On Not Hiring
gabrielweinberg.com
gabrielweinberg.com
> We need to build x, y and z, ASAP. Before you've figured out distribution? What evidence do you have that x, y and z, once built, will make customer acquisition any easier?
It feels like he's saying, "Whoah, let's not just go off half-cocked." And when trying to convinces us to spend the our own time on graphic design It feels like he's saying, "Easy, there. It's OK to take longer on something you're not as good at," which is counter to the conventional wisdom around here.
What's interesting, is the advice is still paired with, "Iterate, iterate, iterate." Feels like the message is less "Hurry" and more "Thoughful iteration." This was refreshing.
"...we have to strike while the iron is hot! My experience is that this is rarely true."
This from a guy who's President of an Emergency Medical Services firm and a TechStars advisor. Probably good advice for many of us here.
"...we have to strike while the iron is hot!
My experience is that this is rarely true."
There are many things we've opted to teach ourselves to do, in preference to going on a hiring binge.
Maybe this is because my partner and I went through the late 1990's dot com boom, saw the aftereffects of mindless staffing, and decided against it.
I have a lot of respect for entreprenuers that can just jump in and make things work like that.
I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done it.
Also, someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's money mean two different things.
This will probably seem like I'm throwing cold water on your founders, but that's not my direct intention. These are the issues that I think about when thinking about how to build a company.
My grandfather co-founded a now-giant engineering company. When they were getting started, they would bid for any job. If they didn't know how to do it, they learned how to do it. I think that's a great attitude, and a winning attitude. They knew they could learn new skills promptly, so I don't see the problem.
They succeeded. It worked out. You may say, "They could have failed" but they could have failed no matter what policy they had for taking on projects so I don't really see a difference. Whenever I take on a non-trivial programming project I have to learn some amount of new stuff in order to complete the project. And I know I can do that. My belief I can learn things is true. This is just normal, shrug.
People buy from startups knowing that you're a startup, usually. There are always ethical issues when it comes to selling, but I don't think that "ability to execute" is the biggest one, as long as you actually believe it could happen, and try.
"someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's money mean two different things"
I think it's legitimate to point out that there is not a lot of personal money risk for the founders. They probably went without much income for a while, and work a lot. But if the startup fails, and they pick up a job afterward, they probably won't be in the negative.
I agree that "making big decisions" should not be equated with "taking a big risk". They are related but not the same.
I totally agree and think it's SUPER important to be honest. Example: I'm a coder. If someone wanted to hire me for a Python job, I would be totally honest, yet confident: "I've never coded Python, but I know Ruby, and I think I could learn Python pretty quickly."
At a previous job, I sat next to a manager who often interviewed programming candidates on the phone. If somebody was trying to BS him, he always looked and sounded irritated. In contrast, when I interviewed, I gave confident answers for what I knew and said "I don't know" if I didn't, often asking questions about what I didn't know because I was curious.
If I were hiring a company to do something and felt they were BSing about what they could do, I would run. But if they said "we THINK we can do it," and explained why, I'd be way more comfortable.
Even better: "we think we can do it, but since we haven't done this before, we're willing to work more cheaply so we can get the experience." That way, I know exactly what I'm getting, and I can weigh the risks. And if all goes well, next time they bid, they can truthfully say "we have experience in this."
That's how I sell myself, anyway.
Some companies look at early exponential growth, think of it as a nearly-vertical line, and build an organization that thrives on that growth. But at some point the growth will start to flatten, and the organization has horribly overshot the mark by then. If building organizations is hard, pruning them is ten times harder.
DDG is run by Gabriel solo for 3 years???
This changes everything I thought about starting up...
* Craig Newmark was running craigslist solo for a couple of years, when it was still a mailing list.
* The imdb guy (Col Needham) runs it with only a handful of volunteers until it was sold to amazon.
* Brad Fitzpatrick ran LiveJournal alone for a while when it was still headquartered in Oregon. During that time he wrote memcached.
* Drew Curtis runs Fark.com alone, since 1999.
* joshu was running del.icio.us alone while still having full time job.
* Markus Frind is the poster boy of doing it alone with his plentyoffish site.
* Marco was doing instapaper as side hobby while being CTO at Tumblr. Couple years later he went full time on it.
Admittedly, a lot of people used it due to sheer network effects. So it provided utility.
But personally I would be ashamed if I built POF.
All credit to him, he seems to put in a ton of effort, but this game isn't only for the rich.
Any school kid can start something similar and run it 'unprofitably' for 3 years. 3 years hosting cost isn't a big deal unless you're doing something like video.
Or just running toward 'profitable' earlier on.
PS Just noticed this was not posted by the author, but the comment still applies
One could argue that for many products, traction starts with interaction design. Good interaction design involves finding out how your user thinks about a problem and then finding a solution that naturally fits inside the user's mental model. Wireframes, etc, all flow from that core revelation. To do this, sometimes you need to interview (potential) customers, study their habits, and really understand their needs.
So it should go without saying that founders should be doing interaction design, but this is first time I've ever seen it put plainly.
The opposite situation, where founders don't have a deep sense of their users' needs and habits, is a recipe for failure.
1) Iterate faster. If you have 2-3 devs working on something vs 1, then you can figure out more quickly if your hypotheses are correct or not.
2) Certain markets (like ours in the non-profit space) require that you have more direct interaction w/ those you are trying to reach. 1 person might have worked well for DDG, that isn't applicable to everyone
Which is why hiring is an art, why companies have hiring managers on which a great deal of responsibility is put on, and why I ultimately have to partially agree with Gabriel. Sometimes not hiring is a good decision.
I've got two other people working with me now, and I hope to add at least two more this year. We're a heck of a good team, with our bases covered in hardware, software development, consumer electronics, home media systems, Windows and Linux network administration ... there are much fewer things that we can't handle between the three of us, versus any one of us alone.
This is great advice. Not only because it is free you up from hiring but design/ui/ux is integral to most web apps and should have a frequent focus of the founder.
If you have specific, defined tasks, it's better to get a contractor. For example, for my current project, I hired a sysadmin for about a week to set up a new infrastructure, configuring puppet and so on. Sure, I could have done it myself, but that would have taken a lot of time and probably wouldn't have been done as well (I'm more dev than admin).
Granted, a freelancer doing a security audit might work out for that. But restarting servers, solving network and OS issues? Is there some kind of sysadmin "call center"? And would I trust them with my private data?
Other than that, the article speaks to my bootstrappy heart.
A business organization might be a saleable asset even with a failed product. A solo founder with a failed product is just broke.
While probably not the best strategy, building an attractive organization may reduce risk by making the worst case scenario a talent acquisition instead of a liquidation. Personally, I'm a bit of a misanthrope so I lean towards Weinberg's position.
People aren't actually "assets".
Only under the rarest circumstances are they looked on that way by potential acquirers; a company needs a coherent place to put a whole team that both meshes what they did before and gives them enough upside to stay. You read about "talent acquisitions" far more often than you do about the companies that lay off all their employees, because the "talent acquisitions" make interesting copy.
You are not likely to profit from the "recruiting arbitrage hedge" you've come up with; all you're going to do is crater your company and screw up a bunch of people's employment. Don't do this.
The best I can come up with at the moment are some comments in the wake of Powerset's acquisition: "At that time we knew that a talented engineer in a tough to get tech was worth about $1.5 million per head. Thus, I knew with relative assurance that since we were going to hire at least 70 people with our Series A money, that our worst case scenario was about a $100 million exit." -[http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr...]
>You are not likely to profit from the "recruiting arbitrage hedge" you've come up with;
If I understand you correctly, I don't agree with this completely. One of the reasons outsourcing and temp companies exist is to perform recruitment that their clients are incapable of doing themselves. There is good money in recruiting arbitrage as a business plan, but in most circumstances "we'll do that if our real strategy fails" is completely useless as a hedge.
(edited for clarity. still a mess)
Confusing the employment contract with the employee isn't just bad accounting, it's flat-out delusional in a market that is largely at-will.