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Comment by jackblemming | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about you, but I don’t enjoy working for companies where a major goal is “hustle hard, increase velocity, measure and optimize everything”. For what purpose? Making our bosses richer? Maybe taking 1/100th of the value created for ourselves?

In my experience, really gifted people don’t put up with environments like this. But I guess you don’t want that in employees if you’re trying to setup a grind farm.

And they usually win too, because they’re thinking far beyond “solve the problem in front of you”. While you’re making your tape player meet market KPIs, they’re inventing DVDs.

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> For what purpose? Making our bosses richer? Maybe taking 1/100th of the value created for ourselves?

When Wave launched in Senegal, our average transfer would have cost 3-5x more if done via the largest existing mobile money system. Multiplied by our millions of monthly active users, that comes out to a savings of over $200 million every year, directly in our customers’ pockets, for them to spend on school fees, feeding their family, or whatever else is important to them.

That’s not a small amount—in fact, it’s around 1% of Senegal’s GDP. Few things are more awesome than being able to measure your success in terms of noticeably increasing an entire country’s GDP.

Working at Wave is an extremely effective way to improve the world

https://www.wave.com/en/blog/world/

I do wish that there were was a way to increase the number of startups that were organised as worker cooperatives so that they could be run democratically by the workers themselves - unfortunately, equity investment precludes this possibility.

Our startup is a multistakeholder cooperative with workers representing 1/3rd of the governance. We’ve also received equity funding. Albeit challenging, raising funds through equity doesn’t necessarily preclude a cooperative structure.

True, you can take equity investment if you're a multi-stakeholder coop and that's still a huge improvement over a traditional corporation in terms of worker ownership. Respect for that!

I think there's a difference between "trying to set up a grind farm" and creating a work environment and culture where people feel comfortable to just get down and do work.

This requires building trust (real trust) and showing vulnerability.

> We trust that people are doing their best and they shouldn’t feel like they need to overwork to hit some arbitrary deadline.

This is, in my mind, the opposite of a "grind farm."

> Maybe taking 1/100th of the value created for ourselves?

It’s relatively rare for an SWE to create $20M/yr in value every year. It’s quite common for one to make more than $200K in salary, with total cost being higher.

In my experience, really gifted people aren't very good at putting up with BigTech corporate BS either. If anything, the ambiguity of an early stage startup is a better environment for such people than the rigid shackles of corporate bureaucracy.

You quote "hustle hard, increase velocity, measure and optimize everything", but none of those words even appear in the article. In fact, the culture described seems to be the opposite. Did we read the same article?

> While you’re making your tape player meet market KPIs, they’re inventing DVDs.

Yeah... I read the article thinking, "these guys have no R&D".

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