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This may sound controversial, but I wish people who make these self-serving recruiting posts would provide examples other than extremely large, established, or

This may sound controversial, but I wish people who make these self-serving recruiting posts would provide examples other than extremely large, established, or well-funded companies. How about the small 3-person outfit developing a produce/service paid for by hours and hours of grueling consulting work? As a startup founder that wasn't funded by top tier venture capitalists (just customers) I have an extremely difficult time swallowing this narrative that anything I do has any direct mapping to Zappo's, Netflix, Netscape, Google, or (lol) Disney. My day to day is concerned about finding customers, getting paid, managing expenditures, creating value (also known as doing real work), not worrying about how to define some sort of 'culture'. My culture is finding customers and getting paid. It's a culture of hustling for sales and doing professionally acceptable levels of work under enormous time and resource constraints with clients that don't really care that I'm trying to develop product. Wealthfront raised $10.5M from investors including Marc Andreessen.

pascal-louis 16y ago
Our goal is to create a large independent company, and are quite far from the bootstrap startup you describe. What you are describing is http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-startups-4557023/10 http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-star... and what I'm after is http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-startups-4557023/16 http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-star... Both models are valid, and both models require different approaches. Steve Blank will be talking about this soon at Wealthfront and you should feel free to join. As for the self-serving recruiting post... we're not recruiting anyone this year!
- tastybites 16y ago
  Hmm, is that a small bit of condescension I detect in your response? Our goal is also to create a large independent company, not build a $500k/year online TODO list company or whatever it is you have in mind (our revenues surpassed that in year 1). I'm not really sure what you mean by 'independent', though, because all companies depend on their customers.... (QED?) Here are some large, independent companies in our space: RAX, TMRK (well, not anymore I guess), peer1.com, he.net, IBM From what I can tell your competitors are the large mutual funds, ETFs, and retail wealth management, so I'm sure you will achieve success, as it's a large and proven market. And as far as not recruiting this year - web content doesn't disappear after a year.
nswanberg 16y ago
Have you read http://sivers.org/delegate http://sivers.org/delegate ? That might be more in line with your experience. The biggest reason why you see posts from well-funded companies on culture, aside from recruiting, is because they are the ones that are hiring quickly and have a large group of people that must make decisions on a company's behalf in that company's best interest. It doesn't strike me as necessary for a very small company to even have those concerns. "[F]inding customers, getting paid, managing expenditures, creating value" sounds exactly right for how you describe your company.
seiji 16y ago
Also see http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-creation.html http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr... about how to bootstrap a culture and/or cult.

pascal-louis 16y ago

Our goal is to create a large independent company, and are quite far from the bootstrap startup you describe. What you are describing is http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-startups-4557023/10 http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-star... and what I'm after is http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-startups-4557023/16 http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/why-fighter-pilots-run-star... Both models are valid, and both models require different approaches. Steve Blank will be talking about this soon at Wealthfront and you should feel free to join. As for the self-serving recruiting post... we're not recruiting anyone this year!

tastybites 16y ago
Hmm, is that a small bit of condescension I detect in your response? Our goal is also to create a large independent company, not build a $500k/year online TODO list company or whatever it is you have in mind (our revenues surpassed that in year 1). I'm not really sure what you mean by 'independent', though, because all companies depend on their customers.... (QED?) Here are some large, independent companies in our space: RAX, TMRK (well, not anymore I guess), peer1.com, he.net, IBM From what I can tell your competitors are the large mutual funds, ETFs, and retail wealth management, so I'm sure you will achieve success, as it's a large and proven market. And as far as not recruiting this year - web content doesn't disappear after a year.

nswanberg 16y ago

Have you read http://sivers.org/delegate http://sivers.org/delegate ? That might be more in line with your experience. The biggest reason why you see posts from well-funded companies on culture, aside from recruiting, is because they are the ones that are hiring quickly and have a large group of people that must make decisions on a company's behalf in that company's best interest. It doesn't strike me as necessary for a very small company to even have those concerns. "[F]inding customers, getting paid, managing expenditures, creating value" sounds exactly right for how you describe your company.

seiji 16y ago

Also see http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-creation.html http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr... about how to bootstrap a culture and/or cult.