
My Last Day at PivotDesk - paulgerhardt
http://ktinboulder.com/2014/10/16/my-last-day-at-pivotdesk/
======
idlewords
"The constant pitching, the t-shirt wardrobe peppered with company logos and
talking about the business at every holiday, lunch with friends or phone call
with Mom really adds up. It’s what you live and breathe as a startup founder
and I wouldn’t have had it any other way."

These should be huge red flags. The author describes thinking about nothing
but work for three years, then reproaches himself for... not having spent more
time thinking about work.

Do not be this guy, you will burn out and you will destroy relationships on
the way down that you cannot repair.

~~~
lkrubner
Recall what Paul Graham wrote:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole
working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty
years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially
well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast... Remember what
a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster. Instead of
accumulating money slowly by being paid a regular wage for fifty years, I want
to get it over with as soon as possible. So governments that forbid you to
accumulate wealth are in effect decreeing that you work slowly. They're
willing to let you earn $3 million over fifty years, but they're not willing
to let you work so hard that you can do it in two. They are like the corporate
boss that you can't go to and say, I want to work ten times as hard, so please
pay me ten times a much. Except this is not a boss you can escape by starting
your own company."

[http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

Elsewhere, he wrote that while he was working on Viaweb he had no time for
romance.

This is a strange thing to say:

"You will burn out and you will destroy relationships on the way down that you
cannot repair."

The opposite is more true: you will make amazing relationships and build a
great network. I had my own startup from 2002 to 2008, and it was a good
experience for me, even though the company eventually failed. But I met many
amazing people who I am still friends with, and the bulk of my business
connections come from that era.

~~~
rwallace
Paul Graham's essays contain much wisdom and truth, but even Homer nods, and
let's be honest, the paragraph you quoted is bullshit.

Even if you care about nothing whatsoever except your job (which probably
isn't - and certainly shouldn't be - the case) there is an optimal level of
effort that delivers peak sustainable output, and for tasks with a significant
intellectual component, the available data says that optimal level is about
thirty or forty hours a week. Beyond that, sure, you'll get more done in the
first week, but chronic fatigue will quickly build up, reducing your
effectiveness to the point where you're actually getting less done than you
would have in a thirty-hour week.

Worse, chronic fatigue is like being drunk: it impairs your judgment to the
point where you can't tell how impaired your judgment is. You feel like a
hero, when your actual performance is more akin to someone coming in to work
drunk every day.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't do a startup, if that's what you think is your
best option. It does mean if you're going to, you should do it in the
understanding that it is not actually a get-rich-quick scheme, and it doesn't
suspend the normal laws of human biology and psychology.

~~~
barry-cotter
_Even if you care about nothing whatsoever except your job (which probably isn
't - and certainly shouldn't be - the case) there is an optimal level of
effort that delivers peak sustainable output, and for tasks with a significant
intellectual component, the available data says that optimal level is about
thirty or forty hours a week. Beyond that, sure, you'll get more done in the
first week, but chronic fatigue will quickly build up, reducing your
effectiveness to the point where you're actually getting less done than you
would have in a thirty-hour week._

Let's see some of that research. "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last
Chapter" Goldin, NBER working paper suggests that there are superlinear
returns to hours worked for differentiated labour. Where workers are basically
substitutable pay has an almos 1:1 relationship with hours worked. Where
people can have unique knowledge and relationships and combinations of same
working more hours makes your total output greater and makes you less
substitutable, which makes your bargaining position better, if you're an
employee.

~~~
idlewords
This is a discussion about company founders, not employees.

------
crazypyro
I don't understand this blog post at all. It seems to only show the very tip
of the situation because, based on the text alone, the story/situation doesn't
add up. Especially the part where he says he was doing everything perfectly
for the week, yet everyone still wanted him gone. It seems like there was a
much deeper personality conflict or something we aren't seeing. Maybe this is
my fault, but unfortunately, it also makes the lesson/point a lot weaker and
more muddy.

Seriously one of the more confusing blog posts I've ever read.

~~~
GuiA
I think he basically got fired and then wrote a blog post about it to make it
sound like it was his decision.

~~~
colinbartlett
I never understand the value of these defensive posts. It may be cathartic,
but you're far better off just silently moving on rather than making a big
stink out of such a transition.

------
beachstartup
> Letting my week fill up with sales, finance, pr and exec team meetings and
> not leaving myself enough time for deep product focus.

i would posit that no single person in a company with more than one person
should be working on all these things in a primary capacity. they're all over
the spectrum in terms of complementary skills. even in a two-person team, you
need to split those roles up so that one person "owns" each of those things.
there are exceptions to this rule but you don't see it often.

moving further down the timeline, one of the things i learned quickly as a
founder is that if you hire someone to do a job, you have to let them do it.
you can't do it for them, and you sure as hell can't micromanage them.
mistakes will be made, there will be misunderstandings, but that's just part
of working on a team. you just have to accept it.

if you are operating with a decent staff (~10+ people), and are a co-founder
and find yourself doing all these tasks, the problem is you.

it sounds like this guy just would insist on working on other peoples'
workloads, while skipping out on a lot of company meetings, and they
eventually started resenting him for it. you can't wipe that away in a week.

------
georgemcbay
Interesting read and seemingly a very professional response to what must be a
heart-wrenching situation on a personal level, but I don't really understand
the rationale behind "giving it a week".

If your team has lost confidence to the point where it "doesn't really know
what you do anymore" this will not change in a week, no matter how well things
go that week.

------
galkk
I think that this post, with it's main point "No one really knows what you do
anymore" completely removes value from previous post "3 Tips Product Managers
Can Use To Do Great Work", and others too. Quite funny to see so much posts
about productivity in that blog, while knowing final.

Harsh reality.

------
kyleashipley
Without having the PivotDesk side of the story, I can't help but feel that
there's a second, undocumented failure here: the lack of a strong feedback
culture.

Did the cofounder really not receive any performance feedback until "It might
be time for you to go"? Did his team members not feel comfortable talking to
him about it, or perhaps even the other cofounders, until the situation
reached a boiling point? Did other team members know they had an open
communication channel to provide feedback about a cofounder?

Unless the issues he describes are intrinsic personality quirks -- in which
case he probably needs to understand his tendencies and find an environment
where he can thrive -- this whole situation seems avoidable. All employees,
but especially managers, should create time and space to have candid, mostly
unstructured one-on-one conversations with a handful of direct reports /
superiors / peers. Leaders should invite criticism from the very beginning and
make sure everyone knows it's safe to challenge ideas and decisions. And
ideally, this starts during the hiring process. Let potential employees know
that you value productive dissent and do your best to evaluate them on that
axis.

If you don't have people within the company that can effectively evaluate you,
find someone outside of the company that can provide advice. This seems more
common at the (co)founder level, although could apply e.g. to a technical
person at a highly non-technical company as well.

EDIT: As a cofounder, he had the power to engineer some of these support
structures himself. This isn't "mean company ruins struggling cofounder," but
rather a reminder to spend time on soft skills and the human element of
running a business.

~~~
fletchrichman
I'll give some insight from the PivotDesk side - I've been working there for
over 2 years. We actually have a great feedback culture - he even mentions
several times in the post how there was an extended period of time where this
was a known issue that was being worked on.

"Over the past six months I gradually lost the confidence of my teammates."

There were actually several different 'experiments' in different tools,
methodologies, and feedback loops that happened over the course of those 6
months to try to help create the right team dynamics again. David (the CEO) is
always very honest with employees if there are issues, and every attempt to
resolve them is made before anyone leaves the team.

~~~
kyleashipley
Appreciate the response and love to hear that you guys tried to make it work.
I originally read the quote you pulled as rationalization / post-hoc
justification, but I can see how maybe he just didn't elaborate on that bit.
(I was also merely trying to balance a lot of the negative commentary with a
more productive approach to these sorts of problems in the future.)

I'm guessing this was a trying time for all of you. Wish you all the best
moving forward!

------
ChuckMcM
This captures the fact that what is inside your head is not always in everyone
else's head. I struggle with this, when things seem "obvious" to me but are
completely missed by others. Sometimes checking in and asking how folks see
things is a good way to figure out what the team is seeing versus what you are
seeing.

------
pcurve
The "No one really knows what you do anymore" is a murmur that follows senior
leadership role all the time. And while it CAN mean that you're not doing
anything, in this situation I think it was a case of some people struggling to
assess the value of all the activities you do through their own lens. More
likely than not, you were making valuable contributions to the company; much
more so than your employees realized.

So when they weighed their perception of your contribution against their
negative feelings towards you, the fulcrum was positioned against your favor.

Departure like this can be a turning point for the company for worse,
especially at a small company like this. I hope this isn't the case.

------
piratebroadcast
Take a vacation and enjoy your family, buddy. Everything will work out in the
end.

~~~
subdane
Everything will work out in the end. If things aren't working out, it's not
the end!

------
MediaSquirrel
You're probably feeling terrible right now. And that sucks. But remember, shit
happens. And while ultimately you are responsible for your own success, it's
your CEO's job to build the organization and make sure that people––including
you––are setup to succeed. And my guess is that the organization itself is
losing a lot by losing you. Bummer.

But as you will quickly discover, the past is the past in startup world and
the only thing that matters now is what you're doing next. Enjoy the endless
possibilities that are future. Be proud of what you've built. And be proud of
yourself.

------
joshontheweb
I have no insight on this situation in particular but Kelly has always been
kind and helpful to me in my experience. He's a sharp dude and I wish him the
best with whatever comes next.

------
dkarapetyan
Seems like some post-facto rationalization. What exactly is the lesson here?
Don't be a jerk to your teammates and make sure they know what you're doing?
Why not just say that instead of publicly apologizing like this?

~~~
huu
Context helps ground the lessons in reality. People would be less likely to
take "don't be a jerk to your teammates" to heart if that's all the post was
saying.

~~~
colinbartlett
I'd argue that we don't have any real context here. Just conjecture and more
questions.

