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A decent rule of thumb is usually "would you spend it if it was your own money" - most people aren't going to go buy $20,000 couches for the office, but they mi
by neworbit 16y ago
A decent rule of thumb is usually "would you spend it if it was your own money" - most people aren't going to go buy $20,000 couches for the office, but they might buy an $800 couch or a $150 Craigslist special. Feel free to ignore this if you are Larry Ellison :)
- rdl 16y agoActually, there have been a lot of times where I'd spend more of my own money (and have) than I would startup money -- e.g. I'll bring in my personal game systems but wouldn't pay for them with company money, let people use my personal car, etc. That's a rational decision for a founder, especially since behaving that way might encourage others to be cost-conscious (you wouldn't expect employees to do the same thing, but they might be willing to try a software load balancer instead of a $50k F5 if you have the right culture, or at the very least to get the best pricing and terms possible from vendors)
- neworbit 16y agoYeah I used to piss off the CFO a couple of jobs ago by spending entirely modest amounts of money to make the engineers happy/productive and explaining "this is something where I would spend my own money to do this, and in fact I did, if you don't want to cut me a reimbursement check then don't." It's always kind of crazy to see finance people bitch about buying dinner or espressos for the team when they're working late. But sometimes the company ends up with a tightass CFO like that after the founder buys a $20k couch, so there we go!