
You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement - speg
http://zachholman.com/posts/the-basement/
======
edw519
(Disclaimer: I'm writing this from a great office with a window overlooking
beautiful blue skies and greenery in an antiseptic office park. How boring.)

Some of my favorite memories:

1\. 4 of us in a nasty "war room" without windows for 6 months, 12 hours a
day, eating junk food when we could, and writing an incredible back office
system. We knew what time it was by the sounds of the Winston drag races at
the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.

2\. 2 of us in the back room of a deserted warehouse writing an e-commerce
system because nothing else could handle our client's business. We walked 4
blocks to the Whistle Stop to get sandwiches or use the bathroom (because we
didn't have one).

3\. 3 of us writing some incredible call center software in a back hallway of
a warehouse in an office park. The area was condemned for mold, so we had to
work out of the deli across the street for a month.

4\. The basement of a dental office. I can still hear the drill.

5\. 2 of us in the janitor's supply closet. 2 desks and a sink with a mop in
it. We launched a programmer's utility startup from there.

In every case, the companionship and work were so good, we barely noticed our
surroundings.

I have never deleted an email, and now I'm so glad. Just reading through some
of the mundane details of these old projects gets my heart racing. I wish
every project could be like these.

No matter what else I have ever done, nothing was as exciting as doing great
work.

Thanks OP, for the memories.

~~~
S4M
Out of those stories, which one ended up being a commercial success?

------
austenallred
This is very true.

As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working
together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I can't
expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early employees as I
did out of the founding team. It's not that we don't work hard to find
motivated and talented hires, but it doesn't matter. I don't think it's
possible to completely align the incentives -- if you're hiring smart,
talented people you're probably fighting for them, and they know that if this
company fails they'll just go work at Google or Facebook or one of the other
places they turned down job offers. It's a subtle difference, but as a founder
the company failing is an unthinkable, unspeakable horror. As an employee it's
a pain, a little bit sad, and you'll have to spend some time finding a new
job. Employees can afford to be rational and pragmatic about it, founders
often can't.

As they say, "You'll never get as high as your first hit." Think of Apple when
its only two employees were Jobs & Woz, or Microsoft when it was just Gates &
Allen. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to grow and to work with people who are
masters in their respective fields, but there's nothing quite like working on
a team that's small and dedicated.

Scaling a team is hard -- especially when you don't really know how to do it.
Not only is it hard as a co-founder to not "touch" every line of code that
goes out, but your job turns to hiring and making sure the rowers (which you
can't always be a part of) are turning the boat in the right direction. We try
to keep the project management very minimal, but there's no way I'm aware of
that you can get by without quick meetings people end up calling "scrums"
(even though they're not) and relying way too much on a Trello board. At least
not when you need everyone on exactly the same page and to be shipping product
quickly. Maybe I'm not a good manager (I know I'm not in some aspects), but
it's a lot harder to turn a bigger ship than the little inner tube we used to
have. It's easy to see why startups can out-innovate and out-work huge
companies. The irony is that if you do that well, you become a huge company.
The startup circle of life, I suppose.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
> As the founder of a company that's gone from just the co-founders working
> together to a small and growing team, one of the things I miss is that I
> can't expect the same level of sacrifice and commitment out of early
> employees as I did out of the founding team.

You should look at this as a feature, not a bug. Employees who will never be
as invested as the founding team are like thermometers. Take their temperature
on a regular basis and it can reveal important facts about your company that
you'd probably be blind to otherwise.

> ...if you're hiring smart, talented people you're probably fighting for
> them, and they know that if this company fails they'll just go work at
> Google or Facebook or one of the other places they turned down job offers.

Not all of the smart and talented people out there are Google or Facebook
material, which is one of the reasons startups should stop trying to build the
New York Yankees. Don't exclude people with potential. With a focus on
employee development, you can grow great employees who are going to be far
more loyal to you because you gave them an opportunity.

~~~
digi_owl
Yep, you can't red line a engine forever. Sooner or later something gives, and
likely it will be at the worst possible moment. Demanding constant sacrifice
seems like a recipe for a revolt amongst the gladiators...

------
jhildings
I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization
structure, the first big thing to notice is probably when "everyone" can't be
together anymore and you need to divide up things between people so you don't
know what everyone is doing all the time anymore

~~~
yourad_io
> I think it's not as much as the office setting than the organization
> structure

Yep. It is the flattest it can ever be. There are also psychological dynamics
in the average basement startup:

Things are usually informal, meritocratic, ambitious. Crunching together in
such a setting will also usually create very strong camaraderie even among
personalities that in a larger organization would just keep away from each
other.

> you need to divide up things between people so you don't know what everyone
> is doing all the time anymore

Even with perfect information/openness - just the fact that there's now an
"us" and "them" starts being.. divisive[1]. Apply enough times and you can't
keep up with how many "thems" there are to an "us". When you've been there
since the company was 4/8 people in a large room, it would be strange _not_ to
feel nostalgic.

[1] I self-nominate for platitude of the year 2015. It's early, but I'm
ambitious.

~~~
jhildings
Yes the "us" and "them" feeling is hard to handle, it's the same in every kind
of organization(sports, hacker group etc) where some people have been around
for quite long and invested much time in different things even if the formal
roles are different

~~~
digi_owl
I find myself reminded of a claim that a issue with the early leadership of
Jobs at Apple was that he was instigating competition between project teams.
In particular surrounding Macintosh and Lisa. While the Apple II (with Woz)
was off in a corner, keeping the ship afloat.

------
P4u1
I miss the excitement but not the uncertainty. We did succeed into becoming a
big company with huge revenues, but most startups never leave the basement, we
knew that back then, maybe it's just me not missing those times, maybe because
I wasn't such a kid anymore, I was 29 at the time we got started and already
had my first kid on the way(2 years before that I was working at another
startup that failed big time but I really didn't care back then). I loved the
work and truly believed we would make it, but it was hard work, taking time
from my family, specially from being with my newborn, so yeah I'm good now
with being "just an engineering manager" knowing my job is safe, my future is
safe. I still work hard but it's different when you don't have to wonder about
the company's future I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. I
might be alone here, but I don't miss a thing.

------
jblok
Shared hardship is a very powerful force to bring people closer. It's why
military personnel often have a really tight bond.

------
santacluster
The vast majority of companies are perfectly fine staying at "basement scale"
for decades. Fuck, for many types of businesses (including much of the tech
industry), that is actually the perfect scale.

This is all Silicon Valley navel gazing. If you want to stay in the basement,
stay in the basement. Very little is stopping you, most business models are
not based on explosive growth.

~~~
rattray
There's more to "the basement" than keeping it small, I think. There's also
the aspect of dreaming; of shooting for something really, really big &
exciting. There are a few businesses that scale without growing the size of
the team much, but it's still extremely hard. For the most part, either you
stay small and lose the ambition-excitement, or you get big.

Personally, I'm really not convinced that one is better than the other.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The dreaming is important. I'm now in a startup past the phase of "changing
the world" and into "finding any small market to keep us afloat". The
excitement is definitely gone. I find myself buying a coffee, taking a walk,
pretty much anything to avoid actually getting to work in the morning. Because
once there I'm doing little that anybody will care about. Except our investors
of course.

~~~
machinshin_
if you're that unhappy, why not leave?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Stock. Inertia. Loyalty to co-workers. The usual.

------
beat
Trying to sell a product that barely works. Trying to recruit people to work
for no money. Worrying about how I'll pay my mortgage in a couple of months.
Oh yeah, I'm having the time of my life. :)

What gets me? Right now, when there's no money and more vision than product,
engineers are _volunteering_ to help, because I'm building something designed
specifically to solve their most frustrating and unproductive problems. I
suspect that in six months or a year, when there's money for salaries and a
decent number of actual customers, those volunteers will dry up. :) But I
suspect a different kind of volunteering will happen, maybe with different
people.

Oh, do you work on a large (multiple teams) software project? Want to know how
I plan to make your life suck less? Get in touch!

------
emehrkay
I tell people all the time that some of my best years were being broke and
working 7am - 7pm on my failed startup. We had a preverbal basement in the
form of a small business incubator, it was great. I miss those guys. I miss
talking about their products, working through some rough decisions with
everyone in the office. I haven't left the basement yet, mine is just a little
more comfortable and only open when I'm not at work. I'm sure I'll miss this
phase in a few years time. Good post

~~~
jhildings
Yeah a great way to really know people is to work hard and much together, then
you know how they handle stress and situations where the hope about getting
something delivered on time / getting payed on time is small

------
fixermark
I remember the fun times of being in the basement.

But I also remember the sleepless nights, the 24-hour cycles around a launch
because between the N of us, none of us had either process experience or the
knowledge to choose a better one, and the resulting shouting matches at 3AM
because everyone was on edge and nerves were frazzled.

More importantly, unfortunately, my stomach will always remind me of those
things. I got out of the startup scene for my health; some people just don't
cope well with that kind of stress.

------
kabdib
Six months in the "wasp waist" of the Bank of America building on Castro
street (440, I think). Air conditioning and heating that never worked (our
office temperature would go from 60 degrees in the morning to high 90s in the
afternoon). Once a water pipe cut loose and sent a river down the stairwell we
used. There were power outages ( _everyone_ in our small company had a UPS,
and this practice saved us...), and there was a spectacular chimney fire in
the Chinese restaurant across the street. Jimmy Carter visited the Performing
Arts center one evening, and we were asked not to go out onto our roof /
balcony and it seemed like a good idea not to make the fellows in dark glasses
nervous.

Castro street is (and probably still is) Asian culinary heaven . . . except
that my boss would only eat at an Italian place near the railroad tracks, or
at the evil hot-dog place where all the employees hated their lives and let
you know it, every order.

We moved to a set of offices on Landings Drive. This was when SGI was still
around; we used to walk over to their cafeteria and just use it -- nobody
seemed to care -- and I'd say "hi" to some of my old Apple co-workers who had
also moved on. I learned how to punch down phones and install networks, and
buy cubicles and get cheap $10 whiteboards from Home Depot.

Fun times.

------
niravshah
I wonder if the author considers the work environment and culture he describes
as inherently unscalable and also unprofitable. One could imagine a workplace
that maintains this kind of ethos while also making money but while remaining
small (EDIT: 37 Signals is a possible example). I think it is an open question
as to whether an organization can be all three - large, profitable, and 'a
basement', to use the metaphor.

~~~
ekanes
Great point, but as a general rule what you don't see in the wild is probably
not possible for some reason. I would wager that since increasing growth
requires increasing bureaucracy, there's your culprit.

~~~
sukilot
It's also possible that big orgd are big because they overshoot their optimum
riding a rocket of early profit, and slowly colldose under their own gravity
to chase ever marginal returns.

Is Larry Page getting richer at 50000 Employees that he was at 10K?

------
jkot
I worked in basement for a while. It was great, cold in summer, warm in
winter, very quiet. However location independence is much much better :-)

~~~
jakobegger
I've also thought about literally working out of my basement (nice and cool in
summer), but there's a bit of a social stigma attached to working out of dirty
storage space :)

~~~
keithpeter
Tidy it up then!

In UK older Victorian and earlier houses sometimes have cellars. Some people
leave them as slightly damp cold spaces, other people do them up and gain an
extra room.

------
daxhuiberts
I worked in a back room of a storage room of a shop in a basement for a while.
The pro is that in summer I didn't get subtracted because I wasn't aware of
the nice weather outside ;) I do share very fond memories of that period like
what Zach is talking about.

------
corford
Spare a thought for us poor solo-founder schmucks slaving away in the basement
on our own... <weary sigh> :)

------
rey12rey
Maybe I'm missing the point but it'll be great to read a GitHub "origin"
story.

~~~
kjksf
You can read it here: [http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-
from-gi...](http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-githubs-
first-year.html) and [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-
profitable-...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-
proud-github)

------
mahyarm
This is a story of Dunbar's number and how headcount growth changes it.

------
erjjones
Is this a foreshadowing for things to come for Zach?

------
skidoo
I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged about the
oxymoron that is "Creative Industry", is how Capitalism robs creativity of any
and all integrity. Exploring ideas for the sake of creation, for any reason
beyond money-fetishizing, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.

~~~
dkopi
I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged is how Socialism
and Anti capitalist ideologies rob creativity of any and all usefulness.
Exploring ideas for the sake of solving real world problems, making people's
lives better, is a wonderful and incomparable thing.

~~~
jacquesm
> I think that something inherent but generally unacknowledged is how
> Socialism and Anti capitalist ideologies rob creativity of any and all
> usefulness.

Socialism?

I think you meant 'communism' as practiced by those countries that have hi-
jacked an otherwise pretty good idea to serve the interests of a select few
fat cats.

~~~
happyscrappy
So far all that has worked is Socialism _with_ Capitalist ideologies. Is there
some example of Socialism _and_ Anti-Capitalist ideologies that has worked?

