8 ms·

You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement

160 points by speg 12y ago

skidoo 12y ago
I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged about the oxymoron that is "Creative Industry", is how Capitalism robs creativity of any and all integrity. Exploring ideas for the sake of creation, for any reason beyond money-fetishizing, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.
- sfeng 12y ago
  You might disagree with me, but I see business as a craft.
  - skidoo 12y ago
    A blacksmith could craftily forge strong chains for the slave-owner, but the potential for his skills would never be met in the doing.
    - jeremysmyth 12y ago
      ...yet the same blacksmith could turn a sword into a plowshare and make society a better place. Straw-man arguments might have their place but they are still straw-man arguments. Not every businessman starts out being mercenary, and not every practicing tradesman cares naught for his art.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - yourad_io 12y ago
    craft krɑːft/ noun 1. an activity involving skill in making things by hand. "the craft of cobbling" 2. skill used in deceiving others. "her cousin was not her equal in guile and evasive craft" You're both right.
    - ashark 12y ago
      Oh, great, there's another term I'll never be able to take as it's intended when used in a business context. Like "hustle".
- dkopi 12y ago
  I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged is how Socialism and Anti capitalist ideologies rob creativity of any and all usefulness. Exploring ideas for the sake of solving real world problems, making people's lives better, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.
  - skidoo 12y ago
    Do that without expecting financial reward, and your soapbox would hold some meaning. "Usefulness" is not synonymous for monetization. Making the world better is not synonymous for making a few people that much richer.
    - dkopi 12y ago
      That's not how Human nature works. The world is filled with failed experiments of "Just do good without expecting anything in return". "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has failed utterly, at every scale. Be it the soviet union, or small bankrupt "kibbutzim" in Israel. Capitalism is much more than "expecting a financial reward". It's a complex system of signals which let producers determine what is the most valuable and efficient use for their resources. What Should I build in my basement? A sous vide cooker? A drone with a camera? A computer game or a new social network? Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need?
      - jeremysmyth 12y ago
        Agree with everything you say, but would like to comment on this: Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need? Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements. Capitalism provides one set of signals, an overpoweringly large one at that, but it does not provide a complete picture of value to humanity.
- austerity 12y ago
  Imperfect as it is, money is the best available measurement of usefulness of a product or service to other people. There's nothing wrong with doing useless things for the hell of it, but attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous.
  - yourad_io 12y ago
    > attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous Is it? In my view, organizations are almost living entities in and of themselves. They can become more ruthless than any individual because of their critical mass and "mission". Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but we have org A ("business"), primarily self-interested, and org B ("non-profit"), which isn't. Sure, there's potential for evil and corruption everywhere, but that doesn't make their two starting points one and the same. Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations? edit: removed non-existent "[1]"
    - austerity 12y ago
      > Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations[1]? No, certainly not inherently. Even if we define moral ground as the degree of altruism of motives (which is way too narrow in my opinion), non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals, but rather non-monetizable goals. But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money while all some non-profits can show in their defense is abstract ideas. KKK is a non-profit.
      - mikegioia 12y ago
        But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground ... KKK is a non-profit. And Comcast is a company. Just because people give money to an organization and extract value from it doesn't mean society should encourage that company's behavior. Your argument makes no sense. You're saying: 1. Moral ground is "something society encourages because it's beneficial to society" 2. People give for-profit companies their money 3. Therefore, companies have a higher moral ground since companies are "demonstrably beneficial to people" How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion? You then throw an example of a bad non-profit (KKK) as I can equally give you an example of a bad company (Comcast) that takes people's money, provides a necessary service to their customers, but is by all accounts one of the worst, most parasitic organizations on the planet.
austenallred 12y ago
This is very true. As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team. It's not that we don't work hard to find motivated and talented hires, but it doesn't matter. I don't think it's possible to completely align the incentives -- if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers. It's a subtle difference, but as a founder the company failing is an unthinkable, unspeakable horror. As an employee it's a pain, a little bit sad, and you'll have to spend some time finding a new job. Employees can afford to be rational and pragmatic about it, founders often can't. As they say, "You'll never get as high as your first hit." Think of Apple when its only two employees were Jobs & Woz, or Microsoft when it was just Gates & Allen. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to grow and to work with people who are masters in their respective fields, but there's nothing quite like working on a team that's small and dedicated. Scaling a team is hard -- especially when you don't really know how to do it. Not only is it hard as a co-founder to not "touch" every line of code that goes out, but your job turns to hiring and making sure the rowers (which you can't always be a part of) are turning the boat in the right direction. We try to keep the project management very minimal, but there's no way I'm aware of that you can get by without quick meetings people end up calling "scrums" (even though they're not) and relying way too much on a Trello board. At least not when you need everyone on exactly the same page and to be shipping product quickly. Maybe I'm not a good manager (I know I'm not in some aspects), but it's a lot harder to turn a bigger ship than the little inner tube we used to have. It's easy to see why startups can out-innovate and out-work huge companies. The irony is that if you do that well, you become a huge company. The startup circle of life, I suppose.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  > As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team. You should look at this as a feature, not a bug. Employees who will never be as invested as the founding team are like thermometers. Take their temperature on a regular basis and it can reveal important facts about your company that you'd probably be blind to otherwise. > ...if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers. Not all of the smart and talented people out there are Google or Facebook material, which is one of the reasons startups should stop trying to build the New York Yankees. Don't exclude people with potential. With a focus on employee development, you can grow great employees who are going to be far more loyal to you because you gave them an opportunity.
jhildings 12y ago
I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization structure, the first big thing to notice is probably when "everyone" can't be together anymore and you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore
- yourad_io 12y ago
  > I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization structure Yep. It is the flattest it can ever be. There are also psychological dynamics in the average basement startup: Things are usually informal, meritocratic, ambitious. Crunching together in such a setting will also usually create very strong camaraderie even among personalities that in a larger organization would just keep away from each other. > you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore Even with perfect information/openness - just the fact that there's now an "us" and "them" starts being.. divisive[1]. Apply enough times and you can't keep up with how many "thems" there are to an "us". When you've been there since the company was 4/8 people in a large room, it would be strange not to feel nostalgic. [1] I self-nominate for platitude of the year 2015. It's early, but I'm ambitious.
  - jhildings 12y ago
    Yes the "us" and "them" feeling is hard to handle, it's the same in every kind of organization(sports, hacker group etc) where some people have been around for quite long and invested much time in different things even if the formal roles are different
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      I find myself reminded of a claim that a issue with the early leadership of Jobs at Apple was that he was instigating competition between project teams. In particular surrounding Macintosh and Lisa. While the Apple II (with Woz) was off in a corner, keeping the ship afloat.
  - angersock 12y ago
emehrkay 12y ago
I tell people all the time that some of my best years were being broke and working 7am - 7pm on my failed startup. We had a preverbal basement in the form of a small business incubator, it was great. I miss those guys. I miss talking about their products, working through some rough decisions with everyone in the office. I haven't left the basement yet, mine is just a little more comfortable and only open when I'm not at work. I'm sure I'll miss this phase in a few years time. Good post
- jhildings 12y ago
  Yeah a great way to really know people is to work hard and much together, then you know how they handle stress and situations where the hope about getting something delivered on time / getting payed on time is small
rey12rey 12y ago
Maybe I'm missing the point but it'll be great to read a GitHub "origin" story.
- kjksf 12y ago
  You can read it here: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-githubs-first-year.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-gi... and https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...
jkot 12y ago
I worked in basement for a while. It was great, cold in summer, warm in winter, very quiet. However location independence is much much better :-)
- jakobegger 12y ago
  I've also thought about literally working out of my basement (nice and cool in summer), but there's a bit of a social stigma attached to working out of dirty storage space :)
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Tidy it up then! In UK older Victorian and earlier houses sometimes have cellars. Some people leave them as slightly damp cold spaces, other people do them up and gain an extra room.
jblok 12y ago
Shared hardship is a very powerful force to bring people closer. It's why military personnel often have a really tight bond.
niravshah 12y ago
I wonder if the author considers the work environment and culture he describes as inherently unscalable and also unprofitable. One could imagine a workplace that maintains this kind of ethos while also making money but while remaining small (EDIT: 37 Signals is a possible example). I think it is an open question as to whether an organization can be all three - large, profitable, and 'a basement', to use the metaphor.
- ekanes 12y ago
  Great point, but as a general rule what you don't see in the wild is probably not possible for some reason. I would wager that since increasing growth requires increasing bureaucracy, there's your culprit.
  - sukilot 12y ago
    It's also possible that big orgd are big because they overshoot their optimum riding a rocket of early profit, and slowly colldose under their own gravity to chase ever marginal returns. Is Larry Page getting richer at 50000 Employees that he was at 10K?
santacluster 12y ago
The vast majority of companies are perfectly fine staying at "basement scale" for decades. Fuck, for many types of businesses (including much of the tech industry), that is actually the perfect scale. This is all Silicon Valley navel gazing. If you want to stay in the basement, stay in the basement. Very little is stopping you, most business models are not based on explosive growth.
- rattray 12y ago
  There's more to "the basement" than keeping it small, I think. There's also the aspect of dreaming; of shooting for something really, really big & exciting. There are a few businesses that scale without growing the size of the team much, but it's still extremely hard. For the most part, either you stay small and lose the ambition-excitement, or you get big. Personally, I'm really not convinced that one is better than the other.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    The dreaming is important. I'm now in a startup past the phase of "changing the world" and into "finding any small market to keep us afloat". The excitement is definitely gone. I find myself buying a coffee, taking a walk, pretty much anything to avoid actually getting to work in the morning. Because once there I'm doing little that anybody will care about. Except our investors of course.
    - machinshin_ 12y ago
      if you're that unhappy, why not leave?
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Stock. Inertia. Loyalty to co-workers. The usual.
  - tejon 12y ago
    I think optimally, if you like the basement and your business is growing out of it, you sell it to someone else who likes big, and find yourself a fresh basement.
daxhuiberts 12y ago
I worked in a back room of a storage room of a shop in a basement for a while. The pro is that in summer I didn't get subtracted because I wasn't aware of the nice weather outside ;) I do share very fond memories of that period like what Zach is talking about.
edw519 12y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm writing this from a great office with a window overlooking beautiful blue skies and greenery in an antiseptic office park. How boring.) Some of my favorite memories: 1. 4 of us in a nasty "war room" without windows for 6 months, 12 hours a day, eating junk food when we could, and writing an incredible back office system. We knew what time it was by the sounds of the Winston drag races at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds. 2. 2 of us in the back room of a deserted warehouse writing an e-commerce system because nothing else could handle our client's business. We walked 4 blocks to the Whistle Stop to get sandwiches or use the bathroom (because we didn't have one). 3. 3 of us writing some incredible call center software in a back hallway of a warehouse in an office park. The area was condemned for mold, so we had to work out of the deli across the street for a month. 4. The basement of a dental office. I can still hear the drill. 5. 2 of us in the janitor's supply closet. 2 desks and a sink with a mop in it. We launched a programmer's utility startup from there. In every case, the companionship and work were so good, we barely noticed our surroundings. I have never deleted an email, and now I'm so glad. Just reading through some of the mundane details of these old projects gets my heart racing. I wish every project could be like these. No matter what else I have ever done, nothing was as exciting as doing great work. Thanks OP, for the memories.
- S4M 12y ago
  Out of those stories, which one ended up being a commercial success?
kabdib 12y ago
Six months in the "wasp waist" of the Bank of America building on Castro street (440, I think). Air conditioning and heating that never worked (our office temperature would go from 60 degrees in the morning to high 90s in the afternoon). Once a water pipe cut loose and sent a river down the stairwell we used. There were power outages (everyone in our small company had a UPS, and this practice saved us...), and there was a spectacular chimney fire in the Chinese restaurant across the street. Jimmy Carter visited the Performing Arts center one evening, and we were asked not to go out onto our roof / balcony and it seemed like a good idea not to make the fellows in dark glasses nervous. Castro street is (and probably still is) Asian culinary heaven . . . except that my boss would only eat at an Italian place near the railroad tracks, or at the evil hot-dog place where all the employees hated their lives and let you know it, every order. We moved to a set of offices on Landings Drive. This was when SGI was still around; we used to walk over to their cafeteria and just use it -- nobody seemed to care -- and I'd say "hi" to some of my old Apple co-workers who had also moved on. I learned how to punch down phones and install networks, and buy cubicles and get cheap $10 whiteboards from Home Depot. Fun times.
fixermark 12y ago
I remember the fun times of being in the basement. But I also remember the sleepless nights, the 24-hour cycles around a launch because between the N of us, none of us had either process experience or the knowledge to choose a better one, and the resulting shouting matches at 3AM because everyone was on edge and nerves were frazzled. More importantly, unfortunately, my stomach will always remind me of those things. I got out of the startup scene for my health; some people just don't cope well with that kind of stress.
P4u1 12y ago
I miss the excitement but not the uncertainty. We did succeed into becoming a big company with huge revenues, but most startups never leave the basement, we knew that back then, maybe it's just me not missing those times, maybe because I wasn't such a kid anymore, I was 29 at the time we got started and already had my first kid on the way(2 years before that I was working at another startup that failed big time but I really didn't care back then). I loved the work and truly believed we would make it, but it was hard work, taking time from my family, specially from being with my newborn, so yeah I'm good now with being "just an engineering manager" knowing my job is safe, my future is safe. I still work hard but it's different when you don't have to wonder about the company's future I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. I might be alone here, but I don't miss a thing.
beat 12y ago
Trying to sell a product that barely works. Trying to recruit people to work for no money. Worrying about how I'll pay my mortgage in a couple of months. Oh yeah, I'm having the time of my life. :) What gets me? Right now, when there's no money and more vision than product, engineers are volunteering to help, because I'm building something designed specifically to solve their most frustrating and unproductive problems. I suspect that in six months or a year, when there's money for salaries and a decent number of actual customers, those volunteers will dry up. :) But I suspect a different kind of volunteering will happen, maybe with different people. Oh, do you work on a large (multiple teams) software project? Want to know how I plan to make your life suck less? Get in touch!
corford 12y ago
Spare a thought for us poor solo-founder schmucks slaving away in the basement on our own... <weary sigh> :)
erjjones 12y ago
Is this a foreshadowing for things to come for Zach?
mahyarm 12y ago
This is a story of Dunbar's number and how headcount growth changes it.

160 points by speg 12y ago

I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged about the oxymoron that is "Creative Industry", is how Capitalism robs creativity of any and all integrity. Exploring ideas for the sake of creation, for any reason beyond money-fetishizing, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.

sfeng 12y ago
You might disagree with me, but I see business as a craft.
- skidoo 12y ago
  A blacksmith could craftily forge strong chains for the slave-owner, but the potential for his skills would never be met in the doing.
  - jeremysmyth 12y ago
    ...yet the same blacksmith could turn a sword into a plowshare and make society a better place. Straw-man arguments might have their place but they are still straw-man arguments. Not every businessman starts out being mercenary, and not every practicing tradesman cares naught for his art.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- yourad_io 12y ago
  craft krɑːft/ noun 1. an activity involving skill in making things by hand. "the craft of cobbling" 2. skill used in deceiving others. "her cousin was not her equal in guile and evasive craft" You're both right.
  - ashark 12y ago
    Oh, great, there's another term I'll never be able to take as it's intended when used in a business context. Like "hustle".
dkopi 12y ago
I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged is how Socialism and Anti capitalist ideologies rob creativity of any and all usefulness. Exploring ideas for the sake of solving real world problems, making people's lives better, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.
- skidoo 12y ago
  Do that without expecting financial reward, and your soapbox would hold some meaning. "Usefulness" is not synonymous for monetization. Making the world better is not synonymous for making a few people that much richer.
  - dkopi 12y ago
    That's not how Human nature works. The world is filled with failed experiments of "Just do good without expecting anything in return". "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has failed utterly, at every scale. Be it the soviet union, or small bankrupt "kibbutzim" in Israel. Capitalism is much more than "expecting a financial reward". It's a complex system of signals which let producers determine what is the most valuable and efficient use for their resources. What Should I build in my basement? A sous vide cooker? A drone with a camera? A computer game or a new social network? Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need?
    - jeremysmyth 12y ago
      Agree with everything you say, but would like to comment on this: Capitalism and profit give the correct signals - what is it that the market demands. What do people truly feel they need? Art is the big gap here. Few could argue successfully that the world is not a better place for the creations of JS Bach, Kafka, Keats, Van Gogh, yet these people did not make their fortune from their life's passion and work. Only after their death were they appreciated for what they did in their figurative basements. Capitalism provides one set of signals, an overpoweringly large one at that, but it does not provide a complete picture of value to humanity.
austerity 12y ago
Imperfect as it is, money is the best available measurement of usefulness of a product or service to other people. There's nothing wrong with doing useless things for the hell of it, but attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous.
- yourad_io 12y ago
  > attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous Is it? In my view, organizations are almost living entities in and of themselves. They can become more ruthless than any individual because of their critical mass and "mission". Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but we have org A ("business"), primarily self-interested, and org B ("non-profit"), which isn't. Sure, there's potential for evil and corruption everywhere, but that doesn't make their two starting points one and the same. Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations? edit: removed non-existent "[1]"
  - austerity 12y ago
    > Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations[1]? No, certainly not inherently. Even if we define moral ground as the degree of altruism of motives (which is way too narrow in my opinion), non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals, but rather non-monetizable goals. But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money while all some non-profits can show in their defense is abstract ideas. KKK is a non-profit.
    - mikegioia 12y ago
      But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground ... KKK is a non-profit. And Comcast is a company. Just because people give money to an organization and extract value from it doesn't mean society should encourage that company's behavior. Your argument makes no sense. You're saying: 1. Moral ground is "something society encourages because it's beneficial to society" 2. People give for-profit companies their money 3. Therefore, companies have a higher moral ground since companies are "demonstrably beneficial to people" How on earth do you arrive at that conclusion? You then throw an example of a bad non-profit (KKK) as I can equally give you an example of a bad company (Comcast) that takes people's money, provides a necessary service to their customers, but is by all accounts one of the worst, most parasitic organizations on the planet.

austenallred 12y ago

This is very true. As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team. It's not that we don't work hard to find motivated and talented hires, but it doesn't matter. I don't think it's possible to completely align the incentives -- if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers. It's a subtle difference, but as a founder the company failing is an unthinkable, unspeakable horror. As an employee it's a pain, a little bit sad, and you'll have to spend some time finding a new job. Employees can afford to be rational and pragmatic about it, founders often can't. As they say, "You'll never get as high as your first hit." Think of Apple when its only two employees were Jobs & Woz, or Microsoft when it was just Gates & Allen. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to grow and to work with people who are masters in their respective fields, but there's nothing quite like working on a team that's small and dedicated. Scaling a team is hard -- especially when you don't really know how to do it. Not only is it hard as a co-founder to not "touch" every line of code that goes out, but your job turns to hiring and making sure the rowers (which you can't always be a part of) are turning the boat in the right direction. We try to keep the project management very minimal, but there's no way I'm aware of that you can get by without quick meetings people end up calling "scrums" (even though they're not) and relying way too much on a Trello board. At least not when you need everyone on exactly the same page and to be shipping product quickly. Maybe I'm not a good manager (I know I'm not in some aspects), but it's a lot harder to turn a bigger ship than the little inner tube we used to have. It's easy to see why startups can out-innovate and out-work huge companies. The irony is that if you do that well, you become a huge company. The startup circle of life, I suppose.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I did out of the founding team. You should look at this as a feature, not a bug. Employees who will never be as invested as the founding team are like thermometers. Take their temperature on a regular basis and it can reveal important facts about your company that you'd probably be blind to otherwise. > ...if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers. Not all of the smart and talented people out there are Google or Facebook material, which is one of the reasons startups should stop trying to build the New York Yankees. Don't exclude people with potential. With a focus on employee development, you can grow great employees who are going to be far more loyal to you because you gave them an opportunity.

jhildings 12y ago

I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization structure, the first big thing to notice is probably when "everyone" can't be together anymore and you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore

yourad_io 12y ago
> I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization structure Yep. It is the flattest it can ever be. There are also psychological dynamics in the average basement startup: Things are usually informal, meritocratic, ambitious. Crunching together in such a setting will also usually create very strong camaraderie even among personalities that in a larger organization would just keep away from each other. > you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone is doing all the time anymore Even with perfect information/openness - just the fact that there's now an "us" and "them" starts being.. divisive[1]. Apply enough times and you can't keep up with how many "thems" there are to an "us". When you've been there since the company was 4/8 people in a large room, it would be strange not to feel nostalgic. [1] I self-nominate for platitude of the year 2015. It's early, but I'm ambitious.
- jhildings 12y ago
  Yes the "us" and "them" feeling is hard to handle, it's the same in every kind of organization(sports, hacker group etc) where some people have been around for quite long and invested much time in different things even if the formal roles are different
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    I find myself reminded of a claim that a issue with the early leadership of Jobs at Apple was that he was instigating competition between project teams. In particular surrounding Macintosh and Lisa. While the Apple II (with Woz) was off in a corner, keeping the ship afloat.
- angersock 12y ago

emehrkay 12y ago

I tell people all the time that some of my best years were being broke and working 7am - 7pm on my failed startup. We had a preverbal basement in the form of a small business incubator, it was great. I miss those guys. I miss talking about their products, working through some rough decisions with everyone in the office. I haven't left the basement yet, mine is just a little more comfortable and only open when I'm not at work. I'm sure I'll miss this phase in a few years time. Good post

jhildings 12y ago
Yeah a great way to really know people is to work hard and much together, then you know how they handle stress and situations where the hope about getting something delivered on time / getting payed on time is small

rey12rey 12y ago

Maybe I'm missing the point but it'll be great to read a GitHub "origin" story.

kjksf 12y ago
You can read it here: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-githubs-first-year.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-gi... and https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-proud-github https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-...

jkot 12y ago

I worked in basement for a while. It was great, cold in summer, warm in winter, very quiet. However location independence is much much better :-)

jakobegger 12y ago
I've also thought about literally working out of my basement (nice and cool in summer), but there's a bit of a social stigma attached to working out of dirty storage space :)
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Tidy it up then! In UK older Victorian and earlier houses sometimes have cellars. Some people leave them as slightly damp cold spaces, other people do them up and gain an extra room.

jblok 12y ago

Shared hardship is a very powerful force to bring people closer. It's why military personnel often have a really tight bond.

niravshah 12y ago

I wonder if the author considers the work environment and culture he describes as inherently unscalable and also unprofitable. One could imagine a workplace that maintains this kind of ethos while also making money but while remaining small (EDIT: 37 Signals is a possible example). I think it is an open question as to whether an organization can be all three - large, profitable, and 'a basement', to use the metaphor.

ekanes 12y ago
Great point, but as a general rule what you don't see in the wild is probably not possible for some reason. I would wager that since increasing growth requires increasing bureaucracy, there's your culprit.
- sukilot 12y ago
  It's also possible that big orgd are big because they overshoot their optimum riding a rocket of early profit, and slowly colldose under their own gravity to chase ever marginal returns. Is Larry Page getting richer at 50000 Employees that he was at 10K?

santacluster 12y ago

The vast majority of companies are perfectly fine staying at "basement scale" for decades. Fuck, for many types of businesses (including much of the tech industry), that is actually the perfect scale. This is all Silicon Valley navel gazing. If you want to stay in the basement, stay in the basement. Very little is stopping you, most business models are not based on explosive growth.

rattray 12y ago
There's more to "the basement" than keeping it small, I think. There's also the aspect of dreaming; of shooting for something really, really big & exciting. There are a few businesses that scale without growing the size of the team much, but it's still extremely hard. For the most part, either you stay small and lose the ambition-excitement, or you get big. Personally, I'm really not convinced that one is better than the other.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  The dreaming is important. I'm now in a startup past the phase of "changing the world" and into "finding any small market to keep us afloat". The excitement is definitely gone. I find myself buying a coffee, taking a walk, pretty much anything to avoid actually getting to work in the morning. Because once there I'm doing little that anybody will care about. Except our investors of course.
  - machinshin_ 12y ago
    if you're that unhappy, why not leave?
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Stock. Inertia. Loyalty to co-workers. The usual.
- tejon 12y ago
  I think optimally, if you like the basement and your business is growing out of it, you sell it to someone else who likes big, and find yourself a fresh basement.

daxhuiberts 12y ago

I worked in a back room of a storage room of a shop in a basement for a while. The pro is that in summer I didn't get subtracted because I wasn't aware of the nice weather outside ;) I do share very fond memories of that period like what Zach is talking about.

edw519 12y ago

(Disclaimer: I'm writing this from a great office with a window overlooking beautiful blue skies and greenery in an antiseptic office park. How boring.) Some of my favorite memories: 1. 4 of us in a nasty "war room" without windows for 6 months, 12 hours a day, eating junk food when we could, and writing an incredible back office system. We knew what time it was by the sounds of the Winston drag races at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds. 2. 2 of us in the back room of a deserted warehouse writing an e-commerce system because nothing else could handle our client's business. We walked 4 blocks to the Whistle Stop to get sandwiches or use the bathroom (because we didn't have one). 3. 3 of us writing some incredible call center software in a back hallway of a warehouse in an office park. The area was condemned for mold, so we had to work out of the deli across the street for a month. 4. The basement of a dental office. I can still hear the drill. 5. 2 of us in the janitor's supply closet. 2 desks and a sink with a mop in it. We launched a programmer's utility startup from there. In every case, the companionship and work were so good, we barely noticed our surroundings. I have never deleted an email, and now I'm so glad. Just reading through some of the mundane details of these old projects gets my heart racing. I wish every project could be like these. No matter what else I have ever done, nothing was as exciting as doing great work. Thanks OP, for the memories.

S4M 12y ago
Out of those stories, which one ended up being a commercial success?

kabdib 12y ago

Six months in the "wasp waist" of the Bank of America building on Castro street (440, I think). Air conditioning and heating that never worked (our office temperature would go from 60 degrees in the morning to high 90s in the afternoon). Once a water pipe cut loose and sent a river down the stairwell we used. There were power outages (everyone in our small company had a UPS, and this practice saved us...), and there was a spectacular chimney fire in the Chinese restaurant across the street. Jimmy Carter visited the Performing Arts center one evening, and we were asked not to go out onto our roof / balcony and it seemed like a good idea not to make the fellows in dark glasses nervous. Castro street is (and probably still is) Asian culinary heaven . . . except that my boss would only eat at an Italian place near the railroad tracks, or at the evil hot-dog place where all the employees hated their lives and let you know it, every order. We moved to a set of offices on Landings Drive. This was when SGI was still around; we used to walk over to their cafeteria and just use it -- nobody seemed to care -- and I'd say "hi" to some of my old Apple co-workers who had also moved on. I learned how to punch down phones and install networks, and buy cubicles and get cheap $10 whiteboards from Home Depot. Fun times.

fixermark 12y ago

I remember the fun times of being in the basement. But I also remember the sleepless nights, the 24-hour cycles around a launch because between the N of us, none of us had either process experience or the knowledge to choose a better one, and the resulting shouting matches at 3AM because everyone was on edge and nerves were frazzled. More importantly, unfortunately, my stomach will always remind me of those things. I got out of the startup scene for my health; some people just don't cope well with that kind of stress.

P4u1 12y ago

I miss the excitement but not the uncertainty. We did succeed into becoming a big company with huge revenues, but most startups never leave the basement, we knew that back then, maybe it's just me not missing those times, maybe because I wasn't such a kid anymore, I was 29 at the time we got started and already had my first kid on the way(2 years before that I was working at another startup that failed big time but I really didn't care back then). I loved the work and truly believed we would make it, but it was hard work, taking time from my family, specially from being with my newborn, so yeah I'm good now with being "just an engineering manager" knowing my job is safe, my future is safe. I still work hard but it's different when you don't have to wonder about the company's future I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. I might be alone here, but I don't miss a thing.

beat 12y ago

Trying to sell a product that barely works. Trying to recruit people to work for no money. Worrying about how I'll pay my mortgage in a couple of months. Oh yeah, I'm having the time of my life. :) What gets me? Right now, when there's no money and more vision than product, engineers are volunteering to help, because I'm building something designed specifically to solve their most frustrating and unproductive problems. I suspect that in six months or a year, when there's money for salaries and a decent number of actual customers, those volunteers will dry up. :) But I suspect a different kind of volunteering will happen, maybe with different people. Oh, do you work on a large (multiple teams) software project? Want to know how I plan to make your life suck less? Get in touch!

corford 12y ago

Spare a thought for us poor solo-founder schmucks slaving away in the basement on our own... <weary sigh> :)

erjjones 12y ago

Is this a foreshadowing for things to come for Zach?

mahyarm 12y ago

This is a story of Dunbar's number and how headcount growth changes it.