4 ms·

Food Matters: Building A Startup Office Culture One Meal At A Time

42 points by jasonshen 15y ago

ridejoy 15y ago
We always had an "unlimited food from Costco" benefit, and now Camille's taking it one step farther by actually making home-cooked dinners. It's been an awesome experiment!
razwall 15y ago
So instead of going home at a reasonable hour to eat dinner with my actual family, I'm supposed to stay at work and listen to a Happiness Manager talk about sustainable meat? No thanks.
- jrockway 15y ago
  Spend time with your family in the morning? Come in at noon, have lunch, eat dinner at 6:30, head home at 8. Or, bring your family to work for dinner.
  - heretohelp 15y ago
    >Spend time with your family in the morning? You have not lived with a typical family, especially not one comprised of night owls.
- jasonshen 15y ago
  Appreciate your thoughts! We did not set up group dinner at Ridejoy as some kind of mandate which we forced everyone to do - that would be pretty lame. Instead, this set up has evolved naturally out of our team's preferences. Our point with this post isn't to say this is ONE TRUE WAY to do things, but to share our way of doing things and encourage some dialog around building a startup's culture.
carguy1983 15y ago
> But at Ridejoy, we’re not just a team, we’re a family, and families eat together. LOL no. I have a family. I don't need a second one. I also have friends. I don't need a second set of friends either. Pay your employees fairly and treat them to a weekly team lunch at a good restaurant. Also fancy dinners when something really awesome gets accomplished. This is what 99% of people want - people with their own lives and tastes and preferences and schedules and social obligations. Also, the implication of a Happiness Manager is that you're working to satisfy their happiness requirements. This is so misguided it's not even funny.
- jasonshen 15y ago
  Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I totally respect your preferences and it sounds like you might not enjoy working at Ridejoy. That's fine - it's certainly not for everyone. We've found our company morale increasing after implementing group dinners and while we can't directly prove a boost in productivity, we believe there is a link. We thought we'd share what we're learning with HN. Not sure where you got your "99% of people want" stat but if it's true, then I guess we're looking for that 1%
  - carguy1983 15y ago
    WARNING: RANT MODE ON. So what happens when you need to have a serious talk with someone for screwing up and everyone's in a terrible mood afterwards? Do you expect them to also join you at dinner? Or is their punishment that they have to pretend to be happy for the happiness manager? Or is their punishment that they don't get to join you, banished to a microwave meal at home while everyone else sings and dances and eats grass fed sustainably raised mutton raised in a westward-sloping Polyface-esque agrarian paradise just north of Petaluma, served on a bed of organic microgreens and wilted white kale and drinks low sulfide wine from the Willamette Valley with just a hint of raspberries on the nose and a dry finish with notes of oak and lavender? Or does the 1% you're looking for also not ever make mistakes, and gets along perfectly all the time, just like a real family? The thing about these kinds of blog posts is that they are thinly disguised recruiting / marketing efforts and inexperienced people take them as some sort of gospel - nobody ever talks about the time when the team is at each others' throats because someone (or everyone) fucked something critical up and lost $50k and 2 months of work, or petty workplace politics or sexual / drinking / druggie relationships or any of that - which always creep into this sort of hippy dippy communal meals big extended family type stuff and really just adds more trouble than it's really worth. I've worked exclusively at startups since 1999 and let me tell you, this shit happens. It all happens, all the time. People throw words at each other. People cuss and get into disagreements, people fuck up, people are very serious about very serious things, especially when TONS of money is involved. Like MILLIONS of dollars of owner and investor money. What this is - is corporate bullshit dressed up as culture, and it's fucking flabbergasting to me that it's making its way into startups!!!
wonnage 15y ago
Nice! Culture posts will always attract complaints from those that see this sort of thing as impinging on their personal time. But if you're in that boat, you have the choice to find a more fitting environment...
dkrich 15y ago
You're not creating the "correct" culture, you're just trading one kind of culture for another. I work to make money. I don't like it when work bleeds into my personal life. When I leave the office at 5 or 6, I am done for the day. That way if I want to spend my free time thinking about things other than work I am free to do so. I once read a case about Tom Siebel that said that he required that every Siebel office in every city contain the same blue carpet and beige walls. Employees were required to dress formally for work every day. This was at the height of the dot-com "I wear shorts to work and play ping-pong all day" office culture. When people asked him why he was so strict while everybody else was allowed to have fun, he said something like "Employees come to work to make money. They can play on their own time." I read that and thought "this guy is fucking awesome." I think if culture is too lax, work suffers. A lot of people thought Siebel was a dick, but he and a lot of his employees came out very very rich while most of those dot-com's went bankrupt and their relaxed employees ended up looking for work. That's why when I see people bragging about places like the Googleplex or Zynga's offices with awesome meals and pods to nap in, I think that their priorities are somewhat out of whack. All that said, everybody is different. Some people love their jobs and don't mind intertwining work and play. To each his own.
- GuiA 15y ago
  It's worked pretty well for Google, wouldn't you say? ;) Ultimately it depends about who works for you. Some people need a well defined framework to perform well, and for those people the "Siebel approach" makes perfect sense. On the other hand, some people absolutely hate rules and conventions that seem silly to them, and need to be free from artificial constraints to perform at their maximum (that includes playing foosball after spending hours fixing a complex algorithm). This is likely the kind of person that works at Google. One category of people isn't inherently "better" than the other— it's just different. I have friends who went to some of the top businesses schools in the world and perform very well in renowned firms, but they'd be completely lost and unproductive if they had a Google environment. On the other hand, I have brilliant CS friends from undergrad who would be extremely frustrated and unproductive if they had to show up to work in a "formal attire" at 9am and had to follow strict rules and hierarchy. As an employer, know the kind of people you employ. As an employee, know who you are and how you perform best.
georgechen 15y ago
I think team dinning is important, but going to lunch as a group (or the group has a fav. place for take out) usually is a much better option. Our little story of AdMob is this: There's this Teriyaki take out place at downtown San Mateo. We affectionately call it the "Cornerteri" since it locate at the corner of 4th and San Mateo Dr. Ask any x-AdMob about Cornerteri and they'll know about this place... That's how you build a company culture.
kijin 15y ago
Whoa, 3-4 negative comments at the top already. If your employees are a bunch of single college-aged people who are already friends with one another, by all means eat together, play together, sleep together, do whatever else you want to do together. If your employees have their own families and social circles outside of work to care about, let them leave at 5:01. As usual, the important thing is to adapt to the needs of your people. When some of your employees get married, have kids, etc., you'll have to adapt accordingly. Problems arise when you refuse to adapt and try to impose the same culture on everyone. As long as you remember not to do that, I don't see any issues here.
- jasonshen 15y ago
  Great point. Our company is small (full-time=5) and young (maxage=26). I don't think think we'll do group meals in exactly this format forever as we get larger and "older". We will always be thinking about how to cater to the needs of the company and the team as we grow and evolve.
rdl 15y ago
This is awesome -- it seems to work really well for your team. Our startup is more likely to go to the range after meetings or with customers, and hit up a steakhouse or sushi bar. Or maybe order a grass fed wagyu cow or berkshire pig and consume 10-15 pounds a week each :) It's nice that the startup ecosystem supports diversity.
scarmig 15y ago
As someone who's lived and worked in similarly collaborative or communal environments, that's something I could enjoy and definitely wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But beyond the personal appeal, the negatively-charged comments really surprise me. People make the same argument against being very close with the people they live with--they're not looking to be best buddies with their roommates. And that's their prerogative and a totally valid choice! But plenty of people do choose to be really friendly with their housemates, and it works well for them. By the same token, how can we definitively say that Ridejoy's strong culture is bad? Maybe it wouldn't work for you, but I'm sure you can imagine people who would get a lot out of it. After all, the 9-5 with people whose relationship with you is purely professional is something of an historical aberration. So why get huffy about something individuals are choosing to do because they believe it creates a better work environment? Instead, let a thousand flowers bloom and try to figure out if there's anything you can learn from all of them, both the successes and the failures.
solsenNet 15y ago
i will say: i am glad i don't have to wake up everyday and think about ride sharing.
codenerdz 15y ago
Its a bit offtopic, but with slightly over a million in seed money invested a few months ago, how long can this culture really last, assuming employees are paid market rates and are not seduced by these twists on expense accounting. How does Ridejoy make money?
reneherse 15y ago
WARNING, ANTI-RANT MODE ON. Based on the comments, I was expecting the blog to describe how Ridejoy is morphing itself into a communist slow food cult. After reading the much more benign article, I want to offer a counterpoint. The team at Ridejoy is in a unique position where the kind of shared meals Camille is describing feels like the right course for them. They're obviously all extremely impassioned and open-minded. All young. Should they do anything else besides what seems to work for them in their current circumstances? Or what seems to feel like the right direction to take things while creating their culture? I say go for it. Take the risk. Break the mold and make the experiment. If it doesn't scale later on, worry about it then. If somebody falls in love and wants to dine with their sweetheart more often than not, BFD. Ridejoy hardly seems like a fascist bureaucracy in the making that would be unable to cope with such emergent circumstances. "Happiness Manager" would be a frightful title in a larger organization (admittedly it sounds a bit like something out of Orwell or Edward Bellamy), but in a this case it pays to remember that Camille's previous title was "Office Hero". There's a lot more playfulness in this group of folks than some commenters here may realize. Further, there is no bloody way the straight-jacketed corporate culture described in some of the commentary here could ever make a product like Ridejoy's work. If you want to scale, sure, go ahead and codify your blue carpets and ties. Fill your branch offices with clones and drones. But if you want to originate, especially something that is not only technologically but socially challenging, put down your copy of "Dress for Success" and let the spirit of non-conformity and play into the workplace. Conformity in environment and clothing only begets conformity in the mind. Playfulness in spirit does not equal slacking off in productivity, but it can often mean leaps in inspiration. Fundamentally, Ridejoy is in the business of promoting sharing, trust, and community. It makes perfect sense that they make the experience of sharing a pillar of their company culture. Immersing themselves in that ethos, being able to feel-out and experience all of its facets, benefits, and pitfalls can only be an advantage to this kind of 'collaborative consumption' startup. That said, a caveat: I'd beware that so many shared meals might not appeal to more introverted folks. (And maybe that's partially why this article struck such a nerve.) The Ridejoy team has some powerfully extroverted personalities, but the culture needs to be founded in such a way that it appeals to all types. This is especially important as the team grows into "18% gratuity added" territory, as introverted folks are going to feel the need for more social space and shelter in proportion to the number of people. People may want to opt out of the convivium, and that needs to be understood, respected, and above all not belittled or derided. Hell, celebrate it by sharing a toast with the folks about to go home. Seriously. Also, I would suggest that meals are served at a consistent and fairly early dinner time. This will allow people with outside evening commitments to plan. And for folks heading home, how much more enjoyable is a commute on a nourished stomach, and how much more productive one's evening?? DISCLOSURE: I don't know any of the folks at Ridejoy, I haven't yet used their service, and I'm over 30. But as someone with a frightfully high metabolism and frequent eating schedule, a healthily food-centric company culture sounds unbelievably awesome. Even if it means finally socializing that ole inner rugged individualist.

42 points by jasonshen 15y ago

We always had an "unlimited food from Costco" benefit, and now Camille's taking it one step farther by actually making home-cooked dinners. It's been an awesome experiment!

razwall 15y ago

So instead of going home at a reasonable hour to eat dinner with my actual family, I'm supposed to stay at work and listen to a Happiness Manager talk about sustainable meat? No thanks.

jrockway 15y ago
Spend time with your family in the morning? Come in at noon, have lunch, eat dinner at 6:30, head home at 8. Or, bring your family to work for dinner.
- heretohelp 15y ago
  >Spend time with your family in the morning? You have not lived with a typical family, especially not one comprised of night owls.
jasonshen 15y ago
Appreciate your thoughts! We did not set up group dinner at Ridejoy as some kind of mandate which we forced everyone to do - that would be pretty lame. Instead, this set up has evolved naturally out of our team's preferences. Our point with this post isn't to say this is ONE TRUE WAY to do things, but to share our way of doing things and encourage some dialog around building a startup's culture.

carguy1983 15y ago

> But at Ridejoy, we’re not just a team, we’re a family, and families eat together. LOL no. I have a family. I don't need a second one. I also have friends. I don't need a second set of friends either. Pay your employees fairly and treat them to a weekly team lunch at a good restaurant. Also fancy dinners when something really awesome gets accomplished. This is what 99% of people want - people with their own lives and tastes and preferences and schedules and social obligations. Also, the implication of a Happiness Manager is that you're working to satisfy their happiness requirements. This is so misguided it's not even funny.

jasonshen 15y ago
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I totally respect your preferences and it sounds like you might not enjoy working at Ridejoy. That's fine - it's certainly not for everyone. We've found our company morale increasing after implementing group dinners and while we can't directly prove a boost in productivity, we believe there is a link. We thought we'd share what we're learning with HN. Not sure where you got your "99% of people want" stat but if it's true, then I guess we're looking for that 1%
- carguy1983 15y ago
  WARNING: RANT MODE ON. So what happens when you need to have a serious talk with someone for screwing up and everyone's in a terrible mood afterwards? Do you expect them to also join you at dinner? Or is their punishment that they have to pretend to be happy for the happiness manager? Or is their punishment that they don't get to join you, banished to a microwave meal at home while everyone else sings and dances and eats grass fed sustainably raised mutton raised in a westward-sloping Polyface-esque agrarian paradise just north of Petaluma, served on a bed of organic microgreens and wilted white kale and drinks low sulfide wine from the Willamette Valley with just a hint of raspberries on the nose and a dry finish with notes of oak and lavender? Or does the 1% you're looking for also not ever make mistakes, and gets along perfectly all the time, just like a real family? The thing about these kinds of blog posts is that they are thinly disguised recruiting / marketing efforts and inexperienced people take them as some sort of gospel - nobody ever talks about the time when the team is at each others' throats because someone (or everyone) fucked something critical up and lost $50k and 2 months of work, or petty workplace politics or sexual / drinking / druggie relationships or any of that - which always creep into this sort of hippy dippy communal meals big extended family type stuff and really just adds more trouble than it's really worth. I've worked exclusively at startups since 1999 and let me tell you, this shit happens. It all happens, all the time. People throw words at each other. People cuss and get into disagreements, people fuck up, people are very serious about very serious things, especially when TONS of money is involved. Like MILLIONS of dollars of owner and investor money. What this is - is corporate bullshit dressed up as culture, and it's fucking flabbergasting to me that it's making its way into startups!!!

wonnage 15y ago

Nice! Culture posts will always attract complaints from those that see this sort of thing as impinging on their personal time. But if you're in that boat, you have the choice to find a more fitting environment...

dkrich 15y ago

You're not creating the "correct" culture, you're just trading one kind of culture for another. I work to make money. I don't like it when work bleeds into my personal life. When I leave the office at 5 or 6, I am done for the day. That way if I want to spend my free time thinking about things other than work I am free to do so. I once read a case about Tom Siebel that said that he required that every Siebel office in every city contain the same blue carpet and beige walls. Employees were required to dress formally for work every day. This was at the height of the dot-com "I wear shorts to work and play ping-pong all day" office culture. When people asked him why he was so strict while everybody else was allowed to have fun, he said something like "Employees come to work to make money. They can play on their own time." I read that and thought "this guy is fucking awesome." I think if culture is too lax, work suffers. A lot of people thought Siebel was a dick, but he and a lot of his employees came out very very rich while most of those dot-com's went bankrupt and their relaxed employees ended up looking for work. That's why when I see people bragging about places like the Googleplex or Zynga's offices with awesome meals and pods to nap in, I think that their priorities are somewhat out of whack. All that said, everybody is different. Some people love their jobs and don't mind intertwining work and play. To each his own.

GuiA 15y ago
It's worked pretty well for Google, wouldn't you say? ;) Ultimately it depends about who works for you. Some people need a well defined framework to perform well, and for those people the "Siebel approach" makes perfect sense. On the other hand, some people absolutely hate rules and conventions that seem silly to them, and need to be free from artificial constraints to perform at their maximum (that includes playing foosball after spending hours fixing a complex algorithm). This is likely the kind of person that works at Google. One category of people isn't inherently "better" than the other— it's just different. I have friends who went to some of the top businesses schools in the world and perform very well in renowned firms, but they'd be completely lost and unproductive if they had a Google environment. On the other hand, I have brilliant CS friends from undergrad who would be extremely frustrated and unproductive if they had to show up to work in a "formal attire" at 9am and had to follow strict rules and hierarchy. As an employer, know the kind of people you employ. As an employee, know who you are and how you perform best.

georgechen 15y ago

I think team dinning is important, but going to lunch as a group (or the group has a fav. place for take out) usually is a much better option. Our little story of AdMob is this: There's this Teriyaki take out place at downtown San Mateo. We affectionately call it the "Cornerteri" since it locate at the corner of 4th and San Mateo Dr. Ask any x-AdMob about Cornerteri and they'll know about this place... That's how you build a company culture.

kijin 15y ago

Whoa, 3-4 negative comments at the top already. If your employees are a bunch of single college-aged people who are already friends with one another, by all means eat together, play together, sleep together, do whatever else you want to do together. If your employees have their own families and social circles outside of work to care about, let them leave at 5:01. As usual, the important thing is to adapt to the needs of your people. When some of your employees get married, have kids, etc., you'll have to adapt accordingly. Problems arise when you refuse to adapt and try to impose the same culture on everyone. As long as you remember not to do that, I don't see any issues here.

jasonshen 15y ago
Great point. Our company is small (full-time=5) and young (maxage=26). I don't think think we'll do group meals in exactly this format forever as we get larger and "older". We will always be thinking about how to cater to the needs of the company and the team as we grow and evolve.

rdl 15y ago

This is awesome -- it seems to work really well for your team. Our startup is more likely to go to the range after meetings or with customers, and hit up a steakhouse or sushi bar. Or maybe order a grass fed wagyu cow or berkshire pig and consume 10-15 pounds a week each :) It's nice that the startup ecosystem supports diversity.

scarmig 15y ago

As someone who's lived and worked in similarly collaborative or communal environments, that's something I could enjoy and definitely wouldn't dismiss out of hand. But beyond the personal appeal, the negatively-charged comments really surprise me. People make the same argument against being very close with the people they live with--they're not looking to be best buddies with their roommates. And that's their prerogative and a totally valid choice! But plenty of people do choose to be really friendly with their housemates, and it works well for them. By the same token, how can we definitively say that Ridejoy's strong culture is bad? Maybe it wouldn't work for you, but I'm sure you can imagine people who would get a lot out of it. After all, the 9-5 with people whose relationship with you is purely professional is something of an historical aberration. So why get huffy about something individuals are choosing to do because they believe it creates a better work environment? Instead, let a thousand flowers bloom and try to figure out if there's anything you can learn from all of them, both the successes and the failures.

solsenNet 15y ago

i will say: i am glad i don't have to wake up everyday and think about ride sharing.

codenerdz 15y ago

Its a bit offtopic, but with slightly over a million in seed money invested a few months ago, how long can this culture really last, assuming employees are paid market rates and are not seduced by these twists on expense accounting. How does Ridejoy make money?

reneherse 15y ago

WARNING, ANTI-RANT MODE ON. Based on the comments, I was expecting the blog to describe how Ridejoy is morphing itself into a communist slow food cult. After reading the much more benign article, I want to offer a counterpoint. The team at Ridejoy is in a unique position where the kind of shared meals Camille is describing feels like the right course for them. They're obviously all extremely impassioned and open-minded. All young. Should they do anything else besides what seems to work for them in their current circumstances? Or what seems to feel like the right direction to take things while creating their culture? I say go for it. Take the risk. Break the mold and make the experiment. If it doesn't scale later on, worry about it then. If somebody falls in love and wants to dine with their sweetheart more often than not, BFD. Ridejoy hardly seems like a fascist bureaucracy in the making that would be unable to cope with such emergent circumstances. "Happiness Manager" would be a frightful title in a larger organization (admittedly it sounds a bit like something out of Orwell or Edward Bellamy), but in a this case it pays to remember that Camille's previous title was "Office Hero". There's a lot more playfulness in this group of folks than some commenters here may realize. Further, there is no bloody way the straight-jacketed corporate culture described in some of the commentary here could ever make a product like Ridejoy's work. If you want to scale, sure, go ahead and codify your blue carpets and ties. Fill your branch offices with clones and drones. But if you want to originate, especially something that is not only technologically but socially challenging, put down your copy of "Dress for Success" and let the spirit of non-conformity and play into the workplace. Conformity in environment and clothing only begets conformity in the mind. Playfulness in spirit does not equal slacking off in productivity, but it can often mean leaps in inspiration. Fundamentally, Ridejoy is in the business of promoting sharing, trust, and community. It makes perfect sense that they make the experience of sharing a pillar of their company culture. Immersing themselves in that ethos, being able to feel-out and experience all of its facets, benefits, and pitfalls can only be an advantage to this kind of 'collaborative consumption' startup. That said, a caveat: I'd beware that so many shared meals might not appeal to more introverted folks. (And maybe that's partially why this article struck such a nerve.) The Ridejoy team has some powerfully extroverted personalities, but the culture needs to be founded in such a way that it appeals to all types. This is especially important as the team grows into "18% gratuity added" territory, as introverted folks are going to feel the need for more social space and shelter in proportion to the number of people. People may want to opt out of the convivium, and that needs to be understood, respected, and above all not belittled or derided. Hell, celebrate it by sharing a toast with the folks about to go home. Seriously. Also, I would suggest that meals are served at a consistent and fairly early dinner time. This will allow people with outside evening commitments to plan. And for folks heading home, how much more enjoyable is a commute on a nourished stomach, and how much more productive one's evening?? DISCLOSURE: I don't know any of the folks at Ridejoy, I haven't yet used their service, and I'm over 30. But as someone with a frightfully high metabolism and frequent eating schedule, a healthily food-centric company culture sounds unbelievably awesome. Even if it means finally socializing that ole inner rugged individualist.