This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.
“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain. If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”
“The problem is that the structures of most larger design businesses cannot effectively facilitate the transmittal of ideas. They don’t allow good design to happen, because they are overburdened with the organizational overhead of running a business: org charts, jurisdictions, inconsistency, poor communications, etc. All the complications that large groups of humans create for one another when they work together, complications that are not about doing design.”
“Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.” [via JK]
“This exhibition features people whose lives are coming to an end. It explores the experiences, hopes and fears of the terminally ill. All of them agreed to be photographed shortly before and immediately after death.”
“Instead of treating news like email (as most RSS readers do), Times presents you with headlines and photos from a variety of sources all in one place, letting you more easily discover the news you want to read. Like your own personal newspaper, you can put feeds into separate areas, create pages for different subjects, and more.”
Q: Do workaholics accomplish more than people who work fewer hours?
A: Often, they don’t. That is because, as perfectionists, they may become so fixated on inconsequential details that they find it hard to move on to the next task, [Psychiatrist Bryan] Robinson said.
As Gayle Porter [a professor who has studied workaholism] put it: “They’re not looking for ways to be more efficient; they’re just looking for ways to always have more work to do.”
Good advice for anyone who wants to be more efficient: When you’re sweating for hours over a tiny detail, stop and ask yourself, “Is this really worth the amount of time I’m spending on it?” If not, declare “good enough” and move on.
Also mentioned in the piece: Companies that believe they’re benefiting from someone’s long hours should think again…
Most companies think that they are benefiting from a workaholic’s long hours, even if it is at the worker’s expense, Porter said. In fact, she said, workaholism can harm the company as well as the worker…
The person may look like a hero, coming in to solve crisis after crisis, when in fact the crises could have been avoided. Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work.
Sometimes the real hero is already home, because he/she figured out a quicker way to get to “done.”
The Park Inn Hotel (and attached City National Bank building) in Mason City Iowa is the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world. It’s in desperate need of financial support to save the building.
On March 12, Wright on the Park (WOTP) received a Vision Iowa grant of $7,500,000 from the Iowa Department of Economic Development for the continuation of the rehabilitation of both building segments. Along with the Vision Iowa grant, the sale of Historic Preservation Tax Credits is expected to yield another 67% of the total funding. For the first time, Mason City residents watching the Park Inn’s gradual deterioration since a modern, 250-room hotel was built here in 1922, can believe the project is do-able.
The Vision Iowa grant is double-edged: while providing a great financial boost, it carries a 180-day deadline. Counting from the day after the grant announcement (March 12), a match of $4,300,000 must be raised for this grant. This will be a daunting task for a town of 28,000, without outside help. For $2,000,000 of this match, WOTP must seek help from the wider Frank Lloyd Wright Community. Contributions can be made to Wright on the Park, Inc. by credit card through the WOTP web site: www.wrightonthepark.org, or by mail to P.O. Box 792, Mason City, Iowa 50402-0792.
If you’re a lover of architecture, and you want to see the last remaining Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel in the world survive to see another day, pitch in what you can. You can read more about the project on the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy site.
Very cool feature on Facebook: When you’re typing a message, and you happen to include a valid link (i.e. http://www.37signals.com) in the body, Facebook automatically looks up the site and pulls back a description and a list of images that help explain the site. You then have the option to send the message with the image + description as an attachment or send the message without any attachment. It drastically clarifies the message with no additional effort whatsoever. Quick, simple, and easy :)
Thought you would be interested in this “pure design” feature. On MyPunchbowl.com (party planning site), users choose a party theme. Like most sites, you can choose by category and search by terms.
However, MyPunchbowl also has the ability to search by color—so if you’re looking for a red based theme, you can find it easily. You know what? Men seem to not care about this feature, but female users LOVE IT.
VC isn’t the only way. Ronnie Angerer writes in with a great example of a site that asked its community for small donations instead of seeking an investor:
My wife is a part of the online knitting and crochet community, Ravelry. She mentioned this weekend that they had asked their members for donations to support infrastructure growth and enhancements to the community. In the blog post about the “Ravelraiser” they write:
“In 3 weeks, 3,457 Ravelers gave donated a total of $71,000 to Ravelry. Not only did we receive an amazing financial boost, we also received a flood of love. About 800 people wrote up really wonderful and amazing notes in the 10 Lousy Bucks group’s “Why I gave” thread.
I really liked that they approached their happy user community for donations (and got them) rather than looking for VC or other funding. Thought you might be interested.
Thanks for sharing Ronnie. According to the post, Ravelry is using the money to pay off all their startup debt, buy an additional server, buy carbon offsets “so that we’re even (actually, a little ahead) with the Earth as well as our bank,” and throw more knitting/crochet/and fiber events.
Good news for the site and good news for its audience too. (There are lots of “this community is sooo worth every penny”-type comments at the post.) When you’re providing a service that people are that enthusiastic for, it’s ok to ask for something in return. That’s what makes something sustainable.
Plus, let’s remember that $70k can go a long way. You don’t need to ask for hundreds of thousands (or more) if you don’t actually need it. Especially if that means giving up equity in your company.
Starting right now The Deck, our advertising network targeting web, design and creative professionals, is bigger, smarter and better looking with the addition of Chip Kidd’s Good Is Dead, Dean Allen’s Textism, the various projects of Mr. Ze Frank and the new suite of rich internet applications geared for artists, Aviary.
“if you make a living only providing an in-person (hands-on) service, you are limiting your income. If you were in a ‘while you sleep’ business, there is no limit to how much you can make.”
“In business you learn at a faster rate, and there’s a lack of bureaucracy and better pay. I tell associates you don’t really know bureaucracy until you experience academic institutions.”
“Between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn’t play itself.”
Notes, photos, blog posts, etc. Sample: “All in all I highly recommend Gel for anyone looking to expand your understanding and awareness of what makes a great user experience. Whether it’s visiting a website, making your own food, building a catapult or attending a conference it will open your eyes in a lot of new ways.”
“At an age when most stars are content to cruise, he seemed thrilled to have a new challenge. ‘Really it makes no sense,’ said Warren Zanes, a musician and educator who edited the oral history companion to ‘Runnin’ Down a Dream.’ ‘It’s completely at odds with the self-mythologizing tendency you see in a lot of rock stars. But Tom Petty is a guy who likes to have fun playing music, and he continues to explore different ways to do that.’...Diarmuid Quinn, chief operating officer of Warner Brothers Records, compared Mr. Petty to unconventional musicians (and label mates) like Neil Young and Jack White. ‘With this kind of artist, you go with their instincts,’ Mr. Quinn said, ‘because they’re usually right.’”
“A lawyer-turned-entrepreneur was the recipient of the title National Small Business of the Year…Shawn Boyer, the award recipient, started SnagAJob.com in 2000 after a friend asked for help finding a summer internship online. When Boyer noticed the absence of websites geared toward internships or hourly jobs, he researched the business, left his job as a lawyer, found venture capital and started the company. Eight years later, Boyer’s business has grown from just two employees to 110 full-time employees. The company grossed sales of $11 million in 2007.”
Paint Chips tells the story of the Esquire, a Brooklyn apartment building that decided each floor would be allowed to choose the exterior colors of their doors, as well as each door’s jambs, lintel and sill.
The result? A classic tale of too many cooks in the kitchen. Years have passed and there’s still no agreement. Check out these quotes from different residents of the building:
“It really is a conflict of too many creative people.”
“It’s like the Bloods and the Crips—except it’s the Teals and the Dark Charcoals.”
“Most people on this floor are somehow involved in the visual arts, so everyone has a feeling about color, you know, one way or the other.”
“It was like the Civil War—brother against brother. I was in the charcoal camp, the side of righteousness.”
“Someone who shall remain nameless looked at me and said that I had to go along with whatever the majority votes, because it’s a democracy. I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. That’s tyranny of the majority.’”
One resident announced that the turquoise color another had selected for her trim made her nauseated leading to this comment: “That’s not nice. Say ‘It’s not to my taste,’ not ‘It makes me sick.’ That’s intolerance, which is the basis of oppression and bigotry.”
“Yeah, there’s been tension. But if more than four eyes roll at once, a community is forming. I think the root of the problem is resistance to change. As an earnest attempt at micro-democracy, the process was educational and entertaining. But at a point, I was ready for a benign dictatorship. If the board had just sent paint crews to do the job, people would have been thrilled with or gawked at the new coat of paint. I bet that’s how it works in the Gretsch building.”
“We live in a hyper design age, where we are all raging aesthetes.”
When it comes to designing something, a benevolent dictator is sometimes a welcome alternative to the chaos of democracy.
I love reading about little changes that make a big difference. The airline industry seems to be a great example.
This article talks about how American Airlines made some small changes to save a lot of fuel:
For instance, pilots were instructed to taxi around the airport with only one engine turned on, a measure that would save about $4 million a year…
And today I saw an article about how airlines are starting to fly slower to save fuel. JetBlue has been flying slower for two years (JetBlue adds an average of just under two minutes to each flight, and saves about $13.6 million a year in jet fuel). Southwest and Northwest are experimenting with it now:
Southwest Airlines started flying slower about two months ago, and projects it will save $42 million in fuel this year by extending each flight by one to three minutes… On one Northwest Airlines flight from Paris to Minneapolis earlier this week alone, flying slower saved 162 gallons of fuel, saving the airline $535. It added eight minutes to the flight, extending it to eight hours, 58 minutes.
It’s a good reminder that while big changes can have a big impact (like American Airlines grounding some of their Super 80 gas guzzlers), sometimes little tweaks (like flying slower) can have a big impact too. Always keep an eye out for the little things. There’s usually a lot of low hanging fruit.
My passwords are so confidential I’m going to write them down on this notepad that says TOP SECRET PASSWORDS. I mean it – these passwords need to be kept SECURE and PRIVATE, so I’m going to WRITE THEM DOWN and label them “My Passwords for all my things that are online.” That will be the best way to keep them safe.
Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.
Now we all borrow occasionally and that’s okay if you fully understand the consequences and don’t make it a habit. I did that the other night. We pushed an update to OpenBar, which had me working until 1:30 AM. That wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t because I got woken up at 5 AM to help deal with an issue that arose. But the costs the following day were typical, numerable, and expensive:
Stubbornness: When I’m really tired, it always seems easier to plow down whatever bad path I happen to be on instead of reconsidering the route. The finish line is a constant mirage and I’ll be walking in the desert for much longer than was ever a good idea.
Lack of creativity: What separates programmers who are 10x more effective than the norm is not that they write 10x as many lines of code. It’s that they use their creativity to solve the problem with 1/10th of the effort. The creativity to come up with those 1/10th solutions drops drastically when I’m tired.
Diminished morale: When my brain isn’t firing on all cylinders, it loves to feed on less demanding tasks. Like reading my RSS feeds for the 5th time today or reading yet another article about stuff that doesn’t matter. My motivation to attack the problems of real importance is not nearly up to par.
Irritability: If you encounter someone who’s acting like an ass, there’s a good chance they’re suffering from sleep deprivation. Your ability to remain patient and tolerant is severely impacted when you’re tired. I know I’m at my worst when sleep deprived.
These are just some of the costs you incur when not getting enough sleep. None of them are desirable. Yet somehow it seems that the tech industry has developed a masochistic sense of honor about sleep deprivation. At times it sounds like bragging rights. People trying to top each other. For what? To seem so important, so in need, so desired that humanity requires you to sacrifice? Chances are you’re not that special, not that needed, and the job at hand not that urgent.
Software development is rarely a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s multiple marathons, actually. So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak. What a bad trade.
This is why I’ve always tried to get about 8 1/2 hours of sleep. That seems to be the best way for me to get access to peak mental performance. You might well require less (or more), but to think you can do with 6 hours or less is probably an illusion. Worse, it’s an illusion you’ll have a hard time bursting. Sleep-deprived people often vastly underestimate the impact on their abilities, studies have shown.
So get more sleep. Stop bragging about how little you got. Make your peak mental capacity accessible.
Urbandigs.com is a real estate strategy site that offers a “Buyers Tips and Tricks” area. Check out the advice they give about what to focus on when investing in a property:
The four permanent features that all buyers should focus on putting their money towards when deciding which product of the group to bid on continue to be:
a) views
b) location
c) natural sunlight
d) raw space
...as these property features generally do not change! The only item that can be changed is natural sunlight and views if you happen to buy a property with a view of a lot that may ultimately be developed; and therefore eliminating or altering your view and natural sunlight. Other than that one risk, your pretty safe. These are the features I focus on when I do consulting for my buyer clients.
Focus on the permanent features. It’s good advice in real estate and in business too. In fact, it sounds a lot like business advice we’ve talked about here: Focus on what won’t change.
When you focus on permanent features, you focus on the things that truly matter over time. Things that won’t go out of style.
That’s why we prioritize on factors like simplicity, speed, and fair prices. People are always going to want these things. It’s why Japanese auto makers focus on reliability, affordability, and practicality. It’s why Amazon obsesses about customer service. It’s why Apple always offers friendly design. It’s why Zingerman’s only sells high quality ingredients.
These things are all constants. People wanted them yesterday, they want them today, and they’re going to want them tomorrow.
Don’t chase the latest technology, fad, trend, or competition. All of these are transitory. You can’t control them and they are likely to change over the next 5 years anyway. Emphasize the temporary and you risk getting stuck selling dial-up in a broadband world (or whatever the equivalent is for your business).
Instead, spend your time on the basics, the constants, the things that won’t change. Figure out the equivalent of views, location, sunlight, and space in your business. Then be an animal about those features.
Case studies Baltimore Sun uses Basecamp to manage “a million moving parts”
“My Department operates as a mini creative agency within the greater organization of The Baltimore Sun Media Group. We do design and development work for clients both internally and externally. This work spans most media and includes: web sites (big and small), banner ads, e-mail newsletters, admail, video production, logos, illustrations, print ads, tradeshow signage, etc. This keeps us pretty busy and we use Basecamp to manage all of our projects from start to finish.”
Entrepreneur Mom uses Basecamp to manage all her client “schtuff”
“I’m training all my clients to use Basecamp instead of sending me multiple emails so rather than sifting through Gmail to find the latest correspondence or searching my computer to resend a file that they don’t remember receiving, we can communicate through Basecamp and upload all the files related to a given project.”
Trucking company uses Highrise to improve communication between office staff and customers
“After looking at many of the major players I stumbled upon Highrise and I’m glad I did. It so easy to use and is very straightforward with what it does. If you need the pipeline stuff or graphs that make you feel warm and fuzzy then look elsewhere…If you want a product that will improve communication between your office staff and customers with a KISS interface, then look to Highrise. I can’t give enough props to the Dashboard idea.”
Shaw Builders creates multimillion dollar homes with Basecamp
“The biggest problem we have is communication and avoiding the he said/she said syndrome. It seems that everyone has selective memory and most homeowners are overwhelmed with the number of decisions that have to be made when building a custom home of this caliber. Basecamp has saved the day numerous times by simply providing a document trail. I can easily use Basecamp’s search capability to isolate documents or massages that relate to a particular task. This has saved us a tremendous amount of aggravation and money. On a past project I had a homeowner who insisted that the railing of his 2nd floor deck wasn’t built correctly. When I pulled up the meeting notes and the AutoCAD drawing through Basecamp within 2 minutes of his ‘brain fade’ I was able to quickly put his argument to bed. That helped to enforce our credibility and saved us from having to rip the railing out at our cost.”
Author and conflict resolution consultant uses Backpack as “business home-base and sanity tool”
“Backpack is my business home-base and my sanity tool to manage it all. It’s set to load when I open my browser each day because I do almost all my administrative work from Backpack. I love that I can access my project files from any Internet-connected computer and from my iPhone. And I love that everything I need for a client or business project is in one place. When I’m busy or on the road, that helps keep me organized so I can give my full attention and energy to my clients.”
The clock spells out time differently every minute. It’s either forty-five minutes past four, or fifteen minutes to five, or four forty-five, or a quarter to five.
Ottoman to bed Uber-ottoman: “t’s a stylish cubic ottoman + it’s a (hidden) guest bed.”
Mountain Tree House Mountain Tree House was designed by architects Brian Bell and David Yocum. More photos at the site.
The Sun Jar The sun jar, designed by Tobi Wong, stores sunlight. Have it sit in the sun during the day and it radiates at night.
This is a wonderful effect and the sandblasted glass makes it seem as if it truly emits warm sun light. It is a great little idea for an outdoor summer dinner, where you have the jars scattered around the table, or an evening at the beach where they will provide just the right amount of light, or as garden illumination, just position them at strategic points in your garden or rooftop terrace or balcony – they work equally well in either location.
Sketch Pad is a cool New York Times column that asks architects or designers to create a vision of what an apartment, house, loft or shack now for sale might look like in order to “help real estate shoppers learn to see past ugly paint, too-small kitchens and a warren of rooms.”
In one of the columns, Updating the Trundle Bed, architects Yen Ha and Michi Yanagishita of Front Studio give an imaginative makeover to a tiny, 380-square-foot studio. It’s a great case study that shows how embracing constraints can lead to creative solutions.
The big-picture goal was to get rid of clutter and give the idea of separation without actually closing off rooms. The top initial question: Where to put the bed? The solution: Raise the end of the living room about 18 inches, and slide the bed under it. This narrated slideshow explains the thinking behind the design (and lets you see the images without the gray bar in the middle).
Other similar hideaway solutions followed. The office and the kitchen are enclosed by translucent panels which don’t close them off the way walls would: “In a solution like a Rubik’s Cube, the corners can swing outward, opening the kitchen and the office to the living area. Make dinner or type a letter, then shut off the area for the rest of the evening.”
The idea for hiding the bed came to the architects during a trip to a Korean restaurant…
“In Asia, lots of things have double uses,” said Ms. Ha, who was born in Vietnam…
“We were frustrated thinking of all these different solutions, and we got hungry,” Ms. Yanagishita said. “We went to have Korean food in a restaurant on 32nd Street. We were eating kimchi — pickled cabbage — and we noticed the raised platform we were sitting on.
“Then all the little pieces came together like a Japanese puzzle box: things slide out, things fold in, things tuck away. It is clean, we hope, without any fussiness.”
Almost two months ago, I decided that I wanted to try working standing up, rather than sitting down. When sitting in my comfortable, reclining office chair, my posture was terrible, my attention span was narrowing rapidly, and I was constantly battling fatigue. After looking around online a bit, it sounded like standing was the way to go.
So I propped my keyboard and mouse up on a few encyclopedias and gave it a go. The first week was rough on my feet and legs, which ached constantly. I kept a bar stool handy for resting periodically on, but I really tried to stand at least 80% of the time. After that first week, though, things improved rapidly.
My attention span improved, too. I noticed an immediate increase in my ability to focus on a problem for longer, and with greater clarity. When I was blocked by some problem, I was able to just walk away from the desk, whereas before the effort of getting up from my chair often made me prefer to just sit and stew in my frustration.
So now, nearly two months later, I am able to replace my book-stack keyboard platform with a real stand-up desk, and I love it. When I was shopping around for a new desk, I quickly realized that I didn’t want stainless steel or plastic. I wanted wood, being the xylophile that I am. And of all the places that sold wooden stand-up desks, Standupdesks.com (the web outlet for Amish Country Furniture Sales) was the most compelling. I purchased a 4-foot-wide variant of this computer desk, and am very pleased with it so far (it just arrived yesterday). The workmanship is top-notch, and I love its simple elegance.
We’ll be posting something about design for the home (or architecture) every day this week.
Hansen Living offers a minimalist, natural approach to kitchens that’s worth a look. Apartment Therapy took a luck at the company’s interesting approach: 1. They get ideas by asking pro chefs what they hate about consumer kitchens and then doing the opposite. 2. They try to limit space intentionally so people don’t fill it up with things they don’t need. 3. When clients ask for more, they tell them to wait 6 months and see if the need is still there (it rarely is).
Knud explained that when he embarked on designing Hansen’s product line, he asked some of the best chefs in Copenhagen what made them ‘laugh at the typical consumer kitchen.’ Then he did the opposite. The result is a collection of free-standing units with no overhead cabinets, but rather drawers below counters. Each drawer is lined with a metal perforated bottom to allow air circulation. The base pieces are raised on legs to allow access for cleaning the entire kitchen floor.
The chefs and Knud agree that overhead cabinets decrease the use of available counter space, increase the chances of hitting one’s head while chopping vegetables, and make any space look smaller. They also agree not to “give people too much space” or they might try to fill it with things they don’t need. In fact, Knud told me, if clients, ask for more cabinets once the kitchen is delivered, he encourages them to think about it for 6 more months and if they still feel a lack of space, they can call him and he’ll concede. According to Knud, they never call.
“We draw inspiration from what’s happening in digital media at large, regardless of whether or not a news organization is explicitly involved, and often regardless of whether a given digital product deals in the news at all. That means that sites of miscellaneous classification like YouTube, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook — and countless others, many of which might have only recently emerged from their founders’ garages — are of as much interest to us as top-shelf competitors like The Guardian and our other peers.”
“Remember that whatever you pay attention to grows in your mind. If you focus on what’s going wrong in your life—especially if you see it as ‘bad luck’ you can do nothing about—it will seem blacker and more malevolent. In a short time, you’ll become so convinced that everything is against you that you’ll notice more and more instances where this appears to be true. As a result, you will almost certainly stop trying, convinced that nothing you can do will improve your prospects.”
“Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.” [tx Sean]
“[One of Apple’s latest patents] would clearly indicate that there’s a store front involved here in order for a user to know that it’s a sunny day in the fall in this virtual world. Something a little outside of the box I’d say and definitely far beyond anything known by any of us shopping at the Apple Store today.”
Startups can bring new ideas to market. They can give people a chance to change the world on their own terms. They can create something where nothing existed before. There is no doubt that they are exciting things to be a part of.
But, as much as the tech world tries to treat them as special, we don’t believe startups are special. They aren’t born out of big bang moments where the laws that govern other businesses don’t apply.
From the moment they go live, startups are as real as any other business. They are governed by the same set of market forces and economic precepts that wrap around every other company, new or old.
At the atomic level, all businesses need to generate revenue to pay their bills, grow their business, and stay in business. The sooner they find themselves in the black, the better chance they’ll have to survive. Call it a business survival instinct — businesses have to feed themselves or they’ll die.
Suggesting startups — specifically tech startups — don’t need to look for revenue opportunities now is akin to spoiling a child and shielding them from the outside world: They’re far less prepared when they eventually have to leave the house for the first time.
A poorly run startup is a poorly run business. A wonderfully run startup is a wonderfully run business. I don’t believe there are many great startups that are bad businesses. Maybe less than 1%. If the business is bad the startup is bad. A great idea, maybe, but a great business, no.
So if you start something up, start a business, don’t start a startup.
The stereotypical startup dream hire is a 20-something with as little life as possible outside of computers. The one that’ll be happy working 14-hour crunch days for weeks on end sprinting for an ever-shifting target that keeps being 90% done for 90% of the time. The one you can make sleep under the table or please with a foosball table in the center of the room. The one where the company paying for dinner pizza is “awesome”.
I should know. I used to be that gullible and even take an odd pride in being up to the job. But it didn’t take long to catch on to the idea that packing a room full of these people was merely a crutch for shoddy management, lousy execution, and myths like “this is the only way we can compete against the big guys”. And you certainly need the latter if you’re trying to give turds wings, but how about just not trying to make crap fly in the first place?
That’s why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. That’s a good thing!
From the experience I’ve had working with family people, I’ve found an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear, the work appears to have meaning, and if it can be done within the scope of what should constitute a work week. When there are real constraints on your time, like you have to pickup the kids or make them dinner or put them to bed, it appears to bring a serenity of focus to the specific hours dedicated to work.
This is what companies need, startups or not. They need constraints and especially constraints on how often you can play the hero card to Get This Very Important Project Done. Most projects are just not that important and most things just shouldn’t be done anyway, despite how good of an idea you feel it is in the heat of the moment.
Update: Removed potential confusion around labor discrimination.
When you’ve got a small group, you don’t need to constantly formalize things. You communicate and you know what’s going on. If you have a question about something, you ask someone. Formalized rules, deadlines, and documents start to seem silly. Everyone’s already on the same page anyway.
Ten-groups
According to British author Antony Jay, there are centuries of evidence to support the idea that small groups are the most efficient. In “The Corporation Man,” he talks about how humans have worked in small groups, usually five to fifteen people, as hunters and farmers for hundreds of generations. The ideal group size is a ten-group:
He found the most efficient to be organised in groups of eight to fourteen people which he came to call ‘ten-groups’, each group free to find its own way towards a target set for it within the general objects of the corporation…
“The basic unit is [a group] which varies from three to twelve or fifteen in number, and perhaps optimizes somewhere around ten; that this group is bound together by a common objective, and that the bond of trust and loyalty thus formed can become an extremely powerful uniting force; that the group needs to decide on (or at least take part in deciding on) its own objective, and to work out for itself how that objective shall be achieved…”
He offers up interesting examples to back up the theory, from sports teams to juries to army squads:
Jay draws attention to units of around this size in many fields beyond the corporation. A committee works best with about ten members; if it grows much beyond that size the extra people do not take a fully active part. Nearly all team games use a group of about ten on each side. Juries have 12 members and the Jewish minyan 10. In an army, organization often decides life and death, and under this pressure armies, too, adopt a basic unit of about ten; the British army, the US army, the ancient Roman army and that of Genghiz Khan, in fact every long-standing successful army, has built up its larger formations from squads or sections of about this size.
That mention of the Roman army takes us back some two thousand years, and Jay traces the ten-group back still farther, back to the foraging communities. The ten-group, found today as a structural unit in successful corporations began, he argues, as the male hunting-group of pre-agricultural times, still with us and still functional.
It seems to be a favorite pastime of the web to moan about the uptime of Twitter. In March of 2008, their uptime according to pingdom was a mere 99.57%. Wah, wah, wah. Sure it could be better. But I’ve felt more connection problems with AIM that I’ve had with Twitter. Even my Comcast network connection seem less reliable than Twitter at times.
That doesn’t exonerate them from building a more stable service. Especially not considering that they have five million dollars of other people’s money to do it with and a few years of practice.
But I for one am pretty damn impressed with what they’ve managed to accomplish so far. They’ve built a simple service that tons of people have become so dependent on that the slightest flicker of the light sends them into terminal withdrawal symptoms. Talk about building something people want!
Now the problem, of course, is that they have a hit on their hands, but there’s no obvious paths to turn that hit into dollar bills (short of waiting until someone offers that 10x+ that their investors probably are savaging for).
If the growth in Twitter usage was mirrored by an equal growth in Twitter profits, the necessary investments needed for infrastructure would be self-evident. But when the money pot is an ever-shrinking gift-with-strings-attached, you can’t just blow your way out of the issue with cash.
Regardless, this is in my opinion the best of what we get from the startup culture of the valley today. An awesome new way to communicate, built very quickly, and addictive enough that people get a little loopy in their expectations. I want my free beer cold, gawd dammit!
So cheers to the Twitter guys. You guys deserve a world of credit for making that Something Awesome. Now please figure out a way to make scaling problems a cause for celebration (more users = more money) rather than condolences (more users = less money).
Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Sarah Hatter, Ryan Singer and Sam Stephenson in Chicago, Matt Linderman in NYC, Mark Imbriaco in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Jeremy Kemper in Pasadena, California, Jeffrey Hardy in Ontario, Canada, and Mr. Jamis Buck in Caldwell, Idaho.
So now, nearly two months later, I am able to replace my book-stack keyboard platform with a real stand-up desk, and I love it. When I was shopping around for a new desk, I quickly realized that I didn’t want stainless steel or plastic. I wanted wood, being the 
