You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement
zachholman.com
zachholman.com
Some of my favorite memories:
1. 4 of us in a nasty "war room" without windows for 6 months, 12 hours a day, eating junk food when we could, and writing an incredible back office system. We knew what time it was by the sounds of the Winston drag races at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.
2. 2 of us in the back room of a deserted warehouse writing an e-commerce system because nothing else could handle our client's business. We walked 4 blocks to the Whistle Stop to get sandwiches or use the bathroom (because we didn't have one).
3. 3 of us writing some incredible call center software in a back hallway of a warehouse in an office park. The area was condemned for mold, so we had to work out of the deli across the street for a month.
4. The basement of a dental office. I can still hear the drill.
5. 2 of us in the janitor's supply closet. 2 desks and a sink with a mop in it. We launched a programmer's utility startup from there.
In every case, the companionship and work were so good, we barely noticed our surroundings.
I have never deleted an email, and now I'm so glad. Just reading through some of the mundane details of these old projects gets my heart racing. I wish every project could be like these.
No matter what else I have ever done, nothing was as exciting as doing great work.
Thanks OP, for the memories.
As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team. It's not that we don't work hard to find motivated and talented hires, but it doesn't matter. I don't think it's possible to completely align the incentives -- if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers. It's a subtle difference, but as a founder the company failing is an unthinkable, unspeakable horror. As an employee it's a pain, a little bit sad, and you'll have to spend some time finding a new job. Employees can afford to be rational and pragmatic about it, founders often can't.
As they say, "You'll never get as high as your first hit." Think of Apple when its only two employees were Jobs & Woz, or Microsoft when it was just Gates & Allen. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to grow and to work with people who are masters in their respective fields, but there's nothing quite like working on a team that's small and dedicated.
Scaling a team is hard -- especially when you don't really know how to do it. Not only is it hard as a co-founder to not "touch" every line of code that goes out, but your job turns to hiring and making sure the rowers (which you can't always be a part of) are turning the boat in the right direction. We try to keep the project management very minimal, but there's no way I'm aware of that you can get by without quick meetings people end up calling "scrums" (even though they're not) and relying way too much on a Trello board. At least not when you need everyone on exactly the same page and to be shipping product quickly. Maybe I'm not a good manager (I know I'm not in some aspects), but it's a lot harder to turn a bigger ship than the little inner tube we used to have. It's easy to see why startups can out-innovate and out-work huge companies. The irony is that if you do that well, you become a huge company. The startup circle of life, I suppose.
You should look at this as a feature, not a bug. Employees who will never be as invested as the founding team are like thermometers. Take their temperature on a regular basis and it can reveal important facts about your company that you'd probably be blind to otherwise.
> ...if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers.
Not all of the smart and talented people out there are Google or Facebook material, which is one of the reasons startups should stop trying to build the New York Yankees. Don't exclude people with potential. With a focus on employee development, you can grow great employees who are going to be far more loyal to you because you gave them an opportunity.
If you aren't articulating your vision well, then of course early employees won't be doing what you expect--and if you don't document what your tech is, of course they will just roll their own.
If you don't give them a reasonable stake in the company in real stock or revenue sharing, then of course early employees won't put in the same work.
If you wasted a lot of effort learning things the hard way about your tech or your business, and you hire early employees that already knew how to do things the right way, of course they won't appear to be working as hard.
It can be really sad watching cofounders screw over early employees all the while wringing hands about "dang, these folks just aren't as committed as we were". Early employee at a startup sucks, because you don't have the financial security of being a cog, you don't have the respect or payoff of being a cofounder, and you do have to clean up after the cofounders messes and grow the business.
Of course they are not going to be as motivated as you are. And as a founder of a failed company, you too can go work at Goofacesoft too afterwards.
It's also your baby, your the one who can be emotionally invested in the company %100 because other than investor hostile takeover or founder politics, your not going to stop being the one who has ultimate ownership of the company. Employees learn after a few jobs that being emotionally invested into a company %100 is not good, because you don't have ultimate responsibility and ownership of it and it easily can be taken away from you.
Yep. It is the flattest it can ever be. There are also psychological dynamics in the average basement startup:
Things are usually informal, meritocratic, ambitious. Crunching together in such a setting will also usually create very strong camaraderie even among personalities that in a larger organization would just keep away from each other.
> you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore
Even with perfect information/openness - just the fact that there's now an "us" and "them" starts being.. divisive[1]. Apply enough times and you can't keep up with how many "thems" there are to an "us". When you've been there since the company was 4/8 people in a large room, it would be strange not to feel nostalgic.
[1] I self-nominate for platitude of the year 2015. It's early, but I'm ambitious.
It's like, "Dude, there're less than ten of us, and half of us are building product, and the other half are sucking at sales. You aren't managing shit."
Little us-vs-them bullshit like that hurts everyone. :(
This is all Silicon Valley navel gazing. If you want to stay in the basement, stay in the basement. Very little is stopping you, most business models are not based on explosive growth.
Personally, I'm really not convinced that one is better than the other.
What gets me? Right now, when there's no money and more vision than product, engineers are volunteering to help, because I'm building something designed specifically to solve their most frustrating and unproductive problems. I suspect that in six months or a year, when there's money for salaries and a decent number of actual customers, those volunteers will dry up. :) But I suspect a different kind of volunteering will happen, maybe with different people.
Oh, do you work on a large (multiple teams) software project? Want to know how I plan to make your life suck less? Get in touch!
But I also remember the sleepless nights, the 24-hour cycles around a launch because between the N of us, none of us had either process experience or the knowledge to choose a better one, and the resulting shouting matches at 3AM because everyone was on edge and nerves were frazzled.
More importantly, unfortunately, my stomach will always remind me of those things. I got out of the startup scene for my health; some people just don't cope well with that kind of stress.
Castro street is (and probably still is) Asian culinary heaven . . . except that my boss would only eat at an Italian place near the railroad tracks, or at the evil hot-dog place where all the employees hated their lives and let you know it, every order.
We moved to a set of offices on Landings Drive. This was when SGI was still around; we used to walk over to their cafeteria and just use it -- nobody seemed to care -- and I'd say "hi" to some of my old Apple co-workers who had also moved on. I learned how to punch down phones and install networks, and buy cubicles and get cheap $10 whiteboards from Home Depot.
Fun times.
Is Larry Page getting richer at 50000 Employees that he was at 10K?
In UK older Victorian and earlier houses sometimes have cellars. Some people leave them as slightly damp cold spaces, other people do them up and gain an extra room.
Straw-man arguments might have their place but they are still straw-man arguments. Not every businessman starts out being mercenary, and not every practicing tradesman cares naught for his art.
noun
1. an activity involving skill in making things by hand. "the craft of cobbling"
2. skill used in deceiving others. "her cousin was not her equal in guile and evasive craft"
You're both right.
Like "hustle".
Capitalism is much more than "expecting a financial reward". It's a complex system of signals which let producers determine what is the most valuable and efficient use for their resources.
What Should I build in my basement? A sous vide cooker? A drone with a camera? A computer game or a new social network? Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need?
Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements.
Capitalism provides one set of signals, an overpoweringly large one at that, but it does not provide a complete picture of value to humanity.
Just as a farmer is not trying to satisfy the world's demand for food, monitoring which crop is most needed. All the farmer does is he prefers a certain amount of money over a certain amount of labour and grows crops that maximize that amount of money. The world signals their demand by price.
It's also at risk of the Is/Ought problem; the stories are not justifications.
You're taking the exceptions (and actually Bach earnt quite well from music). Van Gogh was almost unique among his painting contemporaries, partly because his paintings were, by the standards of the time, weird (I suspect this applies to Kafka as well). And what vindicates him now is an ultimately capitalist consideration - his works are popular, people pay for copies of them. Nowadays there are capitalistic art speculators who will buy the work of underappreciated artists if they like it themselves - see the recent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8829277 - which would solve that problem.
As for Kafka, he had a famously... weird approach to his work. IIRC he wanted his works destroyed; it's only the capitalism of his descendants that means we're able to appreciate them.
Gov't incentives meanwhile often create unintended effects. For example, incentivizing investment in the arts leading to rich people creating their own private museums, often inaccessible to the public, and using them as convenient funnels for tax deductions while still enriching themselves.[1]
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/business/art-collectors-ga...
Contemporary pop art, on the other hand, entertains huge masses of people, gives them pleasure and delight, and makes their days happier.
Socialism?
I think you meant 'communism' as practiced by those countries that have hi-jacked an otherwise pretty good idea to serve the interests of a select few fat cats.
Open source isn't anti capitalist. It's capitalism at it's best form. People join at their own free will, the rule of contracts (open source licensing) are strictly enforced, and there are lots of ways people can profit from open source.
Business incentives stifle creativity; even in creative products. It may wax and wane depending on context, but it's a pretty uncontroversial idea. From the high end of LA creativity-through-the-sausage-machine film and tv, all the way through to the low end, where nobody wants to attend my one man show.
But the parent poster used the HN tigger word "capitalism" when discussing the idea, so lets down-vote the shit out of him! /s
Is it?
In my view, organizations are almost living entities in and of themselves. They can become more ruthless than any individual because of their critical mass and "mission".
Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but we have org A ("business"), primarily self-interested, and org B ("non-profit"), which isn't. Sure, there's potential for evil and corruption everywhere, but that doesn't make their two starting points one and the same.
Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations?
edit: removed non-existent "[1]"
No, certainly not inherently. Even if we define moral ground as the degree of altruism of motives (which is way too narrow in my opinion), non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals, but rather non-monetizable goals.
But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money while all some non-profits can show in their defense is abstract ideas. KKK is a non-profit.
But if we define it as something that the society should
encourage because it's beneficial to the society then
for-profits are arguably on a higher ground ... KKK is a
non-profit.
1. Moral ground is "something society encourages because
it's beneficial to society"
2. People give for-profit companies their money
3. Therefore, companies have a higher moral ground since
companies are "demonstrably beneficial to people"
The reason you don't understand my argument after reinterpreting it is because you have for some reason excluded a few important words from it: "inherently", "should" (as in "should encourage") and "willingly". I am inclined to think your confusion is intentional and therefore explaining myself will be a waste of time.
No?
"if we define it as something that the society should encourage
because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are
arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial
to people who are willingly giving them money"
I challenge your statement that for-profits are "demonstrably beneficial" merely because people give them money!
Technically, yes, but definitely not what I was talking about, as I defined non-profit as an organization which isn't primarily self-interested. The KKK isn't for-profit, but it is for-power, and definitely self-interested. I also included "Sure, there's potential for evil and corruption everywhere" to avoid such a strawman argument.
> non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals
They usually do. But we seem to disagree as to what a non-profit is, so for the sake of the argument, I'm talking about altruistic non-profits, not the KKK. Let's include non-power in that non-profit definition.
> But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money
Willingly? In theoretical economics/free markets/etc, sure. In real life, there are monopolies, lobbying, politics and all sorts of bullshit. You are surely aware that as a consumer you're often stuck with picking the least-worst of your options. If there's one ISP serving your area and you hate them, your free will spans between 'no internet' and 'pay those scumbags'.
[1] Source: me.