How a Founder Turned a Slow Burn Rate into a Big Exit

&quot;The people who stayed longer are the ones who stayed with the company.&quot;<p>Oh, I have seen that couple of times. People who stay longer are the ones who stayed with the company -- but what&#x27;s the reason? The implied reason is that because that people who stay longer do more, feel better, etc. However, in many-many cases people who go home earlier are pushed out by others who stay later -- not based on productivity, etc. At [insert big company here] I knew teams where everybody stayed until 10 pm every day, because that was the team culture. Other teams went home at 5, 6 pm. Were the former more productive? Not at all, just that became the norm.<p>&quot;To this day, I fight any budgets for any part of the company. If you don&#x27;t have one, then people&#x27;s default is to be more conservative. It&#x27;s like limitless paid vacation policies — people end up taking less vacation.&quot;<p>Etcetera. This writing is about &#x27;how to burn out employees&#x27;. It might work out well for founders though.

I worked at Location Labs. I feel what this article doesn&#x27;t capture is how Location Labs also takes care of its people. Like, there was one guy who was working crazy hours to get a product launched. So Tasso basically forced him take a good chunk of time off and paid for his ticket to go see his family (who lived abroad.) Nowhere is the perfect place to work, but I had a wonderful time working with these guys.

I like this call out quote:<p>&quot;“When you&#x27;re all working in one big room, everybody can see each other come and go. It becomes obvious who the outliers are.”<p>Doesn&#x27;t make it sound like we are pretending that the open office plan is really about productivity maximization.

While I don&#x27;t agree with the founder&#x27;s decision to not hire people with prior management experience, I do like his approach to conservative spending. This is something that often feels forgotten about in these days of spacious SOMA offices and massive refrigerators stocked with Japanese soda.<p>As long as my salary is not skimped on, I get a lot of satisfaction from working for a thrifty company. In my domain (infrastructure and ops), learning to do more with less is a lot more challenging than having a blank check for everything you want. Some of my best workplace accomplishments were made when we simply didn&#x27;t have the cash to buy the big, expensive gear or software.

Except what do you do if you have venture backed competitors who are willing to spend and lose huge amounts of money in the land grab for marketshare, and thus have far larger sales teams and development teams?<p>More 2am nights?

Interesting view on not hiring people with previous management experience - seems clearly wrong to me. There&#x27;s a difference between career middle manager MBA types, who might be deadweight at a startup, and other people who have management experience as a result of competence and natural career progression. Someone with experience managing a team should always be preferable, all else being equal.

&gt; Because we were so capital efficient we were able to focus all of our energy on finding a profitable business model<p>This is the real secret. Lean is how they lasted long enough, but a profitable business model with actual customers is how they exited.

This reads like a Burnout Cookbook.

Damn, I was hoping this would be about orbital mechanics in Kerbal Space Program.