
Running a start-up is great, growing a business is boring - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/running+a+start-up+is+great%2C+growing+a+business+is+boring
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jdrock
I suppose it depends on your personality, perspective and how you grow your
company's culture.

I just finished reading Tony Hsieh's upcoming book, Delivering Happiness. He
describes how LinkExchange, his first big company, became boring to grow
because the company culture wasn't fun. But he still enjoys working at Zappos
because he and his execs managed to keep the company culture fun and
interesting. He doesn't know everyone there, but it has a great feel to it.
Keeping his employees engaged, serving his customers, etc. are all great joys
to him.

Note that I'm not saying Zappos still feels like a startup. I think from the
book it's apparent that it doesn't have a startup culture at all. But it does
have an "engaged" culture. Everyone enjoys what they do.

Side note: I don't recommend reading the book. There are about 10 pages in it
I actually felt I could generalize to be useful.

~~~
jacquesm
I think that that 'culture' thing is why the faster growing tech companies
spend so much money on trying to maintain that 'start-up' look-and-feel.

If there is any kind of financial crunch though, those perks are the first to
go, and 'efficiency' is suddenly the buzzword.

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jonpaul
I disagree. The problem isn't that you need money to motivate you in the later
stage of building your company. No, you're trying to be motivated by the wrong
thing. You need to seek ulterior motivation. Passion, purpose, vision. I think
that's how Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Richard Branson and
countless others built their companies. It wasn't money. It was vision. Vision
to change the world.

~~~
ahoyhere
You mean "intrinsic motivation" not "ulterior," which denotes something else
entirely :)

~~~
jonpaul
Thanks =)

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kscaldef
> And even if plenty of the code behind [scaling search] must be very
> interesting, the actual money is made in the adsense department, and though
> at that scale there are some interesting challenges, keyword advertising,
> statistics, reporting and so on are nowhere near as interesting as search.

If you don't think adsense is just as interesting as search in the core
technical algorithms, you probably haven't really thought about it at all.

~~~
jacquesm
Adsense at that scale has interesting challenges, but I don't think it
compares in scope to indexing the web and making it accessible.

Agreed that it is a far from trivial problem, but the dataset is relatively
limited in comparison the biggest hurdles are to get it to match up with a
reasonable ad on first delivery within a given timespan, to track all the
statistics and especially to combat click fraud in the network.

But in the end, without a search engine to display those ads on google would
be just another advertising agency, and in many ways they are.

A better example of an interesting challenge would be to transform google news
in such a way that it would show you only relevant news. There is a lot of
room for improvement there and it would boost natural language processing a
lot to have the tech to do that.

Any piece of tech has interesting components, but that's a relatively small
part of the whole, and the money is made in the drudge-work, that was exactly
the point.

From a start-up perspective, the 'core' engine of the product is probably
relatively complete by launch day, but the infrastructure to make it scale, to
market and monetize it, which is going to be a whole lot less sexy, is where
the money eventually will come from.

~~~
jdrock
I kind of think you're countering yourself here.

Just like only showing relevant news is an interesting challenge, so is only
showing relevant ads. Advertisers don't want to show you ads you're not
interested in; they want to show you ads you'll actually find useful. In many
ways, that's a much more interesting challenge than showing relevant news.

Extending the advertising example, it's also a very interesting challenge to
show people that highly-targeted ads can be a good thing. Just like it's an
interesting challenge to convince advertisers to use your ad platform.
Although they are not technical challenges, they are very interesting business
challenges.

~~~
jacquesm
Relevant ads with a chunk of text is matching two chunks of text based on a
bunch of keywords.

Matching relevant news to a person is a completely different class of problem.

~~~
axod
Why are you making a distinction where there isn't one? News? Ads? It's the
same problem. Matching content to user.

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avk
One of my favorite insights from Steve Blank is "you fail if you stay a
startup." I strongly recommend watching his Startup Lessons Learned Conference
presentation (link below). The differences between startups and established
companies run deep and most entrepreneurs don't make the transition from the
former to the latter.

[http://startup-marketing.com/steve-blanks-sll-keynote-
its-a-...](http://startup-marketing.com/steve-blanks-sll-keynote-its-a-must-
watch/)

~~~
jacquesm
Neat, thanks for the pointer!

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lukeqsee
I'm just in the beginning stages of a start-up. I know that is exactly how
I'll feel once the initial challenges are surmounted.

I love the initial challenges; dealing with the first customers. But staying
at the head (or near head) of a company when it just becomes another corp?
Never. Boring. :-)

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dkasper
Counterpoint: Running a startup means working 18 hour days trying a bunch of
stuff that probably won't work and if it does then you end up in a job you
don't like. Growing a business means helping something along that will have
lasting value. Just depends what type of person you are; making a blanket
statement that growing a business is boring is actually pretty narrow minded.

(Disclaimer: I work at a startup, love it, and will probably work at or start
another startup in the future)

~~~
jacquesm
> I work at a startup, love it, and will probably work at or start another
> startup in the future

Doesn't that sort of prove my point though? Why not stick around and grow it
then?

Isn't the 'what kind of person you are' part the whole point of what I wrote ?

Some people are good at creation and the work that comes with that small team
where you can wear a whole bunch of hats, they thrive in that environment, but
they find that it is much harder to maintain that attitude in larger
companies.

Suddenly there are procedures and forms to be filled out and all kinds of
corporate stuff that will drag you down. You can only work on weekdays, you
have to work between 9 and 5 (hey, I'm a night person), and so on.

I remember that when working for a large corporation (bank) early on in my
career after I switched to the IT department someone came up to me and asked
me not to work so hard because I made some of the others on the team look bad.
They were actually trying to _slow me down_ , can you imagine that sort of
thing in a start-up?

I'd work for any start-up that has a technically challenging idea, even
without pay if the idea was worthwhile enough in my opinion, but I'd have a
really hard time joining up with some 200 employee company that does the same
thing, or hanging around if the idea was received well by the market and the
company needed growing to that level.

Sooner or later your tech days are over and you'll find yourself to be a
'manager', and not everybody is cut out to be one. The choice then is to hang
on to the start-up that you helped found and manage people or to hang on and
be managed by some guy hired two years after you founded the thing.

I'd rather move on at that stage. In the past this has led to school friends
of mine that had also gone in to programming to be hired by start-ups that I
helped found, 20 years on and they're still working there.

I could have _never_ done that, compared to what I've seen in the last 20
years that sounds like being tied to the same disneyland ride for two decades.

