

Food Rules for Startups: Eight Delicious Ways to Build a Better Company - midas
http://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/food-rules-for-startups/

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jamesli
<i> Rule #1 – Eat lunch together around a table. </i>

Not sure about this. It is fine to have lunch together twice a week. Do it
every day? Unless someone really enjoys talking and being listened.

I enjoy discussion with colleagues. I find, though, if more than 4 persons are
involved, it is more efficient to be in a formal place or follow a formal
procedure. Otherwise, 90% of time tends to be on trivial issues.

If lunch together is for socializing, I don't see why twice a week is not
enough. I worked in such an environment before and the topics during lunch
were mostly the same everyday. Most topics were not interesting. To be fair,
it is hard to have an interesting or insightful talk with 10 people. The talks
that made me think and made me intrigued were always with 1 or 2 colleagues.
We can go out for a drink. If the topic is work-related, we can have a 15
minutes coffee break and discuss it.

I understand that lunch is also supposed to give people a break after working
hard for 3~4 hours. But lunch together might not be a break for some people.
Sometimes after constantly working for 3 hours, especially if the work
requires me to be very concentrated, I just want to have a quiet lunch time,
to relax, to read 20 minutes of history or other books to adjust my brain, to
plan what to do in the afternoon, or walk in the sun for 10 minutes. At these
occasions, lunch together and talking to other people only make me exhausted.

People are different. It is fine, though, if the boss wants to establish this
lunch-together culture and exercise the cookie-cutter. There are always start-
ups that don't require this.

~~~
birken
Once or twice a week is completely fine. I work at Thumbtack (and have since
the first meal!), and occasionally if I am in right in the middle of something
or need a break I'll eat at my desk. It isn't a big deal, and I certainly
don't agree that people must eat together everyday.

However, one of the key things our culture is that everybody is always welcome
at the table, and there is never any issue with somebody pulling up a chair
anywhere and joining any conversation. You certainly don't have to if you
aren't in the mood, but you always can. I'm also not a big foodie at all, but
the food is really really good, and that helps a lot :)

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hiromichan
I spent 5 years at Googs. Good food in the office is great. It's way better
having healthy food than just sushi or pizza delivery all the times.

Also giving your people time to spend alone and step out for lunch or just a
walk is great too and I missed that often. You don't just "produce" by sitting
at your desk and staring at the screen.

Also making people feel kind of obliged to attend social event on a weekly
basis or even more often, isn't that fun. People have their life and family
back home and I am sure some of them would like to eat dinner with their loved
ones or just hang out with friends.

Time out and alone is as valuable as team spirit I believe...

So is sleeping and relaxing...

S

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rdl
Using a big residential house as an office for 3-12 employees probably gets
you a great kitchen (most 3-4BR higher-end houses have better kitchens than
most offices), which helps this a lot.

From what I've seen, you can get a chef 2 days/week for about $100 per day
plus food costs to prepare food for 4 days (that day and the next day), and
then do catered food (or a group trip out) to a specialty restaurant, at least
to start out.

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ryanpers
I believe in team building over lunch, but free food is a terrible attractant
and retention item.

People who are intrinsically motivated to do excellent work might be motivated
to join due to food, but they really join for autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Free food is none of these things. And ultimately you end up attracting people
who are after the perks, and may not end up contributing to a passionate
environment.

~~~
Lewisham
Free food helps people focus, as the post says, when you're not figuring out
what to eat, mooching out the building then being a bit annoyed that there's a
queue and then you're forking over cash, you're not focused or thinking about
problems.

You gain purpose when you're sat around a table bonding with teammates and
bouncing ideas. The lunchtimes I had as an intern at Google were incredibly
valuable to me. They were hours which I didn't consider downtime at all.

I think you're significantly underrating this.

~~~
rhizome
_You gain purpose when you're sat around a table bonding with teammates and
bouncing ideas._

Internships are different, and things change once you know what you're doing.

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dhx

      “Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients,
      or ingredients you can’t pronounce.”
    

This comes across as being poor advice. Some of the worst processed foods
(sauces found in a supermarket isle) often contain 90% of one of the following
staples: water, tomato, potato, onion, apple, corn, carrot, ...

It looks healthy but the remainder of the product is salt, refined sugar,
perhaps a dash of another staple ingredient and if you're lucky and 1% herbs
or spices that you can't taste anyway because they were cutting costs.

Quality food will often contain 10-20 fresh ingredients in varying and
balanced quantities. A mix of greens from different families, other
vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, herbs, spices, etc.

Which will be better for your body:

1\. A diet consisting of tomato, potato and salt?

2\. A diverse diet that combines dozens of fresh/raw ingredients.

~~~
ironchef
That's just one of pollan's "rules". Taken out of context, I agree. Put it in
context with the others where he suggests, for example "Stay out of the middle
of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be
on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be
replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad" (or...to paraphrase...eat fresh
foods)...and it's fine.

I also think his "rules" can be somewhat hyperbolic. It's not "anything" with
more than 5 ingredients....as, for example, a great hot n sour soup has WAY
more than that. Holistically his rules would be...understand what you're
eating..eat less processed food...eat mostly plants, etc.

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gudjon
This could be a core culture issue for your company.

I did this for my first startup and it gave us a great company culture. We
hired a "mom" that took care of us the nerds. Over time, we knew that we could
always take up the discussion during lunch time in the kitchen, like on
architecture wanderings, business cases, ideas, issues, etc.

------
cwilson
This is one of the first things we'll be doing after raising our first big
round. Until then... well, you don't want to know!

------
ccarnino
The food should be part of the company's culture. What most of the US people
don't get, is that food is the fuel for the body. If you eat crap you'll
perform not that great. If you eat well, you'll perform a lot better.

You feel more agile mentally and physically. Start to think about food as a
key moment of your life.

------
jroll
We pretty much follow all these rules at my company, and it's wonderful. We
eat better food than you could ever get delivered and get excellent bonding
time out of eating together :)

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mahyarm
If you were a workplace that had a cook create weight loss food for all 3
meals I would love to work there. It saves me hours of time a day.

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untog
"Hire a chef".

Hmm. I wonder what the average investor might think about that?

~~~
masonhensley
There is something to be said about being able to keep your employees from
disappearing from the office for 30-60 minutes for lunch in the middle of the
day.

Think about it, if you have a chef preparing food in your office, you and your
team can work right up until the minute the food is ready, take a 15 second
walk and be seated at a meal. When you are done, you walk 15 seconds back to
your desk.

At the end of the day, it depends on how you value your team's time.

~~~
untog
Oh, sure. In our office we achieve the same effect by ordering delivery,
though.

~~~
shalmanese
Part of it is about incentive alignment. There's about 100 ways to make food
1% tastier with 5% more calories. Restaurants make money from food that is
tasty and perceived as healthy, regardless of whether it's healthy or not so
they tend to utilize the full arsenal of tricks.

When you have a chef in house, they're being paid to make the food to your
specifications so it can often be significantly healthier.

------
Eugenius
#8: Mmmm...Bibimbap

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rhizome
weekly all hands dinner? insane.

~~~
swany4
Insanely fun. :)

~~~
rhizome
It violates Separation of Concerns.

------
kahawe
Two things I really like about this the most:

1\. Providing your employees with healthy, freshly cooked meals on-site! A
decent cafeteria that actually provides fresh meals is a heavenly gift and
beats ordering and take-away pretty much all the time, both in quality and
price so if you can pull it off, by all means provide that for your employees!
If I was to switch jobs, a good cafeteria has become a must for me now and it
would actually be a factor holding me back.

2\. Eating together, focus on "family" in the office. At the IT company I used
to work for, we had a small kitchen and a huge table for everyone and very
often we would end up eating lunch together, cooked by us or just ordered
pizza/kebaps, and we would crack open a beer in the evening, we would play
DotA over the LAN in the office until late at night, we would have a movies
night, we'd celebrate successes and our xmas party in the office quite often
and if an employee wanted to, they could even use the office for a private
party with close friends or have their pen+paper rounds there because the
table was really damn amazing and the location was right downtown, easy to
reach for everyone. What this came down to: this office was way more than just
an office; it was a place were we worked and were you also spent countless
amazing and fun hours as well. Without failure every time I stepped into that
office, I felt a bit "at home" away from home and it was just always a great,
relaxed atmosphere and everyone just loved being in the office because you
instantly associated it with more than just work.

Emphasizing and acting on the simple idea that the office should be more than
just a boring 9-5 work place, more than just a regular office, was definitely
one of the best things our boss did there.

