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Arrears of pay – one of the worst things for your company
- hga 17y agoYeah, arrears of pay is unacceptable as a rule. Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame said that you aren't a real entrepreneur until you've made a payroll from your credit cards. I myself have experienced this once, and the company did everything right. It was Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI, the competitor of Symbolics) and we had been kept apprised of the status of our effort to get an investment from TI. At one point we were told that our paychecks had been cut and then locked in a safe. If we got the investment, we'd get them ASAP, and in the meantime we were free to do as we saw fit. (It being a crusade to being LISP to the masses, we all stayed and worked. :-) This went on for two semi-monthly pay periods, and then we got the investment. And celebrated with a make-you-own sushi party; my suggestion, enthusiastically endorsed by the president, who was even more of a sushi fan than me. It's good, messy and cheap fun, as long as you know how to make the rice and have a good source of fish, which we did from a Japanese grocery store in Cambridge. But outside of special cases like this---we were far from shipping product and we knew we needed another round of financing---it's a clear signal to pull the eject lever. At the very least, it tells you something very solid about the margins on which your company is running and the other resources it has on tap, as well as likely the character of the top dog.