothing.
Alinea was funded by 8 futures traders who each put in half a million dollars.
From the site:
Opened in May 2005, Mr. Kokonas says Alinea grossed $3.5 million its first year, an average of $14,000 for every night it was open. There are eight investors: The smallest stake was $75,000, the largest Mr. Kokonas', at just less than $500,000. Return on investment is expected to exceed 20% per year, he says.
This doesn't sound like an old-school arts patronage to me.
(edit: typo)
You have to already be famous to start one, you have to have met a rich guy who thinks investing in you will make him cool, you only cater to a class of people who in previous centuries would be known as "the aristocracy." Etc.
Just want to say that was a great talk (watched the video) last week. Also, I saw you in Vancouver (Fuck You!) a while back and was impressed with your speaking ability then as well.
Keep up the good work man.
Experience actually counts for more in systems administration, so being older isn't a disadvantage. Surviving the infant-toddler years hones one's skills at managing interrupt-driven tasks and strange working hours.
"Why it doesn't make sense to discriminate against family people"
I think pg is set out to do the same thing VC's do (invest in outlandish, maybe crazy ideas), albeit with a focus on extremely good hackers and with a fraction of the budget.
What DHH seems to be implying is that you should focus on building something that you can get paid for, right away, and throw away the big dreams. Which is pretty much the opposite of pg.
AFAIK all he meant was: don't throw away your easily achievable dreams.
That is not the opposite of pg's thoughts.
Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating. Nitpicky, negative, petty debates.
I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think.
I like this place better when positive, hopeful people are having conversations.
This air just stinks.
For example the PG's and DHH's discussion about definition of a "startup" might seem like nitpicking when taken out of context, but I found it extremely valuable.
My experience is this: either you waste a lot of time futzing around with computers, or you make them do the work they need to do and get on with your life. It has nothing to do with how old or young you are, or how many kids you have. I am a very happy Father now - in fact, this is the greatest startup, with the most rewards, I've ever been involved in - and I'm still applying the same fundamental policy to myself as a programmer: get things done, don't futz around with computers, make them actually do the work they're supposed to do.
It doesn't matter what "kind" of person you are, it matters only what kind of things you make. I know 50-year old grandfathers who can kick royal Assembler ass and still leave early at the end of the day, and I know 18 year old kids who put the keyboard down after 8 hours and go do something else instead, as well.
IMHO, this over-generalization about 'types of people' is a real curse. I would say, don't do it. There are no 'types' of people in the computer world, no matter how the ycombinator cultists want to pitch it to the world: there are people who get things done, and people who don't.
Get things done. Get your code written, working, tested, and in the hands of people who will actually use it. If you can't do this, then you will fail. If you can, then rock on .. may your kids, now and in the future, always appreciate this aspect of you as a person.