7 ms·

Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills and making do on a shoestring budget. Why should they not enjoy

Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills and making do on a shoestring budget. Why should they not enjoy the benefits of their spoils if they do make it? I recall a chapter that struck me from Bob Taylor's book (of Taylor Guitars). The first half of the book was all about him building guitars in a shed, then loading them in a car and visiting guitar shops one by one, trying to convince them to buy his guitars and display them next to the Martins and Gibsons etc. that had a lion's share of the market. Many years later, when he became one of the most successful guitar companies in the US, he built himself a nice house, and he used to invite his staff around for an annual BBQ to show his appreciation of them. Then one day, at the BBQ, he overheard some senior management pointing at his new pool rockery and saying "So THAT's where my bonus went this year...". He stopped inviting staff to his house after that incident. "Tall poppy syndrome" exists in all industries and cultures. Personally, I don't see why people who have sacrificed a lot in order to make money in the early days cannot enjoy it later when they _do_ make it. As long as they maintained a high standard of ethics and principles doing so, of course.

mquander 9y ago
It would be nice if our culture taught people how to be happy with less expensive things, since it's kind of a waste from a utilitarian point of view if a multi-millionaire is spending all of their money on giant houses they live in one week a year and so on and only getting a small amount of utility. Better if they didn't have a taste for giant houses, and gave the money to someone who needed it, or invested in something doing more useful things.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  I can see how people may consider some of these things a 'waste', but a lot of the time, they fail to see the 'down river' consequences of the spending. I remember there was a great deal made in the press a few years back about a famous Indian movie star spending several million dollars on his wedding in a poor city that he grew up in. He was criticised for his 'wastefulness'. However, a follow up report on the event a few months later pointed out that his one wedding actually was massively beneficial for the entire city's economy. Catering and hire companies made several year's profits in one day, and were able to hire more people and take them off the streets. Similarly, we may criticise the extravagant marble entrance stairway in a startup founder's mansion, but that stairway may have probably put the stonemason's kids through college or helped to extend that dying artform for another generation. If they have an empty house, they still contribute to the local government's activities via land tax or rates bills, and they probably also employe local cleaners, garden maintainers etc. Far better than just snorting it all away in cocaine and other heavy drugs.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    This is perilously close to the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    True, the money doesn't evaporate. But it's also true that if the house(s) built with that money were occupied full time, that would be even better.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    > Far better than just snorting it all away in cocaine and other heavy drugs. But when they buy cocaine they still contribute to the income of local dealers and the activities of gangs. Their money may well put a gang leader's kids through college. And drug lords can have huge weddings as well. It seems to me like you as well fail to see the downstream consequences of that spending. I do agree that building a house and letting it sit empty is usually slightly better than spending the money on drugs, but that can easily reverse itself depending on the specific building materials and drugs in question. More importantly, there are not just two alternatives. Why spend money on a house you don't need and pat yourself on the back for helping the people you paid, when you could have used the money much more efficiently to directly improve people's lives?
    - cyberferret 9y ago
      Touche. You make a good point. The fact is - no matter how it happens, that money sloshing around is good for the economy. I guess the worst thing they could do is to convert it to bank notes or gold bars and bury it somewhere.
      - didibus 9y ago
        I think spending it on a house is one of the worst ones though. If the money was kept in the bank it would at least go to reinvest into other companies or help people get loans, etc. But a big house, it just reserves land away and wastes material. P.S.: I'd love to have a big house, and don't jusge people who can afford it that do. Luxury is fun, but in this case its wasteful non the less.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  They already “give money to those who need it”, by buying all those expensive things. I want the opposite. I want them to spend every dollar they have on the most ridiculous bullshit and thus move the economy forward.
gxespino 9y ago
The whole point of the article was to point out that many of these unicorn companies may not have “made” it just yet and that modesty (if you can call a < $3mil gone modest) might be smarter for unicorn founders.
charlesdm 9y ago
People do with their money what they want, but a _MASSIVE_ mansion won't add much value to their life. And owning too many properties can be a real hassle. You can have a large house or mansion, somewhere isolated (if that's what you want), but unless you have a family with 4 kids running, it can get lonely pretty fast.
- cellis 9y ago
  "But a _MASSIVE_ mansion won't add much value to their life". Not sure I agree. Have you ever seen the kind of parties you can throw in a mansion? That's quite a lot of value that you otherwise wouldn't have.
  - astura 9y ago
    Unless you're throwing massive (40+ people) parties ever week it's more economical to buy an average sized house and rent massive space for when you throw huge parties
- sulam 9y ago
  Most of the examples used (with the very notable exception of the WeWork guy who honestly seems like he’s a con artist), are buying $4M homes in SF. That would be a mansion in most of the US, but it’s a typical family home in a decent neighborhood in SF. Also as the article points out, people aren’t using their stock to buy these places (Evan Spiegel being the exception). They are almost certainly using money they got when they (and often the rest of their employees) were offered the chance to take some money off the table in a later round of funding. Investors do this for a few reasons — they want a larger percentage that would cause more dilution than existing shareholders want to take, they want the founder focused on the home run IPO instead of potentially taking a buyout offer that would net the founder life-changing wealth but only be a single or a double for their fund, and probably more I’m not aware of. Point being, investors are fully involved participants in this — no one is being taken advantage of. (Again WeWork may be an exception — the external optics there are very bad.) Finally, using something like Dropbox as an example, Drew has built a multi-billion dollar company and his investors (with the possible exception of the last round which was basically an IPO without the listing) are very happy. Is a $9M condo really a sign that he’s not working hard? Anyone who knows him knows nothing could be further from the truth.
lovich 9y ago
I'm not sure how much of it is tall poppy syndrome when it comes to employees vs bosses. Its might be uncomfortable to talk about, but every dollar the boss keeps _is_ a dollar that the employees don't get and the boss is the one deciding how much both sides get. Tall poppy syndrome would be more applicable if it was peers being upset at the success of one of their own, not between subordinates and leaders
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  The boss is not deciding how much both sides get, supply and demand determines at which price point someone is willing to work for someone.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Aren't bonuses a little separated from the standard market forces surrounding salaries? You don't know what your bonus will be when you agree to work for a company, and how the bonus is funded is truly in part left to discretion of your superiors, and also partly tied to company performance and not the going market wage. Obviously you might leave after a few years of really unfair bonuses. But truly, they seem a little disconnected from regular market forces.
    - edanm 9y ago
      Of course they're not disconnected - they're simply priced in. Everyone knows that if you go work for e.g. Google, you're getting a certain base salary, plus a bonus package (plus options/RSUs, plus free food, plus a lot of things). People consciously subconsciously price these in as much as they can. Of course if bonuses are variable it's harder to price them, but the same can be said of stock grants in companies. And no one can afford to ignore those - they can in practice make up a huge part of your pay package.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        > ...they're simply priced in... Well, you're correct. If the bonus is unacceptable, the employee can just quit. But a year of work (or more if it's event based instead of annual) is a big opportunity cost to find out that info. In other words, employees never take an unexpectedly huge bonus to the chagrin of the employer. So there is a power imbalance there.
stingraycharles 9y ago
> Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills and making do on a shoestring budget. Why should they not enjoy the benefits of their spoils if they do make it? I think the problem is that they are still working for the investors, having sold them the dream. Because they are also acting as CEO, they are still on duty to the investors to create an exit. They haven’t “made it” yet, unless you consider raising investment as the goal. But it isn’t. Until you’ve made your investors a great return, the point of the article is to show some modesty.
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  "Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills " Most don't though. Most come from upper middle class families. They live 'Grad School Life' until they are successful. Meaning: ok, nothing phat or fancy, but they don't have any real trouble or risk. Of course - many do struggle for a long while. I think they should buy what they want ... but they shouldn't be showy about it. Don't drive your Ferrari into work when there's a layoff :). Or ever maybe. EDIT: there's quite a lot of data to validate that richer kids are more likely to be successful founders [1]. I'm not indicating that this is always the case of course, but it's pretty common. I worked for a while at a Fortune 50 and the kids we saw coming in as interns were really well prepared - I also noticed a pattern - their parents were Doctors, CEOs, high level government officials. I'm not saying they didn't earn the positions, but there's no doubt that their status helped, moreover, they already knew how to behave properly in a corporate/professional setting. I had no idea, that's not something my parents could teach me. Two of my 'rich kid' interns went on to found major companies, one of which there's 100% chance you've heard of and probably 80% chance you've used - the other just raised $50M. [1] http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf
  - ci5er 9y ago
    While I would not argue that a "good upbringing" (hence ability to do all the tribal signaling) is a major contributor to success, I would contend that claiming that most founders have these advantages is over-reaching. (Esp. given that most start-ups fail) Coming from a remote Wyoming ranching childhood, I will claim that signalling can be learned, and that most if not all customers, VCs and bankers I might talk to are shocked to learn that I was not brought up just like them. It's no different than lawyers or doctors, though. Every group has tribal signaling to help them identify if a person is in or out of their group. Learn to speak the language. Heck, even poor people (like me!) can do that.
wpietri 9y ago
> Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills and making do on a shoestring budget. Why should they not enjoy the benefits of their spoils if they do make it? Many of these founders have only "made it" in a paper sense. It's at best ungracious to be living large while your employees and investors are still sweating it out and/or losing money. Also, I find the "years of struggle" trope irritating. Many of people live on beans while working 70-hour weeks and don't end up rich. Plenty of those people work at companies whose executives do get rich.
- manigandham 9y ago
  What is your point here? People can spend their money however they want. Are you trying to say that someone who has become financially successful should not spend it because someone somewhere is not at the same level?
  - wpietri 9y ago
    No, and if that's really your interpretation of my point, you weren't working very hard. I mentioned startup employees and investors, not "someone somewhere". The basic theory of a startup is a bunch of people are going to get rich together. Employees take lower salaries and higher risks than they would with a day job in exchange for a promise of sharing in the future wealth when success is achieved. Investors put in money for long periods and at a very high level of risk in exchange for a promise of huge returns if the company succeeds. When founders make those deals and then turn around to fill their own pockets before everybody else, they're not exactly living up to the spirit of the basic startup deal. And when they compound that by living large, it's just rubbing their specialness in everybody's faces. They may be able to get away with it in this age of unicorn hype. But there's a reason startups did not work like this before.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      That's not the basic theory at all. Startups are a narrow niche of new businesses that are exploring new business models and/or designed for scaling quickly. Building wealth is for the founders of the business, the others are employees doing their jobs, in exchange for a salary. Equity is a type of compensation designed to help lower costs, mitigate risk and improve motivation for both sides, but it is neither necessary nor required and there are plenty of businesses that have grown without it. There is absolutely no "get rich together" scheme in place outside of some unfortunate silicon valley cult/culture attitudes. Founders are the business owners so they get the proceeds commensurate to their ownership. There's nothing wrong with that and employees are free to start their own business if they want more control (and work and risk). This is how corporations have worked since the beginning. I'm not sure why you think startups are different, what they worked like "before" and most worryingly why you think founders are "getting away with" creating wealth for themselves by building a business.
elgenie 9y ago
Founders / big stakeholders can live it up xor credibly ask long hours and other sacrifices for the good of the company of rank-and-file and more recent employees, but not both.
astura 9y ago
Well,it is a bad idea to invite your employees to your house anyways - renting space at park is very cheap and a much better idea. First you have to worry about employees stealing stuff or scoping out the house for robbery, etc. Secondly I'd be worried about liability. If someone got hurt during one of these BBQs the homeowners insurance might not want to pay out because they could make an argument you were engaging in business activities during the incident and lots of home owners insurance don't cover business activities. Thirdly, your employees might not be all that comfortable going to your house, going to someone's house, feels a lot more "intimate" than meeting in a public place, and many people aren't comfortable with going to a party at the big boss's house.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > First you have to worry about employees stealing stuff or scoping out the house for robbery, etc. You shouldn’t hire people with whom this is a legitimate concern.
  - smileysteve 9y ago
    I've worked for multiple companies, where, somewhere near the 100 employee mark, one seems to be -> sociopathic and starts stealing laptops -- or the company card. These companies were "best places to work"
    - Swizec 9y ago
      Ah yes big companies. Doesn’t an inner circle usually develop at those sizes and the CEO would only invite the inner circle to their house rather than all 100+ people?
curun1r 9y ago
I think some of it is about the optics as far as raising future rounds. If you're a founder that has built a company with a valuation over $1B, raised a number of rounds, but really only proved that customers like your product at a price that's subsidized with lots of VC cash, living a lavish lifestyle could lead potential future investors to think that you believe you've already made it. I think they'd prefer that you take the perspective that you've only really made it once you've made a profit for your investors. Or even, gasp, until you've built a self-sustaining, actually-profitable company. Otherwise investors will worry that their investment is in your lifestyle rather than a company that will eventually earn them a return on their investment. Once a founder has built a company that's exited or doesn't need any more funding and is turning a profit, I doubt anyone particularly cares how they spend their money.

mquander 9y ago

It would be nice if our culture taught people how to be happy with less expensive things, since it's kind of a waste from a utilitarian point of view if a multi-millionaire is spending all of their money on giant houses they live in one week a year and so on and only getting a small amount of utility. Better if they didn't have a taste for giant houses, and gave the money to someone who needed it, or invested in something doing more useful things.

cyberferret 9y ago
I can see how people may consider some of these things a 'waste', but a lot of the time, they fail to see the 'down river' consequences of the spending. I remember there was a great deal made in the press a few years back about a famous Indian movie star spending several million dollars on his wedding in a poor city that he grew up in. He was criticised for his 'wastefulness'. However, a follow up report on the event a few months later pointed out that his one wedding actually was massively beneficial for the entire city's economy. Catering and hire companies made several year's profits in one day, and were able to hire more people and take them off the streets. Similarly, we may criticise the extravagant marble entrance stairway in a startup founder's mansion, but that stairway may have probably put the stonemason's kids through college or helped to extend that dying artform for another generation. If they have an empty house, they still contribute to the local government's activities via land tax or rates bills, and they probably also employe local cleaners, garden maintainers etc. Far better than just snorting it all away in cocaine and other heavy drugs.
- wpietri 9y ago
  This is perilously close to the broken window fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  True, the money doesn't evaporate. But it's also true that if the house(s) built with that money were occupied full time, that would be even better.
- yorwba 9y ago
  > Far better than just snorting it all away in cocaine and other heavy drugs. But when they buy cocaine they still contribute to the income of local dealers and the activities of gangs. Their money may well put a gang leader's kids through college. And drug lords can have huge weddings as well. It seems to me like you as well fail to see the downstream consequences of that spending. I do agree that building a house and letting it sit empty is usually slightly better than spending the money on drugs, but that can easily reverse itself depending on the specific building materials and drugs in question. More importantly, there are not just two alternatives. Why spend money on a house you don't need and pat yourself on the back for helping the people you paid, when you could have used the money much more efficiently to directly improve people's lives?
  - cyberferret 9y ago
    Touche. You make a good point. The fact is - no matter how it happens, that money sloshing around is good for the economy. I guess the worst thing they could do is to convert it to bank notes or gold bars and bury it somewhere.
    - didibus 9y ago
      I think spending it on a house is one of the worst ones though. If the money was kept in the bank it would at least go to reinvest into other companies or help people get loans, etc. But a big house, it just reserves land away and wastes material. P.S.: I'd love to have a big house, and don't jusge people who can afford it that do. Luxury is fun, but in this case its wasteful non the less.
0xbear 9y ago
They already “give money to those who need it”, by buying all those expensive things. I want the opposite. I want them to spend every dollar they have on the most ridiculous bullshit and thus move the economy forward.

gxespino 9y ago

The whole point of the article was to point out that many of these unicorn companies may not have “made” it just yet and that modesty (if you can call a < $3mil gone modest) might be smarter for unicorn founders.

charlesdm 9y ago

People do with their money what they want, but a _MASSIVE_ mansion won't add much value to their life. And owning too many properties can be a real hassle. You can have a large house or mansion, somewhere isolated (if that's what you want), but unless you have a family with 4 kids running, it can get lonely pretty fast.

cellis 9y ago
"But a _MASSIVE_ mansion won't add much value to their life". Not sure I agree. Have you ever seen the kind of parties you can throw in a mansion? That's quite a lot of value that you otherwise wouldn't have.
- astura 9y ago
  Unless you're throwing massive (40+ people) parties ever week it's more economical to buy an average sized house and rent massive space for when you throw huge parties
sulam 9y ago
Most of the examples used (with the very notable exception of the WeWork guy who honestly seems like he’s a con artist), are buying $4M homes in SF. That would be a mansion in most of the US, but it’s a typical family home in a decent neighborhood in SF. Also as the article points out, people aren’t using their stock to buy these places (Evan Spiegel being the exception). They are almost certainly using money they got when they (and often the rest of their employees) were offered the chance to take some money off the table in a later round of funding. Investors do this for a few reasons — they want a larger percentage that would cause more dilution than existing shareholders want to take, they want the founder focused on the home run IPO instead of potentially taking a buyout offer that would net the founder life-changing wealth but only be a single or a double for their fund, and probably more I’m not aware of. Point being, investors are fully involved participants in this — no one is being taken advantage of. (Again WeWork may be an exception — the external optics there are very bad.) Finally, using something like Dropbox as an example, Drew has built a multi-billion dollar company and his investors (with the possible exception of the last round which was basically an IPO without the listing) are very happy. Is a $9M condo really a sign that he’s not working hard? Anyone who knows him knows nothing could be further from the truth.

lovich 9y ago

I'm not sure how much of it is tall poppy syndrome when it comes to employees vs bosses. Its might be uncomfortable to talk about, but every dollar the boss keeps _is_ a dollar that the employees don't get and the boss is the one deciding how much both sides get. Tall poppy syndrome would be more applicable if it was peers being upset at the success of one of their own, not between subordinates and leaders

lotsofpulp 9y ago
The boss is not deciding how much both sides get, supply and demand determines at which price point someone is willing to work for someone.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Aren't bonuses a little separated from the standard market forces surrounding salaries? You don't know what your bonus will be when you agree to work for a company, and how the bonus is funded is truly in part left to discretion of your superiors, and also partly tied to company performance and not the going market wage. Obviously you might leave after a few years of really unfair bonuses. But truly, they seem a little disconnected from regular market forces.
  - edanm 9y ago
    Of course they're not disconnected - they're simply priced in. Everyone knows that if you go work for e.g. Google, you're getting a certain base salary, plus a bonus package (plus options/RSUs, plus free food, plus a lot of things). People consciously subconsciously price these in as much as they can. Of course if bonuses are variable it's harder to price them, but the same can be said of stock grants in companies. And no one can afford to ignore those - they can in practice make up a huge part of your pay package.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      > ...they're simply priced in... Well, you're correct. If the bonus is unacceptable, the employee can just quit. But a year of work (or more if it's event based instead of annual) is a big opportunity cost to find out that info. In other words, employees never take an unexpectedly huge bonus to the chagrin of the employer. So there is a power imbalance there.

stingraycharles 9y ago

> Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills and making do on a shoestring budget. Why should they not enjoy the benefits of their spoils if they do make it? I think the problem is that they are still working for the investors, having sold them the dream. Because they are also acting as CEO, they are still on duty to the investors to create an exit. They haven’t “made it” yet, unless you consider raising investment as the goal. But it isn’t. Until you’ve made your investors a great return, the point of the article is to show some modesty.

alexasmyths 9y ago
"Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills " Most don't though. Most come from upper middle class families. They live 'Grad School Life' until they are successful. Meaning: ok, nothing phat or fancy, but they don't have any real trouble or risk. Of course - many do struggle for a long while. I think they should buy what they want ... but they shouldn't be showy about it. Don't drive your Ferrari into work when there's a layoff :). Or ever maybe. EDIT: there's quite a lot of data to validate that richer kids are more likely to be successful founders [1]. I'm not indicating that this is always the case of course, but it's pretty common. I worked for a while at a Fortune 50 and the kids we saw coming in as interns were really well prepared - I also noticed a pattern - their parents were Doctors, CEOs, high level government officials. I'm not saying they didn't earn the positions, but there's no doubt that their status helped, moreover, they already knew how to behave properly in a corporate/professional setting. I had no idea, that's not something my parents could teach me. Two of my 'rich kid' interns went on to found major companies, one of which there's 100% chance you've heard of and probably 80% chance you've used - the other just raised $50M. [1] http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf
- ci5er 9y ago
  While I would not argue that a "good upbringing" (hence ability to do all the tribal signaling) is a major contributor to success, I would contend that claiming that most founders have these advantages is over-reaching. (Esp. given that most start-ups fail) Coming from a remote Wyoming ranching childhood, I will claim that signalling can be learned, and that most if not all customers, VCs and bankers I might talk to are shocked to learn that I was not brought up just like them. It's no different than lawyers or doctors, though. Every group has tribal signaling to help them identify if a person is in or out of their group. Learn to speak the language. Heck, even poor people (like me!) can do that.

wpietri 9y ago

> Many startup founders go through months, and years of living on beans, struggling to pay bills and making do on a shoestring budget. Why should they not enjoy the benefits of their spoils if they do make it? Many of these founders have only "made it" in a paper sense. It's at best ungracious to be living large while your employees and investors are still sweating it out and/or losing money. Also, I find the "years of struggle" trope irritating. Many of people live on beans while working 70-hour weeks and don't end up rich. Plenty of those people work at companies whose executives do get rich.

manigandham 9y ago
What is your point here? People can spend their money however they want. Are you trying to say that someone who has become financially successful should not spend it because someone somewhere is not at the same level?
- wpietri 9y ago
  No, and if that's really your interpretation of my point, you weren't working very hard. I mentioned startup employees and investors, not "someone somewhere". The basic theory of a startup is a bunch of people are going to get rich together. Employees take lower salaries and higher risks than they would with a day job in exchange for a promise of sharing in the future wealth when success is achieved. Investors put in money for long periods and at a very high level of risk in exchange for a promise of huge returns if the company succeeds. When founders make those deals and then turn around to fill their own pockets before everybody else, they're not exactly living up to the spirit of the basic startup deal. And when they compound that by living large, it's just rubbing their specialness in everybody's faces. They may be able to get away with it in this age of unicorn hype. But there's a reason startups did not work like this before.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    That's not the basic theory at all. Startups are a narrow niche of new businesses that are exploring new business models and/or designed for scaling quickly. Building wealth is for the founders of the business, the others are employees doing their jobs, in exchange for a salary. Equity is a type of compensation designed to help lower costs, mitigate risk and improve motivation for both sides, but it is neither necessary nor required and there are plenty of businesses that have grown without it. There is absolutely no "get rich together" scheme in place outside of some unfortunate silicon valley cult/culture attitudes. Founders are the business owners so they get the proceeds commensurate to their ownership. There's nothing wrong with that and employees are free to start their own business if they want more control (and work and risk). This is how corporations have worked since the beginning. I'm not sure why you think startups are different, what they worked like "before" and most worryingly why you think founders are "getting away with" creating wealth for themselves by building a business.

elgenie 9y ago

Founders / big stakeholders can live it up xor credibly ask long hours and other sacrifices for the good of the company of rank-and-file and more recent employees, but not both.

astura 9y ago

Well,it is a bad idea to invite your employees to your house anyways - renting space at park is very cheap and a much better idea. First you have to worry about employees stealing stuff or scoping out the house for robbery, etc. Secondly I'd be worried about liability. If someone got hurt during one of these BBQs the homeowners insurance might not want to pay out because they could make an argument you were engaging in business activities during the incident and lots of home owners insurance don't cover business activities. Thirdly, your employees might not be all that comfortable going to your house, going to someone's house, feels a lot more "intimate" than meeting in a public place, and many people aren't comfortable with going to a party at the big boss's house.

Swizec 9y ago
> First you have to worry about employees stealing stuff or scoping out the house for robbery, etc. You shouldn’t hire people with whom this is a legitimate concern.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  I've worked for multiple companies, where, somewhere near the 100 employee mark, one seems to be -> sociopathic and starts stealing laptops -- or the company card. These companies were "best places to work"
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Ah yes big companies. Doesn’t an inner circle usually develop at those sizes and the CEO would only invite the inner circle to their house rather than all 100+ people?

curun1r 9y ago

I think some of it is about the optics as far as raising future rounds. If you're a founder that has built a company with a valuation over $1B, raised a number of rounds, but really only proved that customers like your product at a price that's subsidized with lots of VC cash, living a lavish lifestyle could lead potential future investors to think that you believe you've already made it. I think they'd prefer that you take the perspective that you've only really made it once you've made a profit for your investors. Or even, gasp, until you've built a self-sustaining, actually-profitable company. Otherwise investors will worry that their investment is in your lifestyle rather than a company that will eventually earn them a return on their investment. Once a founder has built a company that's exited or doesn't need any more funding and is turning a profit, I doubt anyone particularly cares how they spend their money.