Why Google employees make bad cofounders | Hacker News Reader

Why Google employees make bad cofounders

blog.devinblais.com

7 pointsdevinblais8 comments

One of the things that I thought about when I was working at Google was how screwed up some of the engineers were going to be post Google. The ones at risk were people who came from school right into Google and found "work" to be not unlike academia. A friend of mine who was a VP over at another big tech firm in the valley at the time said they tried not to interview people whose first and only job was Google.

That said, I've also seen companies where folks have done many similar things to what Google has done (food, vacation options, variable salary packages) and made them work in non cash-rich environments.

The interesting difference is 'revenue per employee' or RpE which is an interesting metric to track. In information businesses where the product doesn't have a "COGS" in the traditional sense, it really is a function of the value that the employees are creating on a day in and day out basis. So you can model your expenses by using taking RpE as your gross revenue, then subtracting off salary, monthly benefits, vacation, and overhead to get your 'gross margin per employee' (GMpE) and if you choose to allocate some fraction of that margin into what I think of as "lifestyle" benefits (onsite massage, or snacks, or what not).

If you take that approach its possible to really talk in real terms about "high tech" work environment vs the business. As a founder/CEO/manager you can get a sense of when something is "too much" and when you can afford to loosen things up a bit.

That said, when Google employees were responsible for over $50,000 per quarter of free cash flow on a per capita basis, and Google decided to save a few cents by changing from OdWalla juice to an off brand, saving perhaps $250 per employee per quarter, I thought it was probably a pretty stupid move.

$250 in savings per quarter seems pretty generous... or I'm vastly underestimating the average per-capita consumption of Odwalla juice amongst Googlers.

Even a $1/serving savings would imply an average of 250 Odwalla juices consumed per employee, per quarter, which works out to something like 3.8 per day. That seems extraordinarily high, especially in light of the plethora of beverages that Google makes available to their employees.

> so I’m not saying they can’t make great cofounders. What I am saying is that working at one of these companies doesn’t come close to qualifying someone to be a technical cofounder, and in some ways, it makes them worse

That's not what I get from the sensational title..

First rule of modern internet: Ignore titles.

"Being a cofounder requires at least 80 hours of work a week. If you aren’t ready to work those hours, don’t start a company. Period."

How true is this? I know VCs certainly want everyone to think and believe it. But really, how true is it?

EDIT: That comes off a little too absolutist for me.

At the end of the day each person can only speak to their experiences and the experiences of those they know who wouldn't exaggerate.

That being said, from what I have seen, it's not true for most people, and is even counterproductive for most people.

A big chunk of most software is about component assembly. You use frameworks and libraries. Stitch things together and make things work.

Contrary to what most people say, 80 hours a week is not abnormal or counter-productive. It is probably counter-productive like if you do that for 2 years. But for a week? 3 months? 6 months? For most people who really are interested in things, this is no problem. I can vouch for this personally. When I am interested in things, I can work on code for months and I don't even keep track of time. And all of my projects don't even involve money.

Back to my first paragraph, super-duper-brain work can be very draining and I cannot imagine working 80 hours a week in that case. But for most pulp software (like I do - hack on node.js, Qt, WebKit, HTML5..) bring it on. I can easily do things at a stretch with no fall in productivity. In fact, I find it counter-productive if I don't work on these problems in a stretch since I lose context. (WebKit debugging anyone?)

"In terms of academia and career, engineers at companies like Google are used to doing really well and rejection is not a frequent event in this part of their lives. They probably got into one of their top choice schools, where they then left to work at one of their top choice companies."

Is there any evidence that this is actually true? It certainly wasn't true for me.

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