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On Not Hiring (gabrielweinberg.com)
241 points by bjonathan on Jan 12, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments



This article feels like a call for more calm in the running of a startup. Perhaps it's just me, but I usually feel a rather frenetic urgency from most articles posted here. Iterate. Pivot. Yesterday might be too late. Go big, or go home. When he says:

> We need to build x, y and z, ASAP. Before you've figured out distribution? What evidence do you have that x, y and z, once built, will make customer acquisition any easier?

It feels like he's saying, "Whoah, let's not just go off half-cocked." And when trying to convinces us to spend the our own time on graphic design It feels like he's saying, "Easy, there. It's OK to take longer on something you're not as good at," which is counter to the conventional wisdom around here.

What's interesting, is the advice is still paired with, "Iterate, iterate, iterate." Feels like the message is less "Hurry" and more "Thoughful iteration." This was refreshing.


Great observation, saturdayplace. Your comment reminds me of David Brown's comment in the TechStars book _Do More Faster_:

"...we have to strike while the iron is hot! My experience is that this is rarely true."

This from a guy who's President of an Emergency Medical Services firm and a TechStars advisor. Probably good advice for many of us here.


  "...we have to strike while the iron is hot! 
  My experience is that this is rarely true."
Wow that was the exact quote that helped me come to a similar conclusion in my "Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink" post below. I rather enjoyed the TechStars book.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2029190


He is largely re-stating Steve Blank's thesis, that you need to figure out if there is a real market for something before you increase your burn rate. Otherwise, says Blank, iterate through different ideas, again, before increasing the burn rate.


agreed, although i think the reason why the urgency is present in the articles is because the default reaction of a founder or small business is to take it slow and calculate. one can be too calculating, and one can be too frantic in their pivots and iterations. the idea should be -- don't be afraid to change, but don't change for no reason.


Maneuver with cadence and intent.


before you slam on the gas be sure you're pointed in the right direction.


Yes. We could have easily written this. We've been building our business slowly, brick by brick, for a little over 5 years now. We never took outside capital, we have always conducted our development in an iterative manner, and we're quite happy with the results.

There are many things we've opted to teach ourselves to do, in preference to going on a hiring binge.

Maybe this is because my partner and I went through the late 1990's dot com boom, saw the aftereffects of mindless staffing, and decided against it.


If you were there, it's hard to forget. Weird fun for a while, but ultimately a bad turn for a lot of people.


I watched my current company grow from 6 employees to 100 employees and along the way I realized I don't have the riskiness to do what our founders did. Our founders spent 2 solid years hiring people with no work for them to do, and within 4 weeks turning around and selling work we didn't have enough employees to fulfill for. This tit-for-tat growth was probably a bit unstable but they went back and forth between overhiring and overselling to the point that we are now a stable and have always been a profitable company.

I have a lot of respect for entreprenuers that can just jump in and make things work like that.


Society attributes value to them for having taken the risk, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was a risk worth taking.

I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done it.

Also, someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's money mean two different things.

This will probably seem like I'm throwing cold water on your founders, but that's not my direct intention. These are the issues that I think about when thinking about how to build a company.


> I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done it.

My grandfather co-founded a now-giant engineering company. When they were getting started, they would bid for any job. If they didn't know how to do it, they learned how to do it. I think that's a great attitude, and a winning attitude. They knew they could learn new skills promptly, so I don't see the problem.

They succeeded. It worked out. You may say, "They could have failed" but they could have failed no matter what policy they had for taking on projects so I don't really see a difference. Whenever I take on a non-trivial programming project I have to learn some amount of new stuff in order to complete the project. And I know I can do that. My belief I can learn things is true. This is just normal, shrug.


"selling what you believe you can do"

People buy from startups knowing that you're a startup, usually. There are always ethical issues when it comes to selling, but I don't think that "ability to execute" is the biggest one, as long as you actually believe it could happen, and try.

"someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's money mean two different things"

I think it's legitimate to point out that there is not a lot of personal money risk for the founders. They probably went without much income for a while, and work a lot. But if the startup fails, and they pick up a job afterward, they probably won't be in the negative.

I agree that "making big decisions" should not be equated with "taking a big risk". They are related but not the same.


"I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done it."

I totally agree and think it's SUPER important to be honest. Example: I'm a coder. If someone wanted to hire me for a Python job, I would be totally honest, yet confident: "I've never coded Python, but I know Ruby, and I think I could learn Python pretty quickly."

At a previous job, I sat next to a manager who often interviewed programming candidates on the phone. If somebody was trying to BS him, he always looked and sounded irritated. In contrast, when I interviewed, I gave confident answers for what I knew and said "I don't know" if I didn't, often asking questions about what I didn't know because I was curious.

If I were hiring a company to do something and felt they were BSing about what they could do, I would run. But if they said "we THINK we can do it," and explained why, I'd be way more comfortable.

Even better: "we think we can do it, but since we haven't done this before, we're willing to work more cheaply so we can get the experience." That way, I know exactly what I'm getting, and I can weigh the risks. And if all goes well, next time they bid, they can truthfully say "we have experience in this."

That's how I sell myself, anyway.


There are two distinct skills. One is building a great product. That can be done with a tiny team. The other is building a great organization. That obviously cannot be done alone. To me an interesting question is whether we need great organizations. There is a great imperative once you have a great product to grow and scale, to go from being a product builder to being an organization builder. It is undeniable that an outstanding organization allows us to leverage our talents in ways we could not do alone, and I suspect success in the massive monetary sense depends more on an ability to build great organizations than on building great products. But I would like to think building great products is enough, and unless you need massive monetary success I expect it is.


Great organizations are wonderful when they're effective at supporting the product or service. With a startup, it's hard to know the organizational size required because you usually aren't even sure of the size of the market.

Some companies look at early exponential growth, think of it as a nearly-vertical line, and build an organization that thrives on that growth. But at some point the growth will start to flatten, and the organization has horribly overshot the mark by then. If building organizations is hard, pruning them is ten times harder.


Forget hiring.

DDG is run by Gabriel solo for 3 years???

This changes everything I thought about starting up...


There are a few more sterling examples:

* Craig Newmark was running craigslist solo for a couple of years, when it was still a mailing list.

* The imdb guy (Col Needham) runs it with only a handful of volunteers until it was sold to amazon.

* Brad Fitzpatrick ran LiveJournal alone for a while when it was still headquartered in Oregon. During that time he wrote memcached.

* Drew Curtis runs Fark.com alone, since 1999.

* joshu was running del.icio.us alone while still having full time job.

* Markus Frind is the poster boy of doing it alone with his plentyoffish site.

* Marco was doing instapaper as side hobby while being CTO at Tumblr. Couple years later he went full time on it.


Drew Curtis does not run Fark.com alone. He has had several employees for years now.


ah, Wikipedia failed me. Thanks for the update.


Somewhat related: Plentyoffish is also an excellent example of this principle as applied to hardware architecture. POF was doing insane levels of traffic for most of its life on 2-3 average-sized servers.


He did it by providing a shitty product though.

Admittedly, a lot of people used it due to sheer network effects. So it provided utility.

But personally I would be ashamed if I built POF.


I should build something so shitty.


PoF built critical mass via marketing. OKC is a superior product in every way except sheer number of users.


You should also keep in mind that Gabriel is rich. That's why he can run DDG unprofitably for 3 years, without raising outside money, and it isn't totally insane.


FWIW, I doubt it costs too much at all to run.

All credit to him, he seems to put in a ton of effort, but this game isn't only for the rich.

Any school kid can start something similar and run it 'unprofitably' for 3 years. 3 years hosting cost isn't a big deal unless you're doing something like video.


How about working on it full-time (with a family to support) like he does for 3 years?


We live off of my wife's salary, including any costs to run DDG.


Aha - there is the secret: marry Gabe's wife!


true, but there's always other options - having a fulltime job and running it as a sideline, doing contract/consulting work...

Or just running toward 'profitable' earlier on.


Gotta give you props for your "roll up your sleeves" philosophy..You know, a blog post you wrote a few years ago, had something in it about things not being as hard as they first look. That one line inspired me to go learn Python, then ruby, rails, javascript, css etc I guess its time now to stop mucking around and learn some photoshop.

PS Just noticed this was not posted by the author, but the comment still applies


Link to the referenced blogpost?


Unfortunately, I can't find it on his blog, but I believe it was a post that had general startup tips, including how he did his hosting etc It's been a few years, so I may be mixing up blog posts


I think I know what you're talking about, and it was before my current blog. It was a part of a longer thing called A hitchhikers guide to startups, but I ditched that in favor of the blog.


interaction design. I agree this is super important. I also still think the founders should be doing it.

One could argue that for many products, traction starts with interaction design. Good interaction design involves finding out how your user thinks about a problem and then finding a solution that naturally fits inside the user's mental model. Wireframes, etc, all flow from that core revelation. To do this, sometimes you need to interview (potential) customers, study their habits, and really understand their needs.

So it should go without saying that founders should be doing interaction design, but this is first time I've ever seen it put plainly.

The opposite situation, where founders don't have a deep sense of their users' needs and habits, is a recipe for failure.


Like most everything... I think IT DEPENDS. I don't think you need to hire more people in order develop your startup, but I think there are some key things you can do w/ the right people.

1) Iterate faster. If you have 2-3 devs working on something vs 1, then you can figure out more quickly if your hypotheses are correct or not.

2) Certain markets (like ours in the non-profit space) require that you have more direct interaction w/ those you are trying to reach. 1 person might have worked well for DDG, that isn't applicable to everyone


I think there's merit to a middle ground between not hiring and hiring recklessly. I've always found that the right person will always move a company forward, where the wrong hire may screw you up irremediably. The problem with most hires is that this effect is hard to predict, and sometimes it is disproportionate/unexpected (a random hire may have a billion dollar idea, and he could also bring your company down).

Which is why hiring is an art, why companies have hiring managers on which a great deal of responsibility is put on, and why I ultimately have to partially agree with Gabriel. Sometimes not hiring is a good decision.


As with a lot of the articles that flow through HN, this applies somewhat more to the web-based startup business model than to other models.

I've got two other people working with me now, and I hope to add at least two more this year. We're a heck of a good team, with our bases covered in hardware, software development, consumer electronics, home media systems, Windows and Linux network administration ... there are much fewer things that we can't handle between the three of us, versus any one of us alone.


> Instead, lean on the powers of incremental improvement and the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Spend time each week looking at a specific parts of your design, and iterate on them. It will get better if you put in the time. And then for finishing touches, e.g. nicer images (the last 20%), outsource via 99designs/freelancers/etc.

This is great advice. Not only because it is free you up from hiring but design/ui/ux is integral to most web apps and should have a frequent focus of the founder.


Agreed, hiring is hard.

If you have specific, defined tasks, it's better to get a contractor. For example, for my current project, I hired a sysadmin for about a week to set up a new infrastructure, configuring puppet and so on. Sure, I could have done it myself, but that would have taken a lot of time and probably wouldn't have been done as well (I'm more dev than admin).


Contractors can work out well, as long as they are treated like contractors. I've seen (and personally experienced) too many situations where employers are simply looking to hire an employee (while calling them a "contractor"), without having to provide benefits or have them eligible for unemployment, etc. So they'll bring in a contractor, ask them to be on-site, try to give them set hours, try to supervise them, and so on. That's shady, and at least in Canada, won't fly (or, it isn't supposed to).


As I already commented on the blog post itself, I wonder whether I could continue that long doing something like DuckDuckGo without having someone on call other than me if things go bad. I know that you have to sacrifice a lot for your startup, but if at all possible, I'd try to find someone who's there to restart the server if I'm not available. Never mind that I don't know whether I would trust my limited security knowledge enough. Just catching 80% of the crackers isn't enough.

Granted, a freelancer doing a security audit might work out for that. But restarting servers, solving network and OS issues? Is there some kind of sysadmin "call center"? And would I trust them with my private data?

Other than that, the article speaks to my bootstrappy heart.


This post seems less about hiring and more about what a startup should be focusing on. Given his reasoning, would it not make sense to hire someone good at customer development and/or customer acquisition?


Employees are assets.

A business organization might be a saleable asset even with a failed product. A solo founder with a failed product is just broke.

While probably not the best strategy, building an attractive organization may reduce risk by making the worst case scenario a talent acquisition instead of a liquidation. Personally, I'm a bit of a misanthrope so I lean towards Weinberg's position.


This is an unbelievably awful way to look at hiring.

People aren't actually "assets".

Only under the rarest circumstances are they looked on that way by potential acquirers; a company needs a coherent place to put a whole team that both meshes what they did before and gives them enough upside to stay. You read about "talent acquisitions" far more often than you do about the companies that lay off all their employees, because the "talent acquisitions" make interesting copy.

You are not likely to profit from the "recruiting arbitrage hedge" you've come up with; all you're going to do is crater your company and screw up a bunch of people's employment. Don't do this.


The idea that valuations can be affected by staff numbers is one I have heard numerous times. While I wouldn't refer to employees as assets, it seems like a mistake to completely discount the idea that increasing the number of engineers won't affect valuation.

The best I can come up with at the moment are some comments in the wake of Powerset's acquisition: "At that time we knew that a talented engineer in a tough to get tech was worth about $1.5 million per head. Thus, I knew with relative assurance that since we were going to hire at least 70 people with our Series A money, that our worst case scenario was about a $100 million exit." -[http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-cr...]


In many cases the team is a crucial component of a valuation. That is not the same thing as saying "if the business fails and you built a good team, your worst case scenario can be a talent acquisition". A talent acquisition is on the "good" end of the spectrum of scenarios, is unlikely, and appears to happen only when there's a graceful mesh between what an acquirer wants to do with a specific team and what that team has already been doing.


"While probably not the best strategy" was probably not the best caveat. I agree that this is dumb, but I also think it's the underlying reason some founders spend so much of their time hiring.

>You are not likely to profit from the "recruiting arbitrage hedge" you've come up with;

If I understand you correctly, I don't agree with this completely. One of the reasons outsourcing and temp companies exist is to perform recruitment that their clients are incapable of doing themselves. There is good money in recruiting arbitrage as a business plan, but in most circumstances "we'll do that if our real strategy fails" is completely useless as a hedge.

(edited for clarity. still a mess)


At one point this was correct, @ahi. But then the Civil War happened.

Confusing the employment contract with the employee isn't just bad accounting, it's flat-out delusional in a market that is largely at-will.




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