

Why Google employees make bad cofounders - devinblais
http://blog.devinblais.com/2013/03/07/why-google-employees-make-bad-cofounders/

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ChuckMcM
One of the things that I thought about when I was working at Google was how
screwed up some of the engineers were going to be post Google. The ones at
risk were people who came from school right into Google and found "work" to be
not unlike academia. A friend of mine who was a VP over at another big tech
firm in the valley at the time said they tried not to interview people whose
first and only job was Google.

That said, I've also seen companies where folks have done many similar things
to what Google has done (food, vacation options, variable salary packages) and
made them work in non cash-rich environments.

The interesting difference is 'revenue per employee' or RpE which is an
interesting metric to track. In information businesses where the product
doesn't have a "COGS" in the traditional sense, it really is a function of the
value that the employees are creating on a day in and day out basis. So you
can model your expenses by using taking RpE as your gross revenue, then
subtracting off salary, monthly benefits, vacation, and overhead to get your
'gross margin per employee' (GMpE) and if you choose to allocate some fraction
of that margin into what I think of as "lifestyle" benefits (onsite massage,
or snacks, or what not).

If you take that approach its possible to really talk in real terms about
"high tech" work environment vs the business. As a founder/CEO/manager you can
get a sense of when something is "too much" and when you can afford to loosen
things up a bit.

That said, when Google employees were responsible for over $50,000 per quarter
of free cash flow on a per capita basis, and Google decided to save a few
cents by changing from OdWalla juice to an off brand, saving perhaps $250 per
employee per quarter, I thought it was probably a pretty stupid move.

~~~
FelixP
$250 in savings per quarter seems pretty generous... or I'm vastly
underestimating the average per-capita consumption of Odwalla juice amongst
Googlers.

Even a $1/serving savings would imply an _average_ of 250 Odwalla juices
consumed per employee, per quarter, which works out to something like 3.8 per
day. That seems extraordinarily high, especially in light of the plethora of
beverages that Google makes available to their employees.

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zoidb
> so I’m not saying they can’t make great cofounders. What I am saying is that
> working at one of these companies doesn’t come close to qualifying someone
> to be a technical cofounder, and in some ways, it makes them worse

That's not what I get from the sensational title..

~~~
general_failure
First rule of modern internet: Ignore titles.

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jrs235
"Being a cofounder requires at least 80 hours of work a week. If you aren’t
ready to work those hours, don’t start a company. Period."

How true is this? I know VCs certainly want everyone to think and believe it.
But really, how true is it?

EDIT: That comes off a little too absolutist for me.

~~~
general_failure
A big chunk of most software is about component assembly. You use frameworks
and libraries. Stitch things together and make things work.

Contrary to what most people say, 80 hours a week is not abnormal or counter-
productive. It is probably counter-productive like if you do that for 2 years.
But for a week? 3 months? 6 months? For most people who really are interested
in things, this is no problem. I can vouch for this personally. When I am
interested in things, I can work on code for months and I don't even keep
track of time. And all of my projects don't even involve money.

Back to my first paragraph, super-duper-brain work can be very draining and I
cannot imagine working 80 hours a week in that case. But for most pulp
software (like I do - hack on node.js, Qt, WebKit, HTML5..) bring it on. I can
easily do things at a stretch with no fall in productivity. In fact, I find it
counter-productive if I don't work on these problems in a stretch since I lose
context. (WebKit debugging anyone?)

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bklimt
"In terms of academia and career, engineers at companies like Google are used
to doing really well and rejection is not a frequent event in this part of
their lives. They probably got into one of their top choice schools, where
they then left to work at one of their top choice companies."

Is there any evidence that this is actually true? It certainly wasn't true for
me.

