Accidental Startup Office Manager: Ordering Food
daniellemorrill.com
daniellemorrill.com
More mundane things I'd like to hear about: HR, accounting, customer support or general management. Those end up being real pains for startups, and we never know it until we experience it.
Picking out an office and furnishing it also sucks, but at least you might do particularly well on it.
Presumably such a entity should also provide centralized arrangement of benefits, payroll, legal documents and other issues. An extreme form would be to have this management company run resource companies that make all hires on pass-through basis and submit a single consolidated bill to the main company each month.
Why wouldn't this work? I can think of only three reasons though I'm not convinced any of them are true: Insufficient supply of sufficiently homogenous companies (e.g. software startups); sufficient diversity of preferences for customization, particularly with regard to location to create insufficient density; or fear of poaching due to close proximity to other companies that require the same skillset
What my dream office is is a standalone building, light industrial style, in Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Menlo Park, with gated parking, and ideally a mile or less from public transit. Onsite generator, fiber, etc., and a way to split the building into public event space for 100 or so people, and offices, with private offices for everyone, with courtyard-type spaces for the groups of offices. 300-500 square feet per person in the "office" area.
The smaller buildings on Plymouth in MV, or Pioneer Way, or some of the office parks in Menlo, would all be fine.
I doubt most other startups want this -- they all want shared spaces with big open plan offices in nice buildings in downtown SF, it seems.
You mention that by Series A, companies want to customize. Is it more a function of wanting some of their own common space or a desire for individual expression?
At least in silicon valley, the annoyances still exist but don't rise to the level of huge opportunity to fix, since the current solutions solve them pretty well, and the pain-per-customer is finite (you only really set up payroll once, etc.)
It's just annoying. The real pain points remain 1) finding great people and hiring them 2) managing teams 3) product 4) customers 5) funding. Office space is the only minor issue which ever rises to the point of serious, and it's only exceptionally bad if you're looking in Palo Alto (SF and even MV are fairly ok). Admin overhead isn't on the list.
(unless you really want to solve it, but there are a lot of reasons why startups aren't great customers. Only really in the Bay Area and maybe NYC is there high enough density to come up with something, and since most of this is regulated per-state (and per-city in NYC and SF), you'd probably want it to be locally focused.)
Although one quibble I had with it was that they gave us a standard policy handbook to have signed by employees which was ridiculous and out of touch with the realities of tech startup (ie employees shouldn't use their work computer to send personal emails, etc). We sent it back to them and they were accommodating.
(Algentis is the one we're using)
(I'm talking things like having a raise agreed in writing, and then getting paid significantly less. And, when questioned about it, the owners saying "oops, yeah, should have told you, we decided we can't pay you that")
Updated post (for those who won't read it here): Important Note: We also order in fresh food from restaurants with GrubHub.com or Postmates, and pick up fresh fruit and vegetables as needed from the local farmer's market (for us at Pier 1). You can also arrange to have farm fresh baskets delivered locally, or from TheFruitCompany.com to anywhere in the U.S. (disclosure by lovely brother-in-law is their CFO).
I realize that it'd be nice to encourage healthier habits, but since it's not anybody's real job to stock the kitchen, it's been path of least resistance. Personally I hate caffeine, but it's not the worst thing.
If a large enough group of people regularly desire such drinks at work, it might just be an statistically odd group, but by default I conclude that they often need that extra boost. In my mind it suggests frequent crunch. Whether it's imposed by the company, the context, or the people - I'm not judging, especially not a startup.
YMMV, I'm certainly biased since a) I only drink water and milk, and b) I have personally seen even worse than energy drinks being offered to help people work longer and harder.
It's not just the caffeine, it's also the sugar in those energy drinks. How many people add that much sugar to a single cup of coffee?
The one we used (which I will recommend) was Farm Fresh To You http://www.farmfreshtoyou.com/ with a small ($25) fruit box delivered. I'm sure in any large city, there is a similar service.
Not to mention the first thing on the list is popcorn. Not sure how everyone else feels, but nothing distracts me more at work than that smell.
I completely agree with the not eating under stress being hard part. It is doubly annoying when someone else's perspective on "Healthy food" is forced upon you at these times.
If you decide to make a purchase through one of my links I may receive a commission from Amazon.
There's a clear purpose of the OP, and suggesting healthy snacks isn't it.
Some of what we do is building one-off or small runs of custom electronics, so we hired a person from our sister company who was previously emptying trash cans in their warehouse. At first he did our inventory as well as QA for our software products. A year later and now he operates our pick-and-place, reflow oven, milling machine, 3d printer, and tons of other things. People are capable of a lot if you give them the opportunity and some guidance.
Examples of snacks include: organic, fair-trade dark chocolate, all-natural dried mango strips, locally-harvested pistachio nuts, and gluten-free, granola bars.
Also, Startups dig BREAKbox. Customers include: Twilio, Retargeter, Involver, indiegogo, Switchcam, Pocket and more.
Disclosure: I’m an intern at blissmo. Feel free to shoot me an email for any reason - yash {at} blissmo {dot} com.
I just wanted to point out that she mentions diabetics as one example of "things to consider", yet the "top 5 foods" are all carbs, except for the basically nutritionally-void sugar free red bull.
Until companies have an actual full time office manager who can worry about this stuff, it is extremely time consuming to cater to all these preferences and if people are really invested in being healthy they will take the time to purchase and bring the foods they want to eat throughout the day. Even once you have an office manager you have to ask yourself whether spending thousands a month on a huge variety of foods is a good idea. Usually until a company is pretty big it just doesn't make sense.
My version: about 2 weeks after I quit my job and moved to India, we started having scheduled water outages from 9AM-whenever on thurs. We also had 6 female employees. So in addition to coding, my job was to show up at 8AM and fill buckets.
I'm now at a big company (startups fail). One perk of big company life - I don't even need to think about front end code (unless I want to).
Let me take a guess though:
Things you enjoy: [backend-code]
Things had to do at the startup: [buckets, frontend-code, backend-code]
Things you have to do at a big company: [backend-code]
Thus making the big-company more pleasant because you didn't enjoy frontend or bucket filling?
We try to cater at least three meals a week for our folks. Because we've seen the benefits: 1) Makes sure that people are actually stopping to eat. 2) Lowers the burn rate for the companies. 3) Lowers stressing about "Where are we going to eat?" 4) And perhaps the most beneficial: It ensures that we're forcing some actual nutrients into their diets.
Of course the other fringe benefit is the peer mentoring and socializing, where people actually stop banging on keyboards and take a moment to talk to one another.
Its only a link bait article full of affiliate link from your product?
And finally, the products you are referring to is the best way to getting everyone fat in the office?
Don't you have any shame in what you are doing?
Either eat solid, whole meals on assigned lunch breaks, or drink something that isn't bad for you - tea, coffee come to mind - or why not, water?
In all frankness I find the whole concept of offering free crap for everyone harmful and eventually counterproductive - I can only imagine what copious amounts of free sugary soft drinks will do to people after a while.
My go to meal is Quaker Oatmeal mixed with Vanilla Whey Protein. I'll eat that 1-2 times a day. Cost for that combo is $0.75, not bad if you ask me. Just trying to give people some good ideas here :)