January 2007(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.)Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of theblocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winnersslow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. Theearliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when theyhave the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100%of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely differentfrom most people's idea of what business is like. If you lookedin people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing"business," you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groupssitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpointpresentations, people producing thick reports for one another toread. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. Andyet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at workhere: the less energy people expend on performance, the more theyexpend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energythey expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performanceworse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazinemodified the "sports" model of some production car to get the fastestpossible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? Theycut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car tomake it look fast.Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goesinto looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makesorganizations less productive. Suits, for example. Suits do nothelp people to think better. I bet most executives at big companiesdo their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and godownstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That's whenyou have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if peoplecould think that well at work. People do in startups, at leastsome of the time. (Half the time you're in a panic because yourservers are on fire, but the other half you're thinking as deeplyas most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and whatpasses for productivity in big companies. And yet conventionalideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds thateven startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, whenoutsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem "professional." We'dclean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that alot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact,programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desksduring office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I wasnotorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewnwith junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understandthat. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognizereal productivity when they see it. Even we were affected by theconventional wisdom. We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeedingdespite being totally unprofessional. It was as if we'd created aFormula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a carwas supposed to look.In the car world, there are at least some people who know that ahigh performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedanwith giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk. Why notin business? Probably because startups are so small. The reallydramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people,so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousandssee business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, tillnow, only a handful people got to see: what happens in the firstyear of a startup. This is what real productivity looks like. Thisis the Formula 1 racecar. It looks weird, but it goes fast.Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything thesestartups do. In big companies there's always going to be morepolitics, and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing whatstartups are really like will at least show other organizationswhat to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead ofstartups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try toseem more like startups. That would be a good thing.JapaneseTranslationFounders at WorkThere can't be more than a couple thousandpeople who know first-hand what happens in the first month of asuccessful startup. Jessica Livingston got them to tell us. So despite the interview format, this isreally a how-to book. It is probably the single most valuable book a startup founder could read.
