Twitter CEO's Unexpected Advice on Preserving Startup Culture in Your Company

You are generalizing your little bubble to the world at large. Lots of people don't want to live or work in a large city.

In NY near the Flatiron, I have several thousand lunch options within a 5-10 minute walk/subway ride. Of course I tend to return to the ones I've had good experiences with, but unlike suburbs I get my fill of novelty in many ways other than just the food I select from some megastripmall.

> Is it because of the formal process that comes with it, because of the way it's usually done at bigco, or do some people feel annoyed about having to always count their time ?

Some people must account for all of their time in 15 minute blocks. It's frustrating because either you do it properly, and have people complaining about the amount of time you spend doing the paperwork; or you fudge it, in which case whyTF do they specify it to 15 minutes why don't they just let you give a broad outline of what you've done?

BigCo can be really weird.

My sense is people generally separate their work into, "Tasks I like to do" and "Administrative overhead". For small companies, being nimble is more important than scale or coordination, so the overhead takes a back seat. To use Lean Startup lingo, until you have product-market fit, scale and coordination isn't a concern.

Once you have product-market fit, then coordination and scale matters. Understanding how people are spending their time is important for service companies to understand billing, and product companies to understand if people are working on the right priorities. It also helps estimation.

I've seen very talented people that are loath to enter time reports. I've seen companies lose money because talented expensive consultants didn't bother getting it in on time.

My suspicion is there are a subset of people who just don't want to be bothered. The best seats for them are small non-consulting firms that are focused more on market response than scaling or coordinating. It's not a judgment call, it's more about going where their mentality fits best. (It took me a long time to realize this in my own career)

I agree with the other comments responding to your question. I don't think time-keeping is itself a bad thing, or that the things that happen to a company once they start keeping track of time is a bad thing, but it's definitely painful to go through the transition.

Time keeping ends up being more important in some kinds of companies than others, but all growing companies end up doing it in some way eventually. For example, Google finally started keeping accurate track of what different services were actually costing them to keep running and the result has been pretty painful for lots of people who use Google products and services. Some example, GAE hosting prices jumped thousands of percent overnight, Google Maps API became so expensive that numerous companies built around it shuttered or moved to other technologies completely, Translate API was shuttered etc.

In aggregate Google was making loads of money, despite having huge money losing parts of the company...and those weren't acting as traditional loss leaders either (meaning they lose a little money in one place to bring customers in to make more money in total).

In a B2B company, you often end up with contracts to manage, and contracts usually have strict labor hours that have to be accounted for. Even if the contract itself doesn't specify the hours (some kind of firm fixed price deal), you still have to internally manage hours to make sure that you're making money on the contract instead of losing it to salaries. The only way to really do that is time keeping.

In most early stage companies, the ones that are still building their products and have lots of investment money to work with and no particular contracts or anything to worry about, the assumption is that they're going to lose money for a while anyways, so there's not a lot of reason to keep track of it. And even as they grow, so long as money coming in is more than money going out things look pretty good.

But eventually somebody will want to squeeze a bit more efficiency out of the company, and time-keeping is the signal that that is happening. It means the end of the loose structure you had been working in and the introduction of metric tracking. With time-keeping comes head counting, more rigid delivery dates, more rigid tracking of every aspect of the business process.

It's like a switch gets flipped and the organization suddenly becomes a regular old company. Which is fine. It usually also means more job stability. But you usually see lots of flight out of the company as people move on to a less rigid environment. And the introduction of very stable personality types who don't mind being a development drone. The culture just...changes.

True. I view the move to services as a way of monetizing the brand. Historically their HW and SW weren't always the best, but people knew you could call their support with a problem. Now they've found a way to get paid for the support as demand for their big iron shrank. They've done a lot of acquisitions too, but not wasteful ones. They still do share buybacks every year, which suggests they know their place as a shrinking company, so they invest profits in shrinking the amount of outstanding shares. You know something is up when Warren Buffett is investing in them. :-)

Compare this to other mature tech companies who blow away all the shareholder wealth once the growth stops.