4 ms·

I started a company basically with the goal to employ smart yet... strange... folks like you. It went somewhat well, but reality and inexperience of course hit

by phil21 10y ago

I started a company basically with the goal to employ smart yet... strange... folks like you. It went somewhat well, but reality and inexperience of course hit and we ended up selling 5-6 years later in what amounts to an acquihire. My new life goal is to get back into that, as it was definitely the happiest time of my life. Just finding solid people who can get work done on projects, without having to kill yourself for no reason. If people were killing themselves for a couple weeks, it was for a damn good reason we all shared the benefits from - e.g. an informed decision by everyone to pitch in for a better outcome at the end. Conversely if we had a slow month we'd work half days on backlog pet projects to help improve tooling. Everyone understood work life had an ebb and flow just like personal life. That is truly what is working in the American workforce imo. Just the camaraderie of being in something together and believing your co-workers/managers/whatever have your back, just like you have theirs when they go through stuff. It's taken a few years to make me realize why "owning" my own labor is so important, but it's basically this. I want to have a long-term lifestyle business with people who work hard and passionately, but realize it's simply one aspect of life. I type this mostly for the simple reason that my initial response was "man I want to hire this guy" but realized how I no longer have the freedom to make such unilateral "crazy" decisions. How many others are in my position? Somewhat depressing to think about :)

soulnothing 10y ago
Thank you :). I'm curious what do you mean by reality/inexperience? I've had a few roles very similar to that. It was here's work, get it done by date Y. That was it. A year back during one of my breaks between roles. I spent two months trying to bootstrap a consulting firm. Ran into the no prior clients to get clients problem. But near best damn time of my life. Spending the morning networking talking to people. Then the afternoon, attending tech meetups, and working on projects. I agree a good team is a corner stone to a good work environment. My favorite places to work also had a strong team to go with it. Also there own little culture traits. I want to own my own consulting firm/labor. For the variety of projects, work schedule, etc. It's just getting back to that point. Alot of the best tech workers I know. Want to own/work in a consulting firm .For several reasons. They want their own hours/locale to work in. To not be artificially held back on a project, and alternate between tech stacks, to keep their skills sharp.
- phil21 10y ago
  reality/inexperience I would put largely on myself, and in the "business role" sense of the word. Looking back we were far more solid than we even realized on the tech side, compared to peers in the industry. What we lacked was all the rest - sales, marketing, business development, someone ensuring that the market verticals we were in were strong and who knew when to start looking into new lines of business. While I had some of the latter, the marketing and sales side was always difficult for me. Lessons definitely learned, and I'm very excited for try #2! And yep, the team matters the most. People forget what that word means, but when you're in a functional team you'll simply know it. I describe it as that feeling of being stuck on some tedious work you're hacking away at feeling burned out on, leaving for the day, then coming in the next morning to find your co-worker who works late pushed that project forward for you while you were sleeping. Sounds silly right? But that is severely lacking in most corporations today - that idea of team spirit and team members having each other backs like that. You certainly see it in startups, but that seems to almost be it save very small pockets with competent managers in large corporations almost by accident rather than design. Reading your other posts in this thread you would have fit right in to our ops team back then. Basically our job was to make sure that phone never rang at 2am, and if it did we had fucked up somewhere so we didn't mind it as much as the only person you typically had to blame was staring back at you in the mirror. Everyone was empowered to keep those calls from coming in though. If your company requires heroics to operate, you're doing it wrong.

by phil21 10y ago

soulnothing 10y ago

Thank you :). I'm curious what do you mean by reality/inexperience? I've had a few roles very similar to that. It was here's work, get it done by date Y. That was it. A year back during one of my breaks between roles. I spent two months trying to bootstrap a consulting firm. Ran into the no prior clients to get clients problem. But near best damn time of my life. Spending the morning networking talking to people. Then the afternoon, attending tech meetups, and working on projects. I agree a good team is a corner stone to a good work environment. My favorite places to work also had a strong team to go with it. Also there own little culture traits. I want to own my own consulting firm/labor. For the variety of projects, work schedule, etc. It's just getting back to that point. Alot of the best tech workers I know. Want to own/work in a consulting firm .For several reasons. They want their own hours/locale to work in. To not be artificially held back on a project, and alternate between tech stacks, to keep their skills sharp.

phil21 10y ago
reality/inexperience I would put largely on myself, and in the "business role" sense of the word. Looking back we were far more solid than we even realized on the tech side, compared to peers in the industry. What we lacked was all the rest - sales, marketing, business development, someone ensuring that the market verticals we were in were strong and who knew when to start looking into new lines of business. While I had some of the latter, the marketing and sales side was always difficult for me. Lessons definitely learned, and I'm very excited for try #2! And yep, the team matters the most. People forget what that word means, but when you're in a functional team you'll simply know it. I describe it as that feeling of being stuck on some tedious work you're hacking away at feeling burned out on, leaving for the day, then coming in the next morning to find your co-worker who works late pushed that project forward for you while you were sleeping. Sounds silly right? But that is severely lacking in most corporations today - that idea of team spirit and team members having each other backs like that. You certainly see it in startups, but that seems to almost be it save very small pockets with competent managers in large corporations almost by accident rather than design. Reading your other posts in this thread you would have fit right in to our ops team back then. Basically our job was to make sure that phone never rang at 2am, and if it did we had fucked up somewhere so we didn't mind it as much as the only person you typically had to blame was staring back at you in the mirror. Everyone was empowered to keep those calls from coming in though. If your company requires heroics to operate, you're doing it wrong.