Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hire Family People

37signals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 157 posts

Re: Hire Family People

#41

Post by menloparkbum »

pg wrote: post #18
jimbokun wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he has decided to take the opposite position to pg on every point about how to start a business and see how well he can argue it. Which is a healthy thing for Hacker News, I think, getting other perspectives.

Actually there wasn't anything in DHH's talk that I really disagreed with, except the use of the word "startup" for the kind of company he was describing. There's already a word for companies like Italian restaurants: businesses. A startup is a very specific kind of business: one that starts small but could grow very large. Only a fraction of the 30 million businesses in the US are startups. I think what made people…

One of my problems with DHH's talk was the examples he used. Starting your own restaurant is incredibly risky from a statistical standpoint. Even if you don't die in the restaurant business, you hardly make any money at all. And since this thread is ostensibly about work-life balance, the restaurant business is probably the only example DHH could have chosen where everyone works longer hours than a pg-defined startup.

Zappos was also a poor choice. It wasn't as if Zappos was a small time shoe store that decided to put up a web storefront and somehow magically scaled up its operations into a billion dollar business in the course of 5 years. Zappos was started buy a guy who had 250 million dollars from selling a software startup to Microsoft. It was specifically started to corner the online shoe market, in the same way Amazon was started to corner the online book market. It was also funded by Sequoia capital, further making it more like a "startup" startup than a DHH work-life-balance startup.

Re: Hire Family People

#42

Post by thaumaturgy »

dhh wrote: post #30
thaumaturgy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg has been specifically keeping the definition of "startup" narrow, to describe only the businesses that go through the two-guys-plus-vc-plus-sleepless-nights-equals-fast-megabucks pattern that we saw in 2000. I think that's the model he's most interested in, that he sees as the most dynamic and rewarding. Shiny. That said, the things you describe closely match what I've wanted to pursue. For me, and many others, it…

I think that's a hijacking of the word that's not helpful at all. And I don't think that pg would argue that you can only call yourself a startup if you're going for VC funding and a sale or IPO. If so, there's an awful lot of tech companies that have been wrongfully labeled as startups under this narrow definition. And you'd only be able to call yourself a startup in retrospect once you saw whether you ended up bein…

No, he might not, but getting funding of some kind is a pretty large part of the kinds of startups that they /are/ talking about, because it makes it easier to develop that massive, rapid growth that gets people's attention. Likewise, a sale or IPO aren't the only ways to derive value out of the startup, but they're the ones that get the most focus, because they're the fastest way to get the desired results (lots of money). I think that this point of view was pretty clear in several of the talks at SS08.

Do I necessarily think that that's the only kind of "startup" that exists? No, not at all. (And I'm probably gonna get busted at some point for putting words in pg's mouth.)

But, in a nutshell, no, they're not talking about the same kind of businesses you are. Others have already made this point for me (http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/04/startup-school-surfi...).

So, coming back and saying, "No, we're talking about two different approaches to the same thing!" ... well, that's not helpful.

Again, my only point is that they're talking about a very specific sort of model when they use the word "startup". If you think your model is the same thing, I wonder how you'd distinguish between a startup and a "software business", or "web venture", or whatever. (And, I think this point is getting made by other elsewhere, not just in this thread but outside of news.yc.)

Re: Hire Family People

#43

Post by cellis »

aswanson wrote: post #40
pg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually most chains are started as chains. Bizarrely enough I happen to know a lot about this, because the only reading material at the Chinese restaurant near my house in Cambridge is restaurant industry trade mags. Sometimes the chain guys will take a restaurant that's successful and turn it into a chain, but when they do this they usually keep nothing more than the name and a few recipes. McDonald's was a burger…

What then, qualifies as a startup per your definition, even in the technology space? You could say that Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo started off along the local restaurant model, selling (or providing services to) a small group of local hobbyists and expanding naturally as new opportunities presented themselves. [EDIT: In each of these businesses (except yahoo, maybe) the goal was to grow a business. I don't even know…

I don't think Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo started off to build small businesses with family men. These were young , extremely ambitious, single people, out to change the world.

Re: Hire Family People

#44

Post by pg »

jsrn wrote: post #37
pg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. We don't ask on the application form if people have kids, nor as far as I can recall have we asked anyone in an interview. The reason most of the people we fund don't have kids is simply that most of the people who apply don't have kids.

> [...] most of the people who apply don't have kids. how do you know if you don't ask?

True, I'm guessing based on the demographic similarity between the people we accept (whose circumstances I do eventually learn about) and applicants as a whole. But the median applicant does seem to be about the same as the median company we fund: a pair of guys about 25 years old.

Re: Hire Family People

#45

Post by tptacek »

pg wrote: post #35
dhh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most restaurant chains didn't start as chains, they started just as that single restaurant. Most big businesses didn't start big, they started small. But that's again off topic. I do agree that the startup term is most frequently associated with technology companies, but you do hear about startups within a fair number of other lines of business too.

Actually most chains are started as chains. Bizarrely enough I happen to know a lot about this, because the only reading material at the Chinese restaurant near my house in Cambridge is restaurant industry trade mags. Sometimes the chain guys will take a restaurant that's successful and turn it into a chain, but when they do this they usually keep nothing more than the name and a few recipes. McDonald's was a burger…

This turns out to be easy to research; just start from the R&I 400 list of chains and go read their corporate histories. If you were in business for many years before opening up satellite locations, we can safely say you weren't started as a chain.

You're right; restaurants conceived as chains dominate the top of the list, with some very notable exceptions, including KFC, Starbucks, and Subway.

Something else that the top of that list shares in common is that they were lucrative for their investors.

Something else that they share is that they are all crappy. Look how far down that list you have to go before you hit something you'd actually choose freely? In-N-Out is #89.

Re: Hire Family People

#46

Post by tptacek »

cellis wrote: post #43
aswanson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What then, qualifies as a startup per your definition, even in the technology space? You could say that Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo started off along the local restaurant model, selling (or providing services to) a small group of local hobbyists and expanding naturally as new opportunities presented themselves. [EDIT: In each of these businesses (except yahoo, maybe) the goal was to grow a business. I don't even know…

I don't think Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo started off to build small businesses with family men. These were young , extremely ambitious, single people, out to change the world.

37Signals didn't start off to build a small business; they keep score with revenue, not headcount, like the rest of the real world.

Re: Hire Family People

#47

Post by menloparkbum »

aswanson wrote: post #40
pg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually most chains are started as chains. Bizarrely enough I happen to know a lot about this, because the only reading material at the Chinese restaurant near my house in Cambridge is restaurant industry trade mags. Sometimes the chain guys will take a restaurant that's successful and turn it into a chain, but when they do this they usually keep nothing more than the name and a few recipes. McDonald's was a burger…

What then, qualifies as a startup per your definition, even in the technology space? You could say that Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo started off along the local restaurant model, selling (or providing services to) a small group of local hobbyists and expanding naturally as new opportunities presented themselves. [EDIT: In each of these businesses (except yahoo, maybe) the goal was to grow a business. I don't even know…

Yahoo! became a business by accident. Apple was started by a guy who wanted to make the best personal computers, and Microsoft was started by a guy who wanted to put a computer in every home and on every desktop.

In the Apple/Microsoft initial period, there were plenty of smaller competitors who wanted to slowly sell stuff to hobbyists and "expand naturally" and none of those companies exist anymore.

Re: Hire Family People

#48

Post by tptacek »

jsrn wrote: post #37
pg wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids. We don't ask on the application form if people have kids, nor as far as I can recall have we asked anyone in an interview. The reason most of the people we fund don't have kids is simply that most of the people who apply don't have kids.

> [...] most of the people who apply don't have kids. how do you know if you don't ask?

Not for nothing, but for a hiring manager, asking this question is a firing offense. So is age, marital status, religion, or even any question about place of residence apart from "are you capable of being on-site during core hours".

From a lot of unfortunate experience: tech people suck at following these rules.

Re: Hire Family People

#49

Post by dhh »

tptacek wrote: post #46
cellis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo started off to build small businesses with family men. These were young , extremely ambitious, single people, out to change the world.

37Signals didn't start off to build a small business; they keep score with revenue, not headcount, like the rest of the real world.

Actually, our primary metric is profit. But you're otherwise completely correct. We're interested in growing profit, growing customers, and growing influence the best we can.

If that happens to lead to a billion-dollar company, awesome. But the odds of business tells us that's probably not overly likely, so we're making sure we'll be happy even if that doesn't happen.

(Who knew merely being satisfied with millions -- single, tens, or even hundreds -- would sound like a humble goal in this context.)

Re: Hire Family People

#50

Post by tptacek »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #42
dhh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a hijacking of the word that's not helpful at all. And I don't think that pg would argue that you can only call yourself a startup if you're going for VC funding and a sale or IPO. If so, there's an awful lot of tech companies that have been wrongfully labeled as startups under this narrow definition. And you'd only be able to call yourself a startup in retrospect once you saw whether you ended up bein…

No, he might not, but getting funding of some kind is a pretty large part of the kinds of startups that they /are/ talking about, because it makes it easier to develop that massive, rapid growth that gets people's attention. Likewise, a sale or IPO aren't the only ways to derive value out of the startup, but they're the ones that get the most focus, because they're the fastest way to get the desired results (lots of…

According to Graham, "getting funded" isn't even a part of the plan for most YC startups.
Post reply on HN