7 ms·

Accidental Startup Office Manager: Ordering Food

60 points by dmor 14y ago

bryanh 14y ago
I like this. You never see Techcrunch or any other tech blogs covering some of the maddeningly mundane aspects of a startup life (for good reason: its boring). From the outside, a startup seems like all code and growth and glamour, but the "CEO is the janitor" motif is nothing if not true-to-life. More mundane things I'd like to hear about: HR, accounting, customer support or general management. Those end up being real pains for startups, and we never know it until we experience it.
- rdl 14y ago
  Ugh. HR (even just payroll, but also various disclosures, insurances, etc.), lawyers, physically printing and getting people to sign large numbers of forms, etc. all are annoying and have very little room for positive differentiation. Picking out an office and furnishing it also sucks, but at least you might do particularly well on it.
  - bryanh 14y ago
    Agreed, it very quickly starts to erode an early startups' most precious resource: time. We've taken to outsourcing what we can, as most do, but it would be nice to see how some people get it out of their way quickly.
  - absherwin 14y ago
    Why hasn't one of the incubators or a startup solved these problems? Between apartment phase and some reasonable maturity point (20-50 people?), one could have a reasonably large building or set of nearby buildings that's subdivided from companies of various sizes. It would have the benefit of: Centralized food acquisition either with community eating or distribution to each unit; centralized administrative services; pre-furnished units which simplifies moving; and big company benefits such a onsite gym, dry cleaning, etc. Presumably such a entity should also provide centralized arrangement of benefits, payroll, legal documents and other issues. An extreme form would be to have this management company run resource companies that make all hires on pass-through basis and submit a single consolidated bill to the main company each month. Why wouldn't this work? I can think of only three reasons though I'm not convinced any of them are true: Insufficient supply of sufficiently homogenous companies (e.g. software startups); sufficient diversity of preferences for customization, particularly with regard to location to create insufficient density; or fear of poaching due to close proximity to other companies that require the same skillset
    - rdl 14y ago
      There are a lot of coworking spaces which also offer private offices. I think the idea is that once you outgrow that, and you hit 10-20 people and a Series A, you want to customize and have your own space. What my dream office is is a standalone building, light industrial style, in Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Menlo Park, with gated parking, and ideally a mile or less from public transit. Onsite generator, fiber, etc., and a way to split the building into public event space for 100 or so people, and offices, with private offices for everyone, with courtyard-type spaces for the groups of offices. 300-500 square feet per person in the "office" area. The smaller buildings on Plymouth in MV, or Pioneer Way, or some of the office parks in Menlo, would all be fine. I doubt most other startups want this -- they all want shared spaces with big open plan offices in nice buildings in downtown SF, it seems.
      - absherwin 14y ago
        As long as there are a reasonably small number of variables, this could be done scalably. The coworking spaces seem to relieve the space and furnishing concerns but don't fix the HR and legal paperwork headaches. You mention that by Series A, companies want to customize. Is it more a function of wanting some of their own common space or a desire for individual expression?
        rdl 14y ago
        You can outsource most of this stuff for $500-1500/mo, and maybe $200/mo per employee if you go PEO. You can pay your lawyers more to do all the paperwork and just bring it to you to sign. At least in silicon valley, the annoyances still exist but don't rise to the level of huge opportunity to fix, since the current solutions solve them pretty well, and the pain-per-customer is finite (you only really set up payroll once, etc.) It's just annoying. The real pain points remain 1) finding great people and hiring them 2) managing teams 3) product 4) customers 5) funding. Office space is the only minor issue which ever rises to the point of serious, and it's only exceptionally bad if you're looking in Palo Alto (SF and even MV are fairly ok). Admin overhead isn't on the list. (unless you really want to solve it, but there are a lot of reasons why startups aren't great customers. Only really in the Bay Area and maybe NYC is there high enough density to come up with something, and since most of this is regulated per-state (and per-city in NYC and SF), you'd probably want it to be locally focused.)
  - GuiA 14y ago
    We outsourced our HR, and although I don't know all the gritty details because my CEO cofounder is taking care of it, I know he likes it a lot. Although one quibble I had with it was that they gave us a standard policy handbook to have signed by employees which was ridiculous and out of touch with the realities of tech startup (ie employees shouldn't use their work computer to send personal emails, etc). We sent it back to them and they were accommodating. (Algentis is the one we're using)
    - rdl 14y ago
      Yeah, I outsourced HR (to Accretive, used by a couple other HNers). We didn't go with a PEO, though.
    - thisone 14y ago
      I'd rather outsourced HR than no HR. When the people you have a grievance against are the people you need to file grievances with, you're better off just leaving. (I'm talking things like having a raise agreed in writing, and then getting paid significantly less. And, when questioned about it, the owners saying "oops, yeah, should have told you, we decided we can't pay you that")
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    I would like to see the entire concept of HR disrupted. Start by not calling people (and think of them as!) "resources".
    - rdl 14y ago
      The trendy SFBA thing is to call it the "People Department".
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
w1ntermute 14y ago
Is anybody else bothered by selection of products listed in the blog post (I didn't check the full list since I'm on my phone)? How about some fruits? You can eat healthy and support the local community at the same time. And Red Bull, even though it's sugar free, isn't something I'd drink on a regular basis. Tea is a nice alternative.
- dmor 14y ago
  We pick up fresh fruit from the market at Pier 1 or get a farmer's box delivered, I should add them Updated post (for those who won't read it here): Important Note: We also order in fresh food from restaurants with GrubHub.com or Postmates, and pick up fresh fruit and vegetables as needed from the local farmer's market (for us at Pier 1). You can also arrange to have farm fresh baskets delivered locally, or from TheFruitCompany.com to anywhere in the U.S. (disclosure by lovely brother-in-law is their CFO).
- Jare 14y ago
  Yeah, the Red Bull immediately suggested 'we want to help you crunch' in my mind.
  - usea 14y ago
    We have a Keurig coffee machine along with a lot of different types of coffee. I don't see energy drinks being any worse than coffee. At a small office, the selection of products shouldn't imply what kind of behavior the company expects of employees. It's just a group of people trying to work together, which includes buying whatever food or drinks are desired and reasonable. I realize that it'd be nice to encourage healthier habits, but since it's not anybody's real job to stock the kitchen, it's been path of least resistance. Personally I hate caffeine, but it's not the worst thing.
    - Jare 14y ago
      In my experience, people drink coffee daily in order to function normally vs being sleepy. OTOH, they go for Red Bull and other energy drinks exceptionally, if/when they need an extra push. If a large enough group of people regularly desire such drinks at work, it might just be an statistically odd group, but by default I conclude that they often need that extra boost. In my mind it suggests frequent crunch. Whether it's imposed by the company, the context, or the people - I'm not judging, especially not a startup. YMMV, I'm certainly biased since a) I only drink water and milk, and b) I have personally seen even worse than energy drinks being offered to help people work longer and harder.
nvr219 14y ago
Dried fruit is a must imho.
yummyfajitas 14y ago
Yep. This is what happens when you do a startup. My version: about 2 weeks after I quit my job and moved to India, we started having scheduled water outages from 9AM-whenever on thurs. We also had 6 female employees. So in addition to coding, my job was to show up at 8AM and fill buckets. I'm now at a big company (startups fail). One perk of big company life - I don't even need to think about front end code (unless I want to).
- codewright 14y ago
  Help me with the non-sequitur from buckets to front-end code. Let me take a guess though: Things you enjoy: [backend-code] Things had to do at the startup: [buckets, frontend-code, backend-code] Things you have to do at a big company: [backend-code] Thus making the big-company more pleasant because you didn't enjoy frontend or bucket filling?
usea 14y ago
At our office (we have 8 employees, 7 are salaried and 6 are engineers) we have a sort of partnership with a sister company who is larger and more mature. We piggyback off some of their resources to help us manage things like payroll, insurance, HR. We do spend far more time than we'd like on things like office supplies, lunch runs, looking at new office space so we can fit more employees, etc. Some of what we do is building one-off or small runs of custom electronics, so we hired a person from our sister company who was previously emptying trash cans in their warehouse. At first he did our inventory as well as QA for our software products. A year later and now he operates our pick-and-place, reflow oven, milling machine, 3d printer, and tons of other things. People are capable of a lot if you give them the opportunity and some guidance.
SG- 14y ago
I put on 40 pounds in my 3 years at a .com startup between 2000-2003 mostly because of the free soda machines (and i hadn't switched to diet soda yet) and free junk food vending machines on each floor. there wasn't any fruit ever. i think the healthiest food was someone stocked a cupboard with rice crispy squares on each floor too.
yashd 14y ago
If you’re interested in healthier, non-junky snacks, check out Blissmo. Blissmo offers a monthly subscription service of healthier snacks, for offices, called the BREAKbox (www.blissmo.com/breakbox). Examples of snacks include: organic, fair-trade dark chocolate, all-natural dried mango strips, locally-harvested pistachio nuts, and gluten-free, granola bars. Also, Startups dig BREAKbox. Customers include: Twilio, Retargeter, Involver, indiegogo, Switchcam, Pocket and more. Disclosure: I’m an intern at blissmo. Feel free to shoot me an email for any reason - yash {at} blissmo {dot} com.
chucknelson 14y ago
As others have mentioned, the foods mentioned don't seem to reflect any deep thought or consideration of various diets. I just wanted to point out that she mentions diabetics as one example of "things to consider", yet the "top 5 foods" are all carbs, except for the basically nutritionally-void sugar free red bull.
- sprobertson 14y ago
  There probably aren't very many quality foods available on Amazon, and why post a link to something if you're not getting referrals?
  - dmor 14y ago
    I went through the other options, like paleo cookies or beef jerky and the reality is that healthier stuff you can order online is really expensive. I don't think it is a startups job to provide full meals or to cater to everyone's dietary preferences - snacks are exactly that, snacks. Something convenient to eat when you are busy and between meals. If you can manage to easily accomodate special requests while getting shopping for stuff done efficiently that's great, but it is really not the startup's job to make sure your high fiber gluten free paleo diet is working for you. Until companies have an actual full time office manager who can worry about this stuff, it is extremely time consuming to cater to all these preferences and if people are really invested in being healthy they will take the time to purchase and bring the foods they want to eat throughout the day. Even once you have an office manager you have to ask yourself whether spending thousands a month on a huge variety of foods is a good idea. Usually until a company is pretty big it just doesn't make sense.
mikeytown2 14y ago
I do the same thing at my work, but I have an honor system where people can keep a tab on a notepad. I buy everything at Costco as the prices are about 1/3 less than what you see on amazon. I round up to the nearest quarter to make life easy for everyone. I have a slightly different selection as well. Below are some of the hot items not listed on this post: Nature Valley Bar - Protein (Peanut Butter & Dark Chocolate). Individual Kirkland Trail Mix. Individual Tropicana OJ. Premier Protein Bars. Premier Protein Chocolate Drink. Lara Bars. Trio Bars. 5-hour energy. Cheese Sticks. Vanilla Whey Protein. My go to meal is Quaker Oatmeal mixed with Vanilla Whey Protein. I'll eat that 1-2 times a day. Cost for that combo is $0.75, not bad if you ask me. Just trying to give people some good ideas here :)
- johnbenwoo 14y ago
  Oatmeal rocks for quick/healthy/inexpensive/tasty. My go-to is quick oats (from the giant cardboard box) + hot water from a coffeemaker + sliced almonds + frozen/dried blueberries + milk
venus 14y ago
Referral links in a blog post are a big turn-off for me. I know that they don't make the product any more expensive, but I still think they are a bad incentive.
turoczy 14y ago
Running a accelerator, one thing we've discovered with feeding our startups is that bringing in food has another beneficial side effect: stress reduction. We try to cater at least three meals a week for our folks. Because we've seen the benefits: 1) Makes sure that people are actually stopping to eat. 2) Lowers the burn rate for the companies. 3) Lowers stressing about "Where are we going to eat?" 4) And perhaps the most beneficial: It ensures that we're forcing some actual nutrients into their diets. Of course the other fringe benefit is the peer mentoring and socializing, where people actually stop banging on keyboards and take a moment to talk to one another.
codex 14y ago
Ignoring the fact that this post contains refer.ly links and is really just SEO bait produced by the refer.ly CEO, I find that carbs and caffeine do not make me more productive at work. I used to think they did, but in reality they only borrowed productivity from the future which must be paid back, with interest, making them a net loss.
- rhizome 14y ago
  I worked at a startup a year ago that had cases of Velveeta mac & cheese. I have to think it was a joke, but they were stored in a way suggestive of human consumption.
Ironballs 14y ago
I... I don't understand. What's this mentality of offering free non-nutritious food for all employees, by the bucketload, for free? Why would you snack in the first place? Either eat solid, whole meals on assigned lunch breaks, or drink something that isn't bad for you - tea, coffee come to mind - or why not, water? In all frankness I find the whole concept of offering free crap for everyone harmful and eventually counterproductive - I can only imagine what copious amounts of free sugary soft drinks will do to people after a while.
- eshvk 14y ago
  It is not free. Nothing is free. In fact, when I was negotiating an offer, the free food for breakfast and lunch was brought up several times. Yes, this is true even at Google. See http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/
knes 14y ago
So this post got downvote/ remove from the frontpage and you repost it ? Its only a link bait article full of affiliate link from your product? And finally, the products you are referring to is the best way to getting everyone fat in the office? Don't you have any shame in what you are doing?
socialist_coder 14y ago
so much high fructose corn syrup
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

60 points by dmor 14y ago

I like this. You never see Techcrunch or any other tech blogs covering some of the maddeningly mundane aspects of a startup life (for good reason: its boring). From the outside, a startup seems like all code and growth and glamour, but the "CEO is the janitor" motif is nothing if not true-to-life. More mundane things I'd like to hear about: HR, accounting, customer support or general management. Those end up being real pains for startups, and we never know it until we experience it.

rdl 14y ago
Ugh. HR (even just payroll, but also various disclosures, insurances, etc.), lawyers, physically printing and getting people to sign large numbers of forms, etc. all are annoying and have very little room for positive differentiation. Picking out an office and furnishing it also sucks, but at least you might do particularly well on it.
- bryanh 14y ago
  Agreed, it very quickly starts to erode an early startups' most precious resource: time. We've taken to outsourcing what we can, as most do, but it would be nice to see how some people get it out of their way quickly.
- absherwin 14y ago
  Why hasn't one of the incubators or a startup solved these problems? Between apartment phase and some reasonable maturity point (20-50 people?), one could have a reasonably large building or set of nearby buildings that's subdivided from companies of various sizes. It would have the benefit of: Centralized food acquisition either with community eating or distribution to each unit; centralized administrative services; pre-furnished units which simplifies moving; and big company benefits such a onsite gym, dry cleaning, etc. Presumably such a entity should also provide centralized arrangement of benefits, payroll, legal documents and other issues. An extreme form would be to have this management company run resource companies that make all hires on pass-through basis and submit a single consolidated bill to the main company each month. Why wouldn't this work? I can think of only three reasons though I'm not convinced any of them are true: Insufficient supply of sufficiently homogenous companies (e.g. software startups); sufficient diversity of preferences for customization, particularly with regard to location to create insufficient density; or fear of poaching due to close proximity to other companies that require the same skillset
  - rdl 14y ago
    There are a lot of coworking spaces which also offer private offices. I think the idea is that once you outgrow that, and you hit 10-20 people and a Series A, you want to customize and have your own space. What my dream office is is a standalone building, light industrial style, in Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Menlo Park, with gated parking, and ideally a mile or less from public transit. Onsite generator, fiber, etc., and a way to split the building into public event space for 100 or so people, and offices, with private offices for everyone, with courtyard-type spaces for the groups of offices. 300-500 square feet per person in the "office" area. The smaller buildings on Plymouth in MV, or Pioneer Way, or some of the office parks in Menlo, would all be fine. I doubt most other startups want this -- they all want shared spaces with big open plan offices in nice buildings in downtown SF, it seems.
    - absherwin 14y ago
      As long as there are a reasonably small number of variables, this could be done scalably. The coworking spaces seem to relieve the space and furnishing concerns but don't fix the HR and legal paperwork headaches. You mention that by Series A, companies want to customize. Is it more a function of wanting some of their own common space or a desire for individual expression?
      - rdl 14y ago
        You can outsource most of this stuff for $500-1500/mo, and maybe $200/mo per employee if you go PEO. You can pay your lawyers more to do all the paperwork and just bring it to you to sign. At least in silicon valley, the annoyances still exist but don't rise to the level of huge opportunity to fix, since the current solutions solve them pretty well, and the pain-per-customer is finite (you only really set up payroll once, etc.) It's just annoying. The real pain points remain 1) finding great people and hiring them 2) managing teams 3) product 4) customers 5) funding. Office space is the only minor issue which ever rises to the point of serious, and it's only exceptionally bad if you're looking in Palo Alto (SF and even MV are fairly ok). Admin overhead isn't on the list. (unless you really want to solve it, but there are a lot of reasons why startups aren't great customers. Only really in the Bay Area and maybe NYC is there high enough density to come up with something, and since most of this is regulated per-state (and per-city in NYC and SF), you'd probably want it to be locally focused.)
- GuiA 14y ago
  We outsourced our HR, and although I don't know all the gritty details because my CEO cofounder is taking care of it, I know he likes it a lot. Although one quibble I had with it was that they gave us a standard policy handbook to have signed by employees which was ridiculous and out of touch with the realities of tech startup (ie employees shouldn't use their work computer to send personal emails, etc). We sent it back to them and they were accommodating. (Algentis is the one we're using)
  - rdl 14y ago
    Yeah, I outsourced HR (to Accretive, used by a couple other HNers). We didn't go with a PEO, though.
  - thisone 14y ago
    I'd rather outsourced HR than no HR. When the people you have a grievance against are the people you need to file grievances with, you're better off just leaving. (I'm talking things like having a raise agreed in writing, and then getting paid significantly less. And, when questioned about it, the owners saying "oops, yeah, should have told you, we decided we can't pay you that")
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  I would like to see the entire concept of HR disrupted. Start by not calling people (and think of them as!) "resources".
  - rdl 14y ago
    The trendy SFBA thing is to call it the "People Department".

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

w1ntermute 14y ago

Is anybody else bothered by selection of products listed in the blog post (I didn't check the full list since I'm on my phone)? How about some fruits? You can eat healthy and support the local community at the same time. And Red Bull, even though it's sugar free, isn't something I'd drink on a regular basis. Tea is a nice alternative.

dmor 14y ago
We pick up fresh fruit from the market at Pier 1 or get a farmer's box delivered, I should add them Updated post (for those who won't read it here): Important Note: We also order in fresh food from restaurants with GrubHub.com or Postmates, and pick up fresh fruit and vegetables as needed from the local farmer's market (for us at Pier 1). You can also arrange to have farm fresh baskets delivered locally, or from TheFruitCompany.com to anywhere in the U.S. (disclosure by lovely brother-in-law is their CFO).
Jare 14y ago
Yeah, the Red Bull immediately suggested 'we want to help you crunch' in my mind.
- usea 14y ago
  We have a Keurig coffee machine along with a lot of different types of coffee. I don't see energy drinks being any worse than coffee. At a small office, the selection of products shouldn't imply what kind of behavior the company expects of employees. It's just a group of people trying to work together, which includes buying whatever food or drinks are desired and reasonable. I realize that it'd be nice to encourage healthier habits, but since it's not anybody's real job to stock the kitchen, it's been path of least resistance. Personally I hate caffeine, but it's not the worst thing.
  - Jare 14y ago
    In my experience, people drink coffee daily in order to function normally vs being sleepy. OTOH, they go for Red Bull and other energy drinks exceptionally, if/when they need an extra push. If a large enough group of people regularly desire such drinks at work, it might just be an statistically odd group, but by default I conclude that they often need that extra boost. In my mind it suggests frequent crunch. Whether it's imposed by the company, the context, or the people - I'm not judging, especially not a startup. YMMV, I'm certainly biased since a) I only drink water and milk, and b) I have personally seen even worse than energy drinks being offered to help people work longer and harder.

nvr219 14y ago

Dried fruit is a must imho.

yummyfajitas 14y ago

Yep. This is what happens when you do a startup. My version: about 2 weeks after I quit my job and moved to India, we started having scheduled water outages from 9AM-whenever on thurs. We also had 6 female employees. So in addition to coding, my job was to show up at 8AM and fill buckets. I'm now at a big company (startups fail). One perk of big company life - I don't even need to think about front end code (unless I want to).

codewright 14y ago
Help me with the non-sequitur from buckets to front-end code. Let me take a guess though: Things you enjoy: [backend-code] Things had to do at the startup: [buckets, frontend-code, backend-code] Things you have to do at a big company: [backend-code] Thus making the big-company more pleasant because you didn't enjoy frontend or bucket filling?

usea 14y ago

At our office (we have 8 employees, 7 are salaried and 6 are engineers) we have a sort of partnership with a sister company who is larger and more mature. We piggyback off some of their resources to help us manage things like payroll, insurance, HR. We do spend far more time than we'd like on things like office supplies, lunch runs, looking at new office space so we can fit more employees, etc. Some of what we do is building one-off or small runs of custom electronics, so we hired a person from our sister company who was previously emptying trash cans in their warehouse. At first he did our inventory as well as QA for our software products. A year later and now he operates our pick-and-place, reflow oven, milling machine, 3d printer, and tons of other things. People are capable of a lot if you give them the opportunity and some guidance.

SG- 14y ago

I put on 40 pounds in my 3 years at a .com startup between 2000-2003 mostly because of the free soda machines (and i hadn't switched to diet soda yet) and free junk food vending machines on each floor. there wasn't any fruit ever. i think the healthiest food was someone stocked a cupboard with rice crispy squares on each floor too.

yashd 14y ago

If you’re interested in healthier, non-junky snacks, check out Blissmo. Blissmo offers a monthly subscription service of healthier snacks, for offices, called the BREAKbox (www.blissmo.com/breakbox). Examples of snacks include: organic, fair-trade dark chocolate, all-natural dried mango strips, locally-harvested pistachio nuts, and gluten-free, granola bars. Also, Startups dig BREAKbox. Customers include: Twilio, Retargeter, Involver, indiegogo, Switchcam, Pocket and more. Disclosure: I’m an intern at blissmo. Feel free to shoot me an email for any reason - yash {at} blissmo {dot} com.

chucknelson 14y ago

As others have mentioned, the foods mentioned don't seem to reflect any deep thought or consideration of various diets. I just wanted to point out that she mentions diabetics as one example of "things to consider", yet the "top 5 foods" are all carbs, except for the basically nutritionally-void sugar free red bull.

sprobertson 14y ago
There probably aren't very many quality foods available on Amazon, and why post a link to something if you're not getting referrals?
- dmor 14y ago
  I went through the other options, like paleo cookies or beef jerky and the reality is that healthier stuff you can order online is really expensive. I don't think it is a startups job to provide full meals or to cater to everyone's dietary preferences - snacks are exactly that, snacks. Something convenient to eat when you are busy and between meals. If you can manage to easily accomodate special requests while getting shopping for stuff done efficiently that's great, but it is really not the startup's job to make sure your high fiber gluten free paleo diet is working for you. Until companies have an actual full time office manager who can worry about this stuff, it is extremely time consuming to cater to all these preferences and if people are really invested in being healthy they will take the time to purchase and bring the foods they want to eat throughout the day. Even once you have an office manager you have to ask yourself whether spending thousands a month on a huge variety of foods is a good idea. Usually until a company is pretty big it just doesn't make sense.

mikeytown2 14y ago

I do the same thing at my work, but I have an honor system where people can keep a tab on a notepad. I buy everything at Costco as the prices are about 1/3 less than what you see on amazon. I round up to the nearest quarter to make life easy for everyone. I have a slightly different selection as well. Below are some of the hot items not listed on this post: Nature Valley Bar - Protein (Peanut Butter & Dark Chocolate). Individual Kirkland Trail Mix. Individual Tropicana OJ. Premier Protein Bars. Premier Protein Chocolate Drink. Lara Bars. Trio Bars. 5-hour energy. Cheese Sticks. Vanilla Whey Protein. My go to meal is Quaker Oatmeal mixed with Vanilla Whey Protein. I'll eat that 1-2 times a day. Cost for that combo is $0.75, not bad if you ask me. Just trying to give people some good ideas here :)

johnbenwoo 14y ago
Oatmeal rocks for quick/healthy/inexpensive/tasty. My go-to is quick oats (from the giant cardboard box) + hot water from a coffeemaker + sliced almonds + frozen/dried blueberries + milk

venus 14y ago

Referral links in a blog post are a big turn-off for me. I know that they don't make the product any more expensive, but I still think they are a bad incentive.

turoczy 14y ago

Running a accelerator, one thing we've discovered with feeding our startups is that bringing in food has another beneficial side effect: stress reduction. We try to cater at least three meals a week for our folks. Because we've seen the benefits: 1) Makes sure that people are actually stopping to eat. 2) Lowers the burn rate for the companies. 3) Lowers stressing about "Where are we going to eat?" 4) And perhaps the most beneficial: It ensures that we're forcing some actual nutrients into their diets. Of course the other fringe benefit is the peer mentoring and socializing, where people actually stop banging on keyboards and take a moment to talk to one another.

codex 14y ago

Ignoring the fact that this post contains refer.ly links and is really just SEO bait produced by the refer.ly CEO, I find that carbs and caffeine do not make me more productive at work. I used to think they did, but in reality they only borrowed productivity from the future which must be paid back, with interest, making them a net loss.

rhizome 14y ago
I worked at a startup a year ago that had cases of Velveeta mac & cheese. I have to think it was a joke, but they were stored in a way suggestive of human consumption.

Ironballs 14y ago

I... I don't understand. What's this mentality of offering free non-nutritious food for all employees, by the bucketload, for free? Why would you snack in the first place? Either eat solid, whole meals on assigned lunch breaks, or drink something that isn't bad for you - tea, coffee come to mind - or why not, water? In all frankness I find the whole concept of offering free crap for everyone harmful and eventually counterproductive - I can only imagine what copious amounts of free sugary soft drinks will do to people after a while.

eshvk 14y ago
It is not free. Nothing is free. In fact, when I was negotiating an offer, the free food for breakfast and lunch was brought up several times. Yes, this is true even at Google. See http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/

knes 14y ago

So this post got downvote/ remove from the frontpage and you repost it ? Its only a link bait article full of affiliate link from your product? And finally, the products you are referring to is the best way to getting everyone fat in the office? Don't you have any shame in what you are doing?

socialist_coder 14y ago

so much high fructose corn syrup

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]