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Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

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Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#41

Post by skynet-9000 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #29
recursive wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid dealing with politics? A lot of people I've heard say "they don't do politics" are affected by it just as much as anyone else. They're just bad at it.

Everyone is hired for a specific job. The details of that job are explicit to both parties. Where there is ambiguity we call that out and set that expectation (ex: that this duty may change). This alone avoids a lot of the “not my job problem” or people trying to encroach on someone else’s job. In turn, this reduces chances of conflict and politics. Additionally, we keep communication extremely focused on work. There…

This sounds pretty awesome. I think that some of the office politics creep in not because of the projects that people are working on, but just because people actually interact on non-work things. This can be a really good thing in many cases (you spend a lot of time with these people, so it's good to have a cultural fit and hang out), but it can also be bad, because so much of your personal life can be wrapped up in people from work.

This has less personal contact, and therefore the only politics will mostly be focused on work. As long as things are scoped tightly and you are self-motivated, this should work pretty well. But, you have to have your own social life, since you won't get it from work.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#42

Post by courtewing »

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point.

Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in public repos. Slack and Zoom are used, but if they're used to make decisions, the recording is saved for others to consume and the decision is documented on GitHub.

Meetings are discouraged, but not non-existent. To give some context, I'm a manager of two teams and this week I had 4.5 hours of meetings (including 1:1s), which is pretty normal. When I was an independent contributor on a single team, I often had weeks where I had a single 30 minute meeting.

In practice today, I suspect an engineer at Elastic will spend an average of ~2 hours a week in a meeting, with a few spending a great deal more than that and others spending less.

This culture is demonstrated top-down and has been a common thread from the early days, through the IPO, and continues today.

Edit: We also have a general philosophy of features being done when they're done rather than when we reach some arbitrary date. This doesn't mean we don't have timelines (we have ~2 month long release cycles), but if we can pair down scope to make a release, we will, and if we can't do it then we'll just move the feature to the next release instead.

We've codified a lot of the philosophy that feeds into this workflow here: https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#43

Post by CleverLikeAnOx »

bravura wrote: post #33
offtop5 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as I can Bill my hours, I don't care all that much. I find smaller or more experimental companies to be much more unstable, and in my thirties I just want something stable and nice so I can save money and retire with a bit over a million in the bank at 40. Just want to be done with it

If you retire at forty with a million in the bank, how do you make it if you live till 80?

There is an idea called FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early). The first half is having enough money to not need to earn again, so you are not dependent on work or others. Once this is achieved, then you can retire early if you would like.

The conventional wisdom in this community is that if you invest a sum of money in equities, you can withdraw a certain percentage annually without ever running out of money. That is, you mostly live off of the growth of your investments. Generally, 4% (inflation adjusted) is considered a safe withdraw rate. So if you have a million dollars, and you can live off of 40K a year or less indefinitely, then you can retire.

Obviously this is a simplification and there are more considerations. Let me know if you have any questions. This is a topic I am passionate about and happy to give my 2 cents on.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#44

Post by bastardoperator »

pickle-wizard wrote: post #5

Thanks for asking this. I recently took a job with $MEGACORP after 5 years with start ups. I forgot how much $MEGACORP likes meetings. I found myself thinking about how gumroad has no meetings. I asked myself the same question as the OP.

I work for an ultra mega corp and honestly the amount of meetings would be comical if it wasn't so monotonous. The recent meetings have centered around increasing capacity, I've tried to explain that less meetings would give folks more time to produce value, nobody gives a shit so I stopped caring too.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#45

Post by CleverLikeAnOx »

atwebb wrote: post #40
bawolff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million in bank is like $35,000 a year in interest. Not an extravagant lifestyle, but certainly possible to live comfortably on that in a low cost of living area if you have low expenses.

Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?

I think the 3.5% number is not for low risk investing. Additionally, you would need to make something more like 5.5% to account for inflation. Still a fairly conservative number for investments in equities.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#46

Post by GGfpc »

courtewing wrote: post #42

Elastic works similarly, though not to the extent that was described in that Gumroad post. It also varies a bit by team, but I've worked on many teams over the last 5.5 years here, so I have a decent perspective on what's normal and how things evolved to this point. Engineering is distributed around the world, so it happens in a highly asynchronous way centered around GitHub issues, the vast majority of which are in…

Do you hire for non senior positions?

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#47

Post by switz »

My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site

If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous environment much like Gumroad, feel free to tell me about your recent projects: daniel@popflash.site

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#49

Post by albertgoeswoof »

switz wrote: post #47

My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous environmen…

How are you making money on here?
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