How to save money running a startup
calacanis.com
calacanis.com
1. Hire a competent but old programmer who has debt, and a wife and kids. Pay him well.
2. Hire a bunch of interns to work on your code. Pay them badly.
3. Let the interns do the unimportant stuff, under the control of the old guy.
4. When the mission critical parts of your software come, for example design or scaling issues, bring in freelance consultants to help you do this
5. Hire lit major students to write a bunch of content for you. They are cheap and good at writing.
6. Release upgrades often and publicize each release as much as you can. You don't need PR.
7. Fire anyone who believes he is a rockstar, knows the best way of doing something and insists it has to be done that way, or somehow thinks he is owed something
8. Get small offices. Make your workers work short hours, so they have time to do stuff at home, and so that they stay with your company because of the amount of freetime available
9. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him
10. Get a guy whose job is to manage outsourced projects. Outsource as much as you can and hold this guy directly responsible for the results
11. Don't go to conferences, don't stay in hotels. Spend to promote your product, not to promote yourself.
12. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow.
13. Spend your ad money on measurable ads like adsense etc. No expensive placement ads. You can optmize then
14. Hire people on freelancer contracts. You can save on their benefits as well as the management costs for doing their taxes
15. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid.
You wanted to save money, right? If you do the above, you don't need aeron chairs to keep your team happy, productive and cheap. However, it's unsexy, and some people will look down on you.
This was a great TicketStumbler company outing. I still think you should have good chairs (not necessarily Aeron). You're spending 1/3 of the day in them - get something nice.
Calcanis has yet to demonstrate how Mahalo is different from 1990's era Yahoo. Until he can do that successfully, we can continue ignoring him.
It's actionable age discrimination, but go ahead. You gotta break some eggs if you want to make an omelette.
9. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him
It's actionable discrimination and a shitty thing to do to an otherwise valuable but shy person, but he's too shy to bring this to your attention or to hire a lawyer, so it's a win-win. (Again, eggs->omelette.)
12. Take the money you make and put it back in company development. Keep the teams small and unified as you grow.
Also, breathe air, drink water, and eat food.
15. Take the guys in the startup to strip clubs. Get them laid.
Again, actionable sexual harassment, but you're a nouveau web entrepreneur and therefore not concerned about things like legal liabilities. Let IBM, Microsoft, and other old school outfits worry about things like that. Besides, you're saving so much money by doing this that you can afford the suit.
I feel like I've fallen victim to a motivational seminar version of Poe's law.
It's actionable discrimination and a shitty thing to do to an otherwise valuable but shy person, but he's too shy to bring this to your attention or to hire a lawyer, so it's a win-win. (Again, eggs->omelette.)</blockquote>
I don't see anything actionable here unless he's a member of a protected class and can claim that's why it was done. Being shy is not protected. For that matter, it's not a shitty thing to do: he's bringing down the team. Sucks to be him, but if he's affecting productivity, out he goes.
he's bringing down the team. Sucks to be him, but if he's affecting productivity, out he goes.
There was no mention of a productivity hit. We have to take the OP at his word that he/she meant, "If somebody isn't suave or outgoing enough, fire that person." I think I'd rather educate my team about diversity, tolerance, and respect than fire technically competent people who happen to like to keep their doors closed. If you have a team that requires all others to be social sophisticates and can't function in the face of shyness, then this is your second biggest problem after handling the inevitable discrimination suit for firing Joe Shy. Also, if I worked with me, I'd probably want some alone time, too.
There are just so many things wrong with point (9) that it's hard to get them all out. Here goes:
1) Team managers, unless highly skilled (and sometimes even then) don't always understand the factors that make their teams function/fail.
2) The aforementioned possible legal liability of insisting on a team of suaves.
3) The inadvisability of insisting on a team of suaves.
4) The presupposition that the person who is awkward/shy is the problem. Maybe (the hypothetical) you and your team are a gang of unproductive dicks?
5) Maybe you're productive dicks but it will never scale?
6) The whiny intolerance of anyone who's not having absolutely the easiest time of things.
7) The fact that none of this has ever been an issue on any team I've ever worked on?
8) The insipid notion that it's a zero sum game or that the only thing is the productivity or that you can improve productivity with misguided social engineering.
I could go on. I think that what it really comes down to is that I'd rather be the guy who succeeds by helping others succeed. Entrepreneurship is as much about finding value where others can't as it is about creating new value. That includes finding it in employees who are less than socially perfect.
Sounds nice in theory, but in a startup you don't get points for being swell. The team needs to click, and if there are people that don't fit with the group dynamic socially, then that's already something working against you.
Fortunately the scene itself is pretty diverse. There are enough different sorts of founders out there that hire people like them that there's a place for shy and outgoing people to find a place to do their thing. I think the fallacy that kicked this off was that all founders are socialites. But if you've got founders that are socialites, they'll probably do better off with a team that is too.
For the record, I had one job that I didn't get because I would have slowed the rest of the team down (in that case it was because the rest of the team was German and I wasn't yet fluent in German). They were right not to hire me. They may have ended up hiring someone less qualified than me, but that made their team more cohesive.
You got me here! The reality is that unless we want to be totally balls-out mercenary and only follow the exact letter of the law, we have to treat people like human beings. And quite frankly, if I'm the person doing it, I'd rather pass on the millions than have to screw over the people I work with. There is Karma and I do have to live with myself.
Getting your team laid AT a strip club does not sound like a good way to save money. Even without the, uh, soliciting of prostitution, I shudder to think of the strip clubs where one goes to "save money."
9. Make your team friendly. If there is a socially akward or shy guy who does not relate with the other members of the team, fire him
The startups I've worked at always had quite a few shy, socially awkward types (I've worked mostly at tech startups). We usually just invited these folks out to lunch and social gatherings and made them feel a part of the team. Perhaps we weren't being very economical...
# tail -f /var/log/messages
Oct 15 15:45:47 mike-laptop Bullshit detected.
Really, I think on a small team, the best OS choice is the one that people know. There are very few cases where I can see OS dogmatism as being worth spending brain cycles on in an early-phase startup. If you're still small enough to all be eating at the same lunch table, you're also small enough that you don't need an IT policy.
Having said that, I am a bit of a Mac fanboy, so they can pry my MacBook Pro at my current job from my cold, unemployed fingers. :)
Plus having an hour to recharge is more effective than 30 minutes. You may save 100 hours a year on lunch, but what do you lose in productivity and morale?
Depending on what you do, a good monitor can actually help you earn money by making you either more efficient or enjoy your work more.
But even there, the sort of people I'd like to hire are much more excited about hard problems than fancy office accessories.
For example, on the home economics front, I'd advise that you buy pots and pans at Target so you can cook your own meals because you'll save $15/meal/person x 3 meals/day x 30 days/month x 4 persons/household = $5400/month/household, on average. Maybe you can save more by buying used pots at the thrift store, or inheriting them from your rich uncle, or salvaging them out of the garbage, but that doesn't invalidate the point.
Your question was glib, and this is a forum for smart people.
Buying Areon chairs for $1500 a pop is not a "save money" move. That's not to say that it's not a smart move but if you want to judge it solely from an economic perspective, it's got fail all over it.
And honestly, every coder appreciates a good chair... we do spend 8+ hours in it every day...
If you're going to buy Areon chairs in a guise to "saving money" you are a fool.
I'm not against perks for employees, what I'm against is disguising clear expenditures of cash - justified or not - as "saving money".
those seem to be in direct opposition to the epitome of startup: steve wozniak
"All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before"
Therefore, I think a modern-day Steve from Silicon Valley would in fact have at least two monitors. If he could get parts at 11 and 13 to build a ham radio and computer, he could also find or build some lcd monitors in this day and age.
I think Waz wanted to learn about everything, and at some point money would stop anyone, and cause them to re-create things in their own room. But I'm sure he would either have monitors or assemble them. For a lot of people right now who concentrate on software, though, it is cheaper to buy monitors outright.
Steve was a hardware guy. If you're a software guy, write your own software. But you will need to spend a lot of time on your butt to program, and I think that is what the post is getting at.
Also, while a design for a circuit might lose value (besides the learning experience), monitors, desks, and chairs will be used for many, many years.
- Outsource all HR, he even calls it a no-brainer. To me outsourcing the well-being of your employees, probably the most important asset you've got is downright stupid.
- All this talk about saving five minutes by having in-house great coffee instead of lettin gpeople fo to Starbucks, having meetings over lunch, etc. misses an important point and tells me that this guy has no idea how to deal with human beings. Your employees don't go to Starbucks just to get a coffee, they go to get a break, to ponder over a problem, have an informal meeeting, or something else. It's not about the coffe. Same with lunch. People need breaks, particularly people that make their money by thinking. I read a post by Joel Spolsky where he claims that he probably works around 4 hours a day, the rest of the time he just goofs around trying to get his thoughts together, thinking over a problem, etc. And he seems pretty productive. People aren't machines - if you treat them as such expect results thereafter.
Jeez...
"Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don’t live in a $4,000 one bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt–hire them!"
Hardly anyone pays $4,000 for a one-bedroom in SF, and if they are they're not working for a startup (or shouldn't be). For reference, I pay $1k in rent and have my own room and a backyard in SF.
Also, you _need_ to be in the same locale as your colleagues. especially in an early stage startup. You need to see people's facial expressions during brainstorming sessions and after idea pitches. You need to read their moods and work with them on a personal, in-person level.
I've worked with outsourced teams in India and the Ukraine, despite the talents of my foreign colleagues things NEVER went as smoothly / quickly as they would have locally. Especially with a fast moving early stage startup, that's of the essence.
"Working at Mahalo is sweet. We get Aeron chairs, 2 monitors, free food, free coffee, and free sodas."
It's still a sweet deal, but it just doesn't feel as nice when you learn that he was doing these things more for the bottom line.
Also, I wouldn't want any employee working for me that thinks to themselves, "Gee, I thought this company was being good to me but it turns out they're trying to make money." It's the whole point.
Of course, OSX still needs a lot of pixels to do its job, so a single laptop screen won't really help. At my current job I have a large second monitor for my MPB and find myself hardly using the laptop screen for anything.
I guess the 2 monitor programmers are windows guys (nothing wrong with that) ... and then they migrate to osx/linux, bringing the bad habits and polluting osx/linux over time
your second monitor for MBP, is it used for extending the view for osx, or it's just a cloned view of the laptop screen (let's say via external monitor cable)?
if it's a cloned view, vnc is an old and reliable technique that works regardless of cpu/os used (you can control powerpc mac, intel mac, windows, linux, bsd machines ... in one box)
dual/multi-boot and parallel guys, try to beat that! :D
Here's one study: http://research.microsoft.com/research/coet/multimonitor/chi...
Wow, no programmers on your team?
Uh, maybe if you've never heard of VOIP. $39.95/mo for an entire company plus $0.03/minute.