I worked at McDonald's. It helped make me the man I am.
Mark, have you also considered advice to burn estates? It is analogous from the under up as your flipping burgers is from the over down.
Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
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Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#12This reminds me of a piece of advice from Brian Fox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox) which is that anyone who wants freedom should get enough jobs as waiters to be confident that you can do it at need.
The reason is very simple. If you are in a strange place in desperate circumstances, an experienced waiter finds it fairly easy to get a job. And very importantly, you get to eat on your first day in the job. This makes it a very valuable fallback to have.
If you're a waiter in a decent restaurant, the food will also be pretty good. Furthermore once your circumstances improve, it is a job that you can leave easily.
(Note that Brian Fox's circumstances have definitely improved. He had a successful startup back in the mid-90s.)
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#13I worked at McDonald's. It helped make me the man I am. Mark, have you also considered advice to burn estates? It is analogous from the under up as your flipping burgers is from the over down.
> I worked at McDonald's. It helped make me the man I am
A lot of people say this. How can you be sure you are not just kidding yourself into thinking the time you spent doing something actually quite unproductive was useful?
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#14I know OP used "flipping burgers" as a metaphor, but for my brother and me, it's very real. We both worked at McDonald's in high school when it was difficult to get a job there and they ran a very tight ship. It was the hardest job either of us every had. We had to do everything: cook, clean, take care of every customer, make sure everything was in place and everything was properly scheduled. We had to smile the whol…
Reminds me of a quote I read from Charlie Munger: “I get flack for saying [when I visit a college and give a speech], “This is a nice college, but the really great educator is McDonald’s.” They hate me for saying this and think I’m a slimy creature. But McDonald’s hires people with bad work habits, trains them, and teaches them to come to work on time and have good work habits. I think a lot of what goes on there is…
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Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#15This reminds me of a piece of advice from Brian Fox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox ) which is that anyone who wants freedom should get enough jobs as waiters to be confident that you can do it at need. The reason is very simple. If you are in a strange place in desperate circumstances, an experienced waiter finds it fairly easy to get a job. And very importantly, you get to eat on your first day in the job.…
If you're into extreme survival mode, why not go directly with growing your own crops and vegetable garden :-)
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#16If flipping burgers isn't for you, I received a great piece of advice once, take some time and work for a used car dealership for a few months. Point being everyone should learn how to sell, how to be a salesman, you can be the most technical person in the room but without the ability to "sell" people on your product or articulate what makes it worth while, you are missing a key element. And face it, if you can be su…
I would rather risk being bad at selling and get to keep my soul.
Up-voted from oblivion not because I agree, but because it's a common attitude that I held for a long time, but which now drives me nuts.
Maybe my soul leaked away while I wasn't looking, but I've had to spend a lot of time selling in the last year, and the typical hacker contempt for 'marketroids' is way off the mark. It's a deep, deep art that deserves respect.
Can you cut corners, be a douche-bag and rip people off? Sure, but it doesn't work as well as you think, and show me a programmer who hasn't shipped something that has made at least one person's life a misery. All the used-car salesmen in the world have nothing on the Windows OS developers if you want to compare suffering inflicted on the world. I still can't look someone in the eye if I know they spent good money on the F1 '98 game I worked on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_1_98
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#17If flipping burgers isn't for you, I received a great piece of advice once, take some time and work for a used car dealership for a few months. Point being everyone should learn how to sell, how to be a salesman, you can be the most technical person in the room but without the ability to "sell" people on your product or articulate what makes it worth while, you are missing a key element. And face it, if you can be su…
I would rather risk being bad at selling and get to keep my soul.
I had a pastor who worked as a used car salesman during the day because our small congregation couldn't afford to pay him a full-time salary.
I have always thought that this was the worst kind of conflict of interest.
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#18You gotta cook the beef & acquire the client so If ur in the restaurant biz it’s time flipping burgers and if ur in the product startup space it’s time on the phone [works way better than email]
Everybody talks about innovative products. Innovative sales & marketing is ignored
We have made inroads into accounts like Dell, Yahoo, Walmart & Google and it all started with tracking big guns at these organizations attending conferences, getting their phone numbers from conference organizers, calling up & requesting a meeting at venue – also to mention an innovative pitch. Definitely could not have been done by a sales ace to start with but definitely something we can teach a sales guy to replicate
Bottom line – if the founding team does it themselves its easy to build a scalable process
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would rather risk being bad at selling and get to keep my soul.
Up-voted from oblivion not because I agree, but because it's a common attitude that I held for a long time, but which now drives me nuts. Maybe my soul leaked away while I wasn't looking, but I've had to spend a lot of time selling in the last year, and the typical hacker contempt for 'marketroids' is way off the mark. It's a deep, deep art that deserves respect. Can you cut corners, be a douche-bag and rip people of…
Earning and keeping trust is a very major part of sales--at least repeated sales--that I've learned about over the past year or two. Rip someone off and not only are they never coming back, but they're telling a bunch of people (~5) that you are untrustworthy. Big net loss in my book.
Re: Startup Founders Should Flip Burgers
#20This reminds me of a piece of advice from Brian Fox ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox ) which is that anyone who wants freedom should get enough jobs as waiters to be confident that you can do it at need. The reason is very simple. If you are in a strange place in desperate circumstances, an experienced waiter finds it fairly easy to get a job. And very importantly, you get to eat on your first day in the job.…
If you're into extreme survival mode, why not go directly with growing your own crops and vegetable garden :-)
This is not advice for survivalists. It is advice for people who want to lead an interesting life. In his case he wanted the freedom to travel and work on free software back in the 80s. His skills as a waiter provided a safety net that gave him the freedom to do that.
Growing your own crops would be an absurdly horrible strategy. Imagine that you're in a strange city and your wallet was just stolen. You have just a few days of reserve cash. Would you at this point prefer the fallback plan of, "Plant these seeds, wait for them to grow" or "Get a job as a waiter, eat immediately"?