Start-up Advice Weekend
Well, this turned out to be quite a weekend for start-up advice. Jason Calacanis wrote a blog post on how a start-up can save money. Most of his suggestions were pretty good; however, a few of his comments really set-off a firestorm in the blogopshere (here, here, here, and here). In particular, “Fire people who aren’t workaholics…come on folks, this is start-up life, it’s not a game if you want balance in your life. For realz.”
Although somewhat brutal, and not the exact choice of words I’d use, there is more than an ounce of truth to this. Start-ups are hard, and if folks are really into what the company is doing, you’re not going to make it. Often times you will be competing against bigger companies with more resources, and the two things you have at your disposal are innovation and moving faster. Often times, moving faster means working hard that they do at “BigCo.”
Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley really ripped into Jason with a post entitled, “Jason Calacanis fires people who have a life,” and some rather brutal comments followed. I have to admit that I disagree with Duncan, I think he was missing the point Jason was making (made easier by Jason’s poor choice of words). Michael Arrington, wrote a post in which he disagreed with Duncan Riley (how’d that for debate - two bloggers on the same blog disagreeing with one another). I was impressed that Mike gave his bloggers enough free reign to blog their opinions without trying to regulate them. On balance, I felt Mike did a really good job of understanding and defending the point Jason was trying to make. Obviously you want to treat your employees well, you want to be careful not to burn out the team, your want to create a fun and inspirational place to work, but at the end of the day it takes hard work.
I’ve been somewhat surprised with my own experiences at Pluggd, where some employees with significant equity positions don’t seem to care very much. It is hard for me to understand, but I’ve come to realize that start-ups aren’t for everyone and you need to find the people who are the right culture fit. It’s probably the same reason so me professional athletes have that burning desire to succeed and train hard in the off-season (e.g. Jerry Rice), while other very talented athletes show up out of shape for the season. It’s like the Bronx Tale, there is nothing worse than wasted talent. In a start-up, you simply can’t afford the folks that don’t understand what it takes to be successful. It’s more important than experience, more important than where you went to school, etc.
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