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Your Job as a Founder Is to Create Believers
- pavlov 11y agoCorollary: "Your job, as a startup employee, is to drink the Kool-Aid."
- kaa2102 11y ago...or find a startup with a vision and implementation plan that you can believe in.
- gorena 11y agoA startup with a vision plan wouldn't be bad!
- dudul 11y ago+1. Do employees at the DMV believe in their mission? Why can't founders understand that employees are there for the paycheck? And rightfully so. "Guys, it's your company too! Let's do great things together and make the world a better place!" Yeah great. And for the next round of funding is it gonna be "my company too" or is my 1/10th of a point gonna be diluted?
- nostrademons 11y agoBecause employees aren't always there for the paycheck, and it is to a startup founder's advantage to select for the ones that aren't. There are a fair number of people out there that would rather work for a job they believe in than maximize their paycheck.
- dudul 11y agoOf course. Now, would you rather hire the dummy who has no clue how to get shit done but believe in your "LinkedIn for puppies" or the expert who will take you there without caring for your idea? This post makes it sound like it's a requirement that employees believe deep down in their soul in your idea, while it is not at all required to do a good job.
- nostrademons 11y agoFalse dichotomy. You can probably get reasonably competent people who believe in your idea, and experts who are halfway interested in it. Given the choice between the two of them, I'd rather take the reasonably competent person who's really excited to be doing the job, rather than the expert who's halfway interested. You can train technical skills; you can't train motivation. And someone who's motivated will usually improve rapidly, so after a year or two, you may very well have an expert that's highly motivated.
- imh 11y ago> you can't train motivation. That's where that pesky paycheck comes in.
- vladimirralev 11y agoIt's not that false. Remember, whatever you measure will improve. That's a warning. If you select for believers, you will get "believers". Most of the employees are coached from high school to simulate enthusiasm at job interviews. You can hear this in almost every jobseeker's seminar, school, motivational speech, you can even see this in pop-culture. Some would argue that eventually people can be so good at faking enthusiasm that a person who focused on actual skill and drive will be at disadvantage.
- Mahn 11y agoWell technically speaking that dichotomy is false, people who are passionate or "believe" in a startup aren't necessarily dummies, and conversely, skilled professionals in specific fields aren't necessarily careless about a company's goals or vision. It's not a black and white question.
- mindcrime 11y agoWell, I doubt you ever want dummies in the strictest sense, but as for "experts who don't care", I'll just say that there's a time and place to bring in "mercenaries" to deliver specific abilities for nothing but money. Nothing says your workforce can't (or shouldn't) be made up of a mixture of people working for different reasons. In fact, it'd be pretty hard to put together a company where everybody wasn't working for a mixed-up combination of different reasons.
- Killswitch 11y agoBingo. When I started at the startup I previously worked at, while we were working for pennies and not making money, it was "our company" because I had equity along with the founders. Once we started making money and could have reasonable salaries it went from "our company" to "my company".
- chjohasbrouck 11y agoI'm a PHP developer, can I ask how you made the transition to Node? Did you just start hacking away at personal projects with Node? Any advice on resources?
- Killswitch 11y agoPersonal projects mostly yes. r/node was a big help. I also make sure to learn JavaScript, not NodeJS exclusively. A firm understanding of JavaScript is the best way in my opinion. So start using frontend JavaScript stuff. Angular, React, etc. Once you're very comfortable with that, start building your own stuff. Ignore the "but why would I build my own when so much better exists?" because it's not about building something someone else will use, but to help you understand the workings of what you're building more. Once you are comfortable in the frontend, NodeJS is just as easy.. Learn the core modules, and ecosystem. On the frontend you should already be using something like Browserify or Webpack, so you'll already be familiar with using CommonJS based requires.
- chjohasbrouck 11y agoThat's interesting. I already have a lot of experience with Javascript so it might not be so painful. What do you think about Rails vs Node/Express/etc when it comes to startups? Are more choosing Node lately, or is Rails still the startup gold standard? This is the comment I've been responding to btw: > I've been a PHP developer since 1997. December of 2014 I left PHP completely for NodeJS. Best decision of my life. Can I ask why you feel that way? Sorry for the interrogation, I'm just really curious and thinking of a transition myself.
- dpeck 11y agoexternally, yes. But internally, as a senior team member, you should be calling the founder(s) out on their shit constantly if you're going to be around long.
- smacktoward 11y agoWow. From one of the linked articles (http://www.businessinsider.com/pandora-didnt-pay-50-employees-for-two-years-says-tim-westergren-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/pandora-didnt-pay-50-employee...): In the run up to its 2004 Series B funding Pandora was running on financial fumes. Pandora wasn’t able to pay its employees for an astounding two years between 2002 to 2004 while it worked on producing a viable commercial product. Not paying full-time employees is very, very illegal in California, where Pandora is based. “We had no idea we were breaking the law," Westergren said. Over that period, Pandora accumulated $2 million in back wages owed. How this story did not end with Pandora getting nuked from orbit in a court of law, I have no idea. And the bit about Westergren having "no idea we were breaking the law" (wink, nudge, say no more, guv!) is the perfect cherry on top. I guess we're supposed to celebrate not paying your employees for years as some kind of Triumph of Entrepreneurialism, though. And I suppose it is, if you're Tim Westergren! (Not so much if you're one of the employees who he essentially strong-armed into loaning him tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at zero percent interest, but who cares about them.)
- savanaly 11y agoWhy did the employees keep working? Were they promised more money in the case that Pandora did work out? Was the day to day job there enough of a perk that they didn't mind that the expected present value of their wages was low? Or were the costs of finding a new job really high during that time period in that area so that there were better alternatives but they couldn't take advantage of them?
- djloche 11y agoThe crazy thing is - how did the employees manage to stick around? Did they only hire people with huge lines of credit?
- kanwisher 11y agoEven if you have the money in the bank, if I didn't salary for 2 years, I would want founder equity
- e40 11y ago
- minimaxir 11y agoThe emotional appeal of "creating believers" doesn't work when investors want clear, quantitative results and returns on their investment. That's why "growth hacking" with intrusive modals and misleading marketing is an industry in itself in 2015. Airbnb, Evernote, and Twitter are outliers from a nicer past.
- sparrish 11y agoYour Job as a Founder Is to Create a Product People will Believe
- idlewords 11y agotl,dr to more effectively lie to others, learn how to lie to yourself
- krapp 11y agoRemember... it's not a lie if you believe it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsprogrammer 11y agoI've been working on a theory that corporations are actually cults. This is excellent validation.
- chrismarlow9 11y agoI think Google and Apple alone prove your theory.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoUnfortunately, I think I'd have to assert and verify that for every corporation to truly prove it. I'm not interested in spending my life doing that, but someone simply needs to show a counter-example to force me to drop the theory :P
- nostrademons 11y agoSo is every human organization. The basic facts of life are that we're born, we eat, we sleep, we shit, we piss, some of us reproduce, and we die. All other meaning beyond that is socially constructed, from religion to power to currency and wealth to corporations, cults, voluntary associations, friendship, identity, and so on. All history has been the story of one social illusion replacing another. For a couple millenia the church was dominant; for some period within that, it jockeyed with the kingdom. Starting in the 1800s, the nation-state became dominant; people have been increasingly losing trust in them since Vietnam. The traditional big corp died, as a source of allegiance, in the 1980s. Startups are moving in to fill a void - and, as productive organizations that rely upon peoples' consent for their existence, I think they're a lot better than many of their predecessors.
- walterbell 11y ago> productive organizations that rely upon peoples' consent for their existence As a bonus for portfolio optimization and market experiments, they are more disposable than their predecessors. The half-life of socioeconomic belief continues to shrink.
- 11y ago
- nsxwolf 11y agoSounds good. What JS library should I use to do that?
- jonesb6 11y agothere's a React add-on for that
- chrismarlow9 11y agoThat's JSX... noob...
- mikejholly 11y agoBelieveJS
- riebschlager 11y agoI worked for a stretch at a startup where I was asked to "believe". The company's core values were made into wall artwork and recited aloud at staff meetings. It was all eerily similar to my Catholic upbringing. Including the guilt. "Oh, you want to leave work at 5? Yeah, that's fine. I just thought you really believed." You have to be a little insane to start a company, I totally get that. But you're truly doing yourself a disservice if you're attempting to amass a legion of followers. A good developer might not give two shits about your carefully crafted mission statement, but she'll do some kick ass work. Isn't that good enough any more? Why is "startup culture" so obsessed with maintaining the appearance of success rather than focusing on creating something amazing?
- minimaxir 11y ago> I worked for a stretch at a startup where I was asked to "believe". The company's core values were made into wall artwork and recited aloud at staff meetings. It was all eerily similar to my Catholic upbringing. Including the guilt. "Oh, you want to leave work at 5? Yeah, that's fine. I just thought you really believed." They appear to have tried to imitate Facebook's culture, with the infamous "Move Fast and Break Things" slogans plastered everywhere. This is part of the reason why startups-imitating-successful-startups is bad logic and a perpetual problem.
- Kinnard 11y agoI think this means that you were at the wrong company. Maybe everyone there was. That can happen. You should find a company where you do really believe
- kohanz 11y agoThe idea that everyone can and should work at a company where they really believe in the mission or culture of that company seems at least somewhat idealistic and naïve.
- riebschlager 11y agoAbsolutely. Also, that choice is luxury that many of us have access to but most people don't.
- digisth 11y agoI think his point is one that seems obvious, but isn't always. First, you should believe in your product, then your job is to get others to do so. Treating people badly, not paying them, lying, etc. are all terrible and we should not ever praise those parts, but that doesn't mean his overall point is wrong at all. There are a few things going on there: 1) If you as the creator don't believe in it, you're probably going to have more trouble convincing others that it's worth using, unless you have some kind of interesting personality quirk. 2) The value of something - and it may be very valuable - might not immediately be obvious. AirBnB, for example, sounded insane to many people before it caught on. The founders had to believe in it, and they had to convince others to do so. 3) For things which are purely subjective (and I know some do find this distasteful, for sometimes good reasons), convincing others of its value is the entire point. Think about things like fashion, music styles, toys / novelties of various kinds - even certain kinds of technologies which only shuffle the deck in terms of functionality / UX may need to have users convinced. The effects of this one can be net positive (something starts out looking like a fad, turns into incredibly useful thing [Twitter]), net negative (unhealthy fad diets), or neutral (Webkinz? Furbies?), but even if you hate these things, you can't wish them away or deny they exist.
- dudul 11y agoThat the founders and the investors have to believe in a product is undeniable. If we agree that "believe in" means "believe that it's gonna catch on and make a shitload of money", not necessarily "make the world better". But why should you care as a founder if your employees believe in your product? Your employees are professionals, pay them to get shit done and that's it, why do they have to believe in your idea of "Uber for strippers", or "twitter for baby sitters"? The only ones who have to believe are the ones who put their ass on the line for a potential big reward. And startup employees are not in this category.
- digisth 11y agoIt's certainly not required by a any means - if people are good and do their jobs well, then you don't need that. It might be harder to recruit people in some cases if they don't care about your product or service at all, though. There are some industries / technologies I don't have any interest in, and wouldn't work for companies involved in them. So there is some value in having employees care.
- rootedbox 11y agoHe has a point. blind faith vs. logical rational ... being in the in the first business of selling to people(or employees) that work off of blind faith has always been way more profitable in at least power, and sometimes even money.
- ksenzee 11y agoThis is idlewords's concept of investor storytime[0]. The only difference is that here, the author thinks it's a good thing. [0] http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm#ads http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm#ad...
- beeperbot 11y agoThe anecdotes are totally useless. You could replace "For 999 days [the airbnb founders] didn't see traction. But, they believed." with "For 999 days [the airbnb founders] didn't see traction. But, they brushed their teeth." and walk convinced that dental hygiene is somehow key to success.
- kluck 11y ago"For 999 days [the airbnb founders] didn't see traction. But, they brushed their resume."
- brianstorms 11y agoYour job as founder is to create customers.
- graycat 11y agoAs a founder: Always be selling. Always be fund raising. Always be improving the product. Always be creating believers. For each of the above, it is 99% of being a successful CEO. Right! Now how to cram 4(99) into 100! Somewhere in there am I also permitted to write good code?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- brayton 11y agoGrowth creates believers
- troels 11y agoAnd here I thought my job as a founder was to find a business model that creates value.
- Kinnard 11y agoWell, you'd have to believe that it creates value in order to say to yourself and to other people(unless you're a con-artist) you've found one such.
- Animats 11y agoSuggested reading: "The Annihilation Score", by Charles Stross. This is the latest in the Laundry series, about a unit of the British government which deals with paranormal problems. They have to deal with someone who calls himself "The Mandate". He has the power to make anyone around him believe what he says, and he has political ambitions. (He can make people believe him. But the CCTV/face recognition system isn't fooled, and he's caught.)
- fapjacks 11y agoYou know the old question "What superpower would you have if you could have any?"... I have always answered this way. If you can make any number of people believe anything you want, you wouldn't need any other superpower at all. You would have absolute power over every other person in existence.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoSure, but you couldn't fly.
- 20100thibault 11y agoYou could still get them to believe you can fly
- DrNuke 11y agomotivational sh*t is the signal things will end in tears
- smacktoward 11y agoDEmotivational sh*t, on the other hand... http://despair.com/collections/demotivators http://despair.com/collections/demotivators
- DrNuke 11y agoeheh... rational commitment, domain knowledge and hard work are still better companions in our nitty-gritty sh*tty life
- bkurtz13 11y agoThe advice in this post seems like it could undergo a minimal rewrite and apply even better to cult leaders.
- Kinnard 11y agoIf you don't believe in what you're building you're a slave. If you don't believe in what you're selling you're a con-artist.
- kluck 11y agoIt seems all rather obvious: Of course you have to believe that what you do makes sense in order to feel at least a bit of pleasure doing it. Everything else is just a job. What I am worried about is that maybe it is sometimes taken too far, into some kind of religion at which point it is destracting from the actual practical goals of the company.
- ryanSrich 11y agoThis can also be read as "Your Job as a Founder Is to Create Believers So You Can Pay Your Employees Like Shit".
- prawn 11y agoOr to be fairer to people just trying to run a company: "Getting your employees to buy into your vision is usually more efficient than overpaying them to stay." There are many companies that don't underpay because they want to exploit people but because they are trying to stay afloat.
- victor9000 11y agoIn order of priority, your responsibilities as an employee are: 1. To yourself and your family 2. To your career and professional development 3. To the company Don't ever sacrifice 1 or 2 for 3 because the company will not do the same for you. Part of meeting responsibilities 1 and 2 is making sure that you are fairly compensated for your work product and for the value you provide to the company. If you are not being fairly compensated for your work then you should make some effort to rectify this imbalance. If your efforts yield no fruit then you should walk away. Capable employees are too valuable to be squandering their potential drinking kool-aid for the benefit of others.
- zenbowman 11y agoFor the most part, this is correct. It would take an exceptional company with a grand vision for me to swap 2 & 3. I could see myself doing that if I worked for Seymour Cray's companies in the 60s and 70s, or Bell Labs in its heyday, or a company with a grand vision like SpaceX today. But for the most part, you are right.
- halcyondaze 11y agoWell said.
- Disruptive_Dave 11y agoFor some reason the following quote came to me while reading this: "Our task is not nurturing enthusiasm, but overcoming indifference." (Believe this was from an older Wieden + Kennedy pitch deck.)
- parallel 11y agoYour job as founder is to create revenue.
- ElHacker 11y agoSure, believing in your startup as a founder goes a long way. Keeps you motivated in coming back to work at it and walk the extra mile. But is not the founder's most important task to convince the press, investors, partners or even a team to believe. A mindset like that is only looking for acceptance in the external world. The truly job of a founder is to focus on what really matters: user satisfaction. Working on the features they need, creating a 10x quality product, being the best at the specific area your startup is aiming at. Everything else will follow.
- alcasans_head 11y agoSo running a startup is like running a cult? Makes sense
- mikejholly 11y agoCompanies aren't about religion, they're about creating products people pay for. Fin.
- unabst 11y agoWhen I read posts like this, I used to think I needed to be more persuasive and crafty with how I presented what I was selling. I thought I lacked the skills of a good salesman, so to speak. Then I read somewhere that the greatness of a salesman begins at the products they choose to sell. They're great not because they can sell anything. They're great because they efficiently choose to sell the products that sell themselves. As it turns out, great sellers aren't in the business of convincing people. Persuasion is the craft of a mediocre salesman. Hence, I think this is more accurate: "Your Job as a Founder is validated by the believers you create." There is always something in between, such as a vision, a demo, a product, an experience, a great speech, revenue, and so on. But founders don't create believers per se. They generate them. I feel this distinction to be quite important.
- govindkabra31 11y agoI find it wrong that the author is using other successful companies as examples that they were built on "belief". No, airbnb founders did not believe. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg did not believe either. Nor did Larry page. They got there by learning from user, questioning their "belief" and iterating. Nate: '... so I at this point decided to move to Boston. Had other priorities in my life. And pace suddenly slowed down .... Have you told Michael that I am working on other things?'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya0I6oz7q9U&fea.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya0I6oz7q9U&fea... Mark: '.. well, it does not have to be anything more than a college friend website. That is a great product.' https://youtu.be/aQ5otpv6kTw?t=252 https://youtu.be/aQ5otpv6kTw?t=252 Larry page: ... tried multiple times to license their technology and later sell the company for a few millions and later for a few billions. The gap in their asking price and market offer kept them going.
- endlessvoid94 11y agoI heard one of the current YC partners speak a couple years ago at a student conference and this person phrased things really well. There was a question from the audience, something like "how do you know when to quit?" Their response: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And try again. And keep trying. But don't be a damn fool."
- pbreit 11y agoI might phrase it "...to _find_ believers". You run into a lot fewer problems if you merely search vs trying to convince.
- known 11y ago"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
- dagw 11y agoThe other big problem about having company values is that people might expect you to live up to them. I once took a job at company largely because I really liked their espoused "values" and "mission statement" and I "believed" in the same thing they claimed to believe in. Compared to the last place I worked it all sounded like a massive breath of fresh air. Anyway didn't take me too long to realize that all those claimed values where just empty words and the new place was exactly like the old place, and that certainly wasn't good for my moral.