Work with People You Love

Wait..so you just wrote a long blog post to basically say you like being friends with your friends? I know you guys just had some kind of launch, but if you need to drive traffic to your site, you could be a little more creative with your blog posts. I did read the post though, so maybe you are getting the desired result.

> but none of the negative things will happen to us because we’re too awesome.

I just wanted to note that the above is the definition of hubris, and exactly what the people doing EDD (Ego-Driven Development) are thinking: http://deliberate-software.com/ego-driven-development.

Having said that though, I do hope that your team is indeed that awesome and I wish you success. I would just caution you to think very critically when you become tempted by the "we're too awesome" line of thought.

What happens when the people you love are no longer passionate about the product you're building because their interests have grown in a different direction? Now you're faced with the potential that someone sticks around only because they love the people but they're burned out by the work and don't want to face the possibility of doing what is necessary and moving on to another job where perhaps they don't (yet) love the people there but the job is what they're passionate about. There's also the issue of scalability. It's great that you love everybody in your 10 person startup, but how do you scale this out to build a business with 1000 employees? Short of slipping something in the Kool-aid, I don't think it's possible.

Another way to approach it is to work with people who are really competent and who you have an enormous amount of respect for. If, through work, you happen to form a bond of friendship with them that's great and you can continue to be friends even if your life takes a different direction. Should that happen, you can move on to a new job and still look for competence from people you can respect and build up that sense of camaraderie with a new team. Maybe it will lead to friendship and love. Maybe you'll not socialize with everyone on the team but you'll still have massive amounts of respect for their ability to get the job done that you don't need to feel like you have to love everyone. This approach does scale out to thousands of employees. If I'm in the same company as you, I don't have to like you but I should be able to expect that you'll perform your job competently which will earn my respect.

Well written, glad to hear things are going well.

You have to go through a couple of crisis situations together before you really know if you love the people you work with.

This will end well!