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

http://blog.idonethis.com/post/62808799986/unexpected-advice-on-preserving-startup-culture

by smalter • 13 years ago

87 42 13 years ago

blog.idonethis.com

mathattack5• 13 years ago

This is obvious, but sometimes tough on employees. At a prior employer I watched how early employees felt that things had become too impersonal when they had to start recording their time and submitting expense reports. But the reality is the company was suffering from under-management as the founders couldn't keep a grip on the firm with their informal management style. They were smart enough to change some of the culture to enable the company to keep growing.

From an employee's point of view, it's tough, but if you're happiest at a 20-50 person firm, it's best to move on (at least after vesting) when the company gets too big.

arethuza• 13 years ago

I've never worked anywhere where I had to do time recording - but even in a 2 person startup I've always done "formal" expense claims to avoid the potential wrath of tax authorities.

bane4• 13 years ago

I'd say that the moment you start doing time keeping is the moment the startup culture days are over. It's like a mental switch for everybody in the company. Everybody feels it and there's simply no going back.

It's like puberty, painful, but inevitable, and leads to more maturity later.

Wilya• 13 years ago

I'm curious about what's so wrong about time keeping.

I've seen startups that did some time keeping (though not in a very tight way, more in just keeping track of who did what on a half-day basis), some that didn't keep any, and I can't see much of a difference in the culture or how it's a bad thing. I don't see how it's useful, but it's never been a red flag to me by itself.

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 ?

thenomad• 13 years ago

The second half of the article is arguably more interesting than the first: it covers Zappos' CEO's idea for increasing productivity with large numbers of employees.

I'll be very interested to see if his "city" experiment works.

taeric• 13 years ago

Agreed. Makes some intuitive sense. If we knew exactly what made things work, it would make sense to pick that environment. Since we clearly don't, it seems most of the limiting actions we take actually reduce the chances of finding that random walk that leads to success.

krmmalik• 13 years ago

Agreed. I'd love to read more about the Zappos case study. I'd love to see how they've solved some of the finer challenges of attempting a work environment like this.

I can definitely see why it would work though.

chiph2• 13 years ago

I've worked at firms in suburban office parks, and I've worked at firms in downtown urban areas. I like the latter more, simply because you can walk to lunch and interact with people (sometimes they're the homeless, which is how I learned about Blue Leapers being a global threat to mankind...)

With the suburban offices, either I'm bringing my lunch, or I'm driving somewhere to go eat. In both cases I'm in a sensory bubble, and that's bad. So I think Tony's idea has a lot of validity.

wtvanhest6• 13 years ago

Even more than that, every person I know who in their 20s and 30s would prefer to work in the city and either do a quick commute in via public transportation or live in the city. No one wants to have to get in a car and drive for 40 minutes. If they do, they justify it due to cost, not actual benefit.

The companies that get the best people are the one's located in downtown. That alone increases productivity.

bane4• 13 years ago

I generally agree, but recent planning movements have managed to produce suburban areas with centralized work/shop centers for the community giving lots of options for the suburban worker.

Something I've noticed working in a couple of city environments is that most of the variety of restaurants in the area I don't take advantage of anyway since their geared towards dinner patrons and/or are overpriced for the kind of quick lunch I want during the work day. So I usually end up boiling down an urban work area to a half dozen places to eat.

A suburb area I worked in before had twice that many with good lunch options within a 5 minute walk. A couple nearby office campuses require a short drive, but at least 2 dozen good lunch places to eat within a 5-10 minute drive.

toddmorey• 13 years ago

Las Vegas seems like a challenging environment to make it work, but I think he's definitely on to something. I think this is why the technology scene in California pivoted to San Francisco. It's also what makes NYC promising. Seems most people would prefer to work in am urban core rather than in an office park.

I think it would be interesting to see corporate campuses follow dense residential trends and create multi-use buildings with the ground floor dedicated to publicly accessible restaurants, retail, etc. That would even help fund the project.

jusben13693• 13 years ago

I too am intrigued by the move to SF away from the Peninsula/Valley. I think though it's a subset of the "Software eating the World" thesis. You can now build much bigger companies with fewer people who are younger (no middle management) and get them significantly further along. So you don't need that campus to house 1000 employees to build a $100 million company as in the past. It'll also be interesting to see if startups begin to leave SF if they really get big. I hope not, but am curious.

dreamfactory• 13 years ago

I know a large established company that did this and turned out to make more from the commercial property letting than their core business, which presents them with an interesting dilemma...

dbough• 13 years ago

The company I work for has been going through the metamorphosis of startup to medium sized over the last few years.

I firmly believe that there needs to be more structure (policies, procedures, documentation) as you get bigger and add employees. If those are lacking, you'll get a lot of uninformed employees making poor decisions and a product that looks and feels disjointed.

bicx• 13 years ago

The whole idea of bringing people together for more interaction can easily be abused. As a dev at a startup, we just sit at a big table (well, technically 6 desks pushed together). While we have had some great discussions that improved our workflow and even the direction of the company, we also had many, many discussions about football, Verge articles, and Youtube videos. Being motivated, (generally) hard-working developers, we actually got a bit frustrated with how easy it was to interact with each other.

A few months ago, we let go of most of our scheduling structure, and now we have virtually no obligation to be in the office if we don't want to. Now we just work from home if we absolutely need a highly productive day. I like the structure we've come up with (plus we distract each other a lot less these days), and we are much more productive. There's a balance to be struck, and encouraging interaction can have unintended side effects if you aren't careful.

jbattle• 13 years ago

We had a similar problem here. I was frustrated when people felt like they had to stay home to get work done. We set aside one of the meeting rooms as a quiet work room (with monitors/keyboards/mice). Gives another option for getting away from the noise to focus but you are still close enough for collaboration when you want/need it.

jusben13693• 13 years ago

I think I saw a wonderful quote around you're more productive on your own and more creative/innovate as a group. So as you say balance is the trick.

ChikkaChiChi• 13 years ago

Being a CEO requires you to sell two products: What your company offers, and what you offer those that produce those offerings.

Achieving greatness can only come with an obsessive self-awareness to always be trying to improve both.

jusben13693• 13 years ago

I was employee 40 at a startup that went to 400. I think Dick's advice is right. The hardest part is losing many of the early employees once you hit about 150. But the bigger problem would be trying to keep them. You need different skill sets and different people for different stages. It hurts though. (also agree that the Zappos piece was much more interesting to me - but Vegas?! It's tough to go outside 3 months of the year after 9am)

TheCowboy• 13 years ago

A couple people mentioned wanting to read more on Tsieh's Downtown Project.

This colorful piece was posted on HN over the summer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5895699

When reading I'd recommend considering that some time has passed, so maybe things have improved on the Zappos/Hsieh side.

jtbigwoo2• 13 years ago

I feel like there are four stages of company development that need distinct sets of people.

1. Pioneers who can survive and search for a successful direction.

2. Generalists who can take that direction and establish a foundation.

3. Specialists who can take that foundation and build something that can succeed on a large scale. (I don't like the Specialist label, but I couldn't think of a better one.)

4. Optimizers who can grow and refine a large-scale business.

Many companies (Microsoft, for example) make the mistake of promoting themselves as a stage 1 or 2 company when they function like a stage 3 or 4 company. They keep looking for Pioneers who are going to be unhappy and quit after a year when what they really need are Optimizers.

It's not that later-stage companies can't benefit from having and keeping Generalists, it's just that the company is too large to be doing the things that Generalists enjoy. They don't need somebody who can build a server one day and code a new contact page the next. They need somebody who will spend six months working on a project that makes a certain kind of transaction 10% faster.

mathattack5• 13 years ago

I'd add a 5th. "Maxing the value of a mature or declining business." Many companies overinvest on #4, when the business has moved to step 5. IBM played this very well. Blackberry, perhaps not so well.

jtbigwoo2• 13 years ago

Good point! Just because a business isn't growing doesn't mean it needs to shut down immediately. There are still companies that make buggy whips.

wtvanhest6• 13 years ago

I'd argue that what IBM did well was build a consultancy business. That is where a lot of their growth came from over the past 5 years. Their core business is being used as a cash cow and brand for their new business.

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