Is the tech bubble popping? Ping pong offers an answer

http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-tech-bubble-popping-ping-pong-offers-an-answer-1462286089

by palguay • 10 years ago

58 76 10 years ago

This blew me away:

"Venture capitalist Michael Cardamone, the tournament’s co-organizer, approves of young companies buying tables with venture funds. “You absolutely should,” he says. “It’s part of building culture.”"

jychang• 10 years ago

It makes sense in terms of cost to benefit. A ping pong table is a few hundred dollars at most. An employee performing well is $100,000 at minimum.

Little things like free food and ping pong tables actually offer a massive return on investment.

joelrunyon• 10 years ago

From the article

Startups pay up to $2,300 for a high-end Butterfly-brand table.

Your point stands, but the pricing is quite different.

dabeeeenster• 10 years ago

In London a Ping Pong table would cost around £10k/year in floorspace used.

bnegreve• 10 years ago

Only if having a ping pong table (or free food) improve productivity.

That's a rather strong assumption.

cylinder2• 10 years ago

Who are these people who play ping pong during work hours? I want to finish my work and go home. If I have a break, I want to go outside and get some sun and air because I hate being inside all day. I'm not looking for a frat.

jonnathanson• 10 years ago

"Little things like free food and ping pong tables actually offer a massive return on investment."

Yes, provided everything else about the company is working. People are productive. The product is showing signs of fit. People believe in the founder(s)' vision and in the CEO's direction. Under these circumstances, things like ping pong tables and free meals can offer amazing ROI.

But when your first few business moves are shopping for fancy digs and filling the space with ping pong tables, your priorities are questionable. Morale can't be bought with trinkets. Morale is earned with a strong sense of collective mission and product traction. The rest is icing on the cake.

This distinction is often lost on people, who rush off to buy foosball tables as though the mere presence of such will trick employees into being happy and productive. It's a very '90s attitude: "People want to work for a startup that looks startupy." Well, sure. But the best people want to work for a startup that has a real shot at success, first and foremost.

jon-wood2• 10 years ago

Its part of building a culture certainly. Believe it or not its possible to build a company culture around things other than ping pong though - the last company I was at had a culture that revolved around food, cooking, and eating together for example (they do food delivery). Probably not as good for my waistline, but it definitely brought everyone together.

golergka• 10 years ago

In my current company, ping pong table is the strongest day-by-day teambuilding activity — something that different team members do together, not related to work, something that builds positive relationships between anyone. Most of interactions with some people in the company are intense and have potential for conflict (just because our respective roles), and ping pong offers us a chance to have a different kind of interaction.

In previous company, it was a pool table and game room with Rocket League. In one before that, foosball. Regardless of the game, having some game that is played regularly by coworkers together really helps to build positive relationships and create a team. Definitely worth investor's money.

TrevorJ• 10 years ago

That's cargo cult thinking if I've ever heard it.

lowglow• 10 years ago

Can we use the classic metric of aeron chair sales?

cm2187• 10 years ago

Do they switch to stools in bad times?

Apocryphon• 10 years ago

Standing desks.

collyw• 10 years ago

I just switched to a stool to discourage me from slouching.

jmcgough2• 10 years ago

hah, those have been turning up cheap on craigslist lately

MawNicker3• 10 years ago

They're terrible chairs. A mesh back is nice but you need a proper seat. The Aeron cuts off circulation to the legs. It's also about 5x overpriced. I just upgraded to a low end model from a no-name brand. [1] It's honestly a better chair.

1: http://www.amazon.com/Seating-Professional-AirGrid-Adjustabl...

cylinder2• 10 years ago

You'd have to adjust for the standing desk fad

noir_lord2• 10 years ago

Might be a fad but I love mine, I have a spinal condition that makes standing for (most) of the day much less than painful than sitting. (so I built myself one to solve all the usual problems, 21sq/ft of space, goes high enough to be suitable for non-midges, completely and totally stable, in hindsight I might have got carried away a bit http://imgur.com/a/H7fxb - the chair is in the process of been replaced with a stool (that I'm also building))

http://imgur.com/a/H7fxb

Philipp__2• 10 years ago

Had to check if I was reading Onion's article.

jonobird13• 10 years ago

I came to the comments to see if I was the only one.

Philipp__2• 10 years ago

This kinda perfectly aligned with current episodes of HBO's Silicon Valley.

varjag• 10 years ago

“If you don’t have a ping-pong table, you’re not a tech company,” says Sunil Rajasekar, chief technology officer at Lithium Technologies, a San Francisco software startup."

I really hope it was tongue in cheek quote out of context.

wobbleblob• 10 years ago

This clearly illustrates what's wrong with the San Francisco tech culture: it is stuck in the 20th century, and assumes that 'tech' means white or Asian male in their 20's.

Actual cutting edge tech companies order foosball tables.

noir_lord2• 10 years ago

Maglev air hocky is where it's at.

(Not sure that is a thing but it should be).

ramatevish• 10 years ago

It reminds me of https://twitter.com/php_ceo/status/492089140201406465

eva1984• 10 years ago

Their definition of a tech company is obviously not representative. Maybe only when you are 'tech' company that handles online comments, you really need a ping pong table to justify your status.

redcodenl• 10 years ago

I think they've saturated the market...

ryporter• 10 years ago

Well, this indicator is not the worst one of all time. That record is probably still held by the price of butter in Bangladesh. [1] Seriously, all you need to read from this article is the following quote:

Mark Cannice, a University of San Francisco professor, issues a quarterly index of venture-capitalist confidence. “I put more faith in venture capitalist insights and confidence,” he says, “than I would in ping-pong-table sales.”

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/08/stock-market-...

fghrthtb• 10 years ago

I wouldn't

arez• 10 years ago

the graph venture capital vs.ping pong tables reminded me of this http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

chetanahuja• 10 years ago

"Startups pay up to $2,300 for a high-end Butterfly-brand table."

Oh shit we've been doing it wrong. When PacketZoom moved to it's current office space (with a bit of spare room), we plonked down ~$130 for something like this bad boy.. http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/product/index.jsp?productI... and put it on top of an ikea table we inherited from the previous occupants. Perfectly good playing surface with decent bounce and no obvious defects after a year of use:

puranjay• 10 years ago

That ping pong table chart is largely useless

dkopi• 10 years ago

I always thought the main purpose of ping pong tables was to make it easy for HR to find the employees that should be let off first in case of cut backs.

akjetma• 10 years ago

Oh, no, you're thinking of unlimited vacation policies.

jonobird13• 10 years ago

Correlation or Coincidence? I get how they got to this conclusion, but I think latter.

royroyroys• 10 years ago

I've found it's easier to have a conversation whilst playing pool.. Maybe others are opting for this too? :)

gambiting2• 10 years ago

The article mentions a few companies that used to buy ping-pong tables and now they stopped - but surely you can only buy so many ping pong tables until you don't need any more? It's not like you can be buying X tables per month, forever. You will either run out of people interested in playing, or space for them - or both.

erikb• 10 years ago

Here's the thing though. If nobody invests based on ping pong offers but you do, then the gain for your successful bets should be a lot higher.

mrkmcknz• 10 years ago

But what happens when those companies already have a ping pong table or five?

I mean there's a limit to how many ping pong tables Twitter wants to load into their office.

ElKrist• 10 years ago

Last time I went through a series of interview to find a new job, I systematically asked to go to the bathroom. I believe male's toilet cleanliness is a good indicator of how employees perceive their workplaces. Said simply, if it's not clean then I expect employees to give poor considerations to each other or to the work they produce. You can be fooled by what recruiters tell you in the interviewing room, the perks they offer (free food, ping-pong etc.) but I think a company always show signs it can't control while you're in their precinct.

dccoolgai• 10 years ago

That's a good idea. Thanks!

steverb• 10 years ago

Funny, I use the quality of the toilet paper as a proxy for how the company treats its regular employees.

banku_brougham2• 10 years ago

That works for restauraunts as well.

gaur• 10 years ago

“It does make a psychological statement to the founders and employees that we’re not your father’s company”

No kidding. My father's company wouldn't instill a culture where the expectation is to work 80+ hours a week and then try to (inadequately) offset it with shitty little perks like a ping-pong table.

LoSboccacc• 10 years ago

not really insightful, but it sparked my interest, so I'll leave this google trends search there

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=startup%20bubble%2C%...

make of it what you will.

daemonk• 10 years ago

"Building culture" seems like an euphemism for romanticizing the workplace to squeeze more productivity out of employees without spending too much money on supplementing salaries.

Interestingly, It's kinda like academia in that way. Academics romanticizing research as being some kind of virtuous or nobel pursuit to justify their shitty wages and lack of personal time. (source, I am an academic)

I guess we all become devout monks of our own domain at some point in our careers until we realize the bullshit "culture" that was perpetuated, ultimately in the employer's interest.

mathattack• 10 years ago

Is it a symbol or an actual game that's used? I've had them in many offices but rarely seen them used.

To me the ping pong table and exposed surfaces in startups reflect wood paneling in law firms. It's symbolism rather than functionality. Symbols do matter.

snarfy• 10 years ago

These cultures are all artificial. I've worked at a handful of companies that all brought in the ping pong/foosball/shuffle board, and nobody plays them. It's always a ghost town.

Instead, employees will bring in their own toys like card games and basketball hoops, because that's what they like.

The culture happens because the employees themselves have the latitude and money to make it happen. The foosball table that they are all trying to mimic happened because some ceo/founder at a successful company always wanted one and brought one in for himself. Now it's offered as some kind of perk even though nobody likes the game. The perk should be extreme latitude and high pay. The culture will happen all by itself.

Terretta• 10 years ago

Hmm. We play the shit out of our ping pong tables.

Engineers, product guys, engineering managers, department heads, everyone together, usually four up plus some onlookers. Not artificial at all.

We play the card and table games at each others' homes, usually after sous vide steaks or barbecue.

Our hangouts are nothing like Billions. :-)

throwaway2016a• 10 years ago

I'm surprised people are so negative here about ping pong tables and such.

In my experience, it's true. It does build culture. In our case, Foosball is a place were employees can bond with each other that transcends business boundaries. Marketing and engineering people both like Foosball - same can not be said for a lot of other extracurriculars.

We even hold tournaments during company time that at least 3/4 of the company chooses to play in.

When you are spending at least 1/3 of your time every day with the same people, I think it is healthy for you to occasionally do something together that is not work. I assume the people here who head straight home also have never gone out after work for drinks with their co-workers or gone to a sports game with them, or anything like that. Foosball and ping pong provide an opportunity to do that.

In fact, as a manager I often challenge my team members to a game of foosball when I get a sense something isn't right and it gives me an opportunity to chat with then 1:1 without feeling like an intervention.

Should you buy a $1300 foosball table when your company is not making money? IMHO, absolutely not. But if you have a good sales month, go for it. I'd rather be in a company where people get to know each other than one where everyone sits quietly at their desk all day and leaves just as quietly at the end.

Then again, I hold a different world view than some other people. I think that a FU money exit is unlikely for most, and getting a four hour a day job without a pay cut is unlikely for most, so if you're going to spend 1/3 of your life at work, a fair measure of success is if you can actually be happy while you are in the office.

banku_brougham2• 10 years ago

I work at a big tech company. They don't provide table tennis, but every building has one or two, or more. I find that a game is better for me to get a boost than the coffee. But i still drink the coffee.

Interestingly, I rarely played when I was in a business role, but ever since I switched to a tech role I've played every day. I bought two paddles as well, it's some kind of metamorphosis.

Is the tech bubble popping? Ping pong offers an answer

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