“self-funded small business that encourages people to stay away from the VCs, says you don’t need to live in San Francisco to be successful, suggests that charging for your products is a good thing, espouses the advantages of small teams, applauds shorter work weeks with more reasonable hours, rejects the notion of traditional ‘seriousness business stuff,’ and believes keeping it simple is the way to success.â€
Jason Calacanis was hounded a little last week with his comments about workaholics but it’s worth looking at what he said rather than the rants about how people interpreted them.
when you don’t love what you do it sucks.
I can totally empathise with this as I keep working on trying to do the switch again? Explain? Okay. I will, but not here.
Jason also says
Very much paraphrased here…and removing some points which I don’t feel can apply universally.
- Buy Macs. They’ll save you money in the long run
- Buy an extra monitor for everyone. Makes people happy and productive
- Buy lunch. Often.
- Find a good accountant to handle tax and wages
This, the Jason Calacanis/37Signals model is the model I already run with for the most part, but there are limits, e.g.
- I think most customers would prefer that Mac-Sys was open 6 days a week rather than 5 (but that limitation comes from the Enterprise Park and not from us). We have campaigned repeatedly to get this changed…
- The hosting company needs to be available 7 days a week. That’s just a reality. Nothing can be done about that and it’s up there with my own expectations.
- Infurious could get away with a 4 day week, probably less considering everyone is working at it part time at the moment anyway.
but the issue with all of this is in terms of equality. Rolling out something to one group and not another isn’t egalitarian and therefore I’m not willing to consider it. It’s not an issue at the moment because the hosting company and Infurious are both still in startup mode. Working conditions are not bad at all – it’s not a stressed environment, they get to work with interesting people every day, they do stuff they enjoy and the only aggro was who gets to play their music on the Airport Express. But it’s not perfect, we’re starting to get tight on space and I’m feeling more and more that a city centre location (or one walkable to from the major bus and train stops) would be better for everyone.
I think 2008 will be a time for me to work on improving the working conditions for everyone.