We need more calm companies
justinjackson.ca
We need more calm companies
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: We need more calm companies
#2Couldn't agree more. It's cool to be profitable, to grow slowly and with intention, to create a good experience for founders, employees, and customers, to build something that lasts.
The grow-fast-or-die-trying approach that Silicon Valley (and YCombinator) promoted in tech world the last quarter century leads to millions of miserable folks (employees, customers, and founders) and a few very rich ones. After trying that approach for a long time, it just doesn't bring me motivation or joy.
Re: We need more calm companies
#3I don’t disagree with the premise, but this would come off less self-serving if the author would provide examples of “calm companies” other than just their own.
Re: We need more calm companies
#4a sad reality of corporations optimizing for investor returns:
the people who work on and buy the product suffer. Good employees are fired, and useful products are shut down.
Speaking generally: Public companies live in a state of pressure to exploit everything possible to the benefit of shareholders and execs.
It's increasingly difficult to see how benefiting this small group outweighs the massive and ceaseless costs to society as a whole.
Re: We need more calm companies
#5Calm companies as defined in this article is difficult to pull off in markets with winner takes all dynamics
Re: We need more calm companies
#6Replace "calm" with "privately owned". Investors that aren't actually invested in the company for the long term are ruinous.
Re: We need more calm companies
#7I don’t disagree with the premise, but this would come off less self-serving if the author would provide examples of “calm companies” other than just their own.
I see with completely different eyes here. This is a sort of manifesto that tells me where the heart of the founders is.
It also inspired me to do better and look at my own company and myself as a fellow founder. I agree with almost everything he said and I'd like to see my company as being a "Calm Company" too. It's a great opportunity to measure my ideas against other's.
I wish more entrepreneurs would post like that, even if it's not 100% selfless. I think the trade off of getting more eye balls for sharing his vision is totally fair.
Time and again I keep seeing articles like this in HN and it's the reason I'm so addicted. It's such a good filter on all the chaotic crap it's out there.
Re: We need more calm companies
#8I don’t disagree with the premise, but this would come off less self-serving if the author would provide examples of “calm companies” other than just their own.
My thoughts exactly. This seems to be a general trend, too. I feel like half the blog posts I read on HN start off interesting but suddenly switch into an advertisement.
Re: We need more calm companies
#9Couldn't agree more. It's cool to be profitable, to grow slowly and with intention, to create a good experience for founders, employees, and customers, to build something that lasts. The grow-fast-or-die-trying approach that Silicon Valley (and YCombinator) promoted in tech world the last quarter century leads to millions of miserable folks (employees, customers, and founders) and a few very rich ones. After trying t…
Fair enough, but the system isn’t set up to optimize for the happiness of founders and employees. It’s set up to maximize returns, which agreed ends up concentrated in a very few rich outcomes.
(btw, big fan of Lost and Founder).
Re: We need more calm companies
#10Calm companies exist everywhere. In fact, calm companies probably outnumber “frenzied” companies 10x.
They are the quiet, stable, regional, unsexy businesses that have been around for 40 years. I have a friend who is an SWE at a large regional insurance broker. Very calm work indeed.
They just don’t pay SV wages.