
On Not Hiring - bjonathan
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/01/on-not-hiring.html
======
saturdayplace
This article feels like a call for more calm in the running of a startup.
Perhaps it's just me, but I usually feel a rather frenetic urgency from most
articles posted here. Iterate. Pivot. Yesterday might be too late. Go big, or
go home. When he says:

> We need to build x, y and z, ASAP. Before you've figured out distribution?
> What evidence do you have that x, y and z, once built, will make customer
> acquisition any easier?

It feels like he's saying, "Whoah, let's not just go off half-cocked." And
when trying to convinces us to spend the our own time on graphic design It
feels like he's saying, "Easy, there. It's OK to take longer on something
you're not as good at," which is counter to the conventional wisdom around
here.

What's interesting, is the advice is still paired with, "Iterate, iterate,
iterate." Feels like the message is less "Hurry" and more " _Thoughful_
iteration." This was refreshing.

~~~
edw519
Great observation, saturdayplace. Your comment reminds me of David Brown's
comment in the TechStars book _Do More Faster_:

"...we have to strike while the iron is hot! My experience is that this is
rarely true."

This from a guy who's President of an Emergency Medical Services firm and a
TechStars advisor. Probably good advice for many of us here.

~~~
PStamatiou

      "...we have to strike while the iron is hot! 
      My experience is that this is rarely true."
    

Wow that was the exact quote that helped me come to a similar conclusion in my
"Startup Fundraising is a Time Sink" post below. I rather enjoyed the
TechStars book.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2029190>

------
seanalltogether
I watched my current company grow from 6 employees to 100 employees and along
the way I realized I don't have the riskiness to do what our founders did. Our
founders spent 2 solid years hiring people with no work for them to do, and
within 4 weeks turning around and selling work we didn't have enough employees
to fulfill for. This tit-for-tat growth was probably a bit unstable but they
went back and forth between overhiring and overselling to the point that we
are now a stable and have always been a profitable company.

I have a lot of respect for entreprenuers that can just jump in and make
things work like that.

~~~
secretasiandan
Society attributes value to them for having taken the risk, but that doesn't
necessarily mean it was a risk worth taking.

I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you
can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done it.

Also, someone doing it with their own money and doing it with someone else's
money mean two different things.

This will probably seem like I'm throwing cold water on your founders, but
that's not my direct intention. These are the issues that I think about when
thinking about how to build a company.

~~~
xenophanes
> I would ask if there are moral implications of selling what you believe you
> can do (to employees/customers/investors) as if you actually can/have done
> it.

My grandfather co-founded a now-giant engineering company. When they were
getting started, they would bid for any job. If they didn't know how to do it,
they learned how to do it. I think that's a great attitude, and a winning
attitude. They knew they could learn new skills promptly, so I don't see the
problem.

They succeeded. It worked out. You may say, "They could have failed" but they
could have failed no matter what policy they had for taking on projects so I
don't really see a difference. Whenever I take on a non-trivial programming
project I have to learn some amount of new stuff in order to complete the
project. And I know I can do that. My belief I can learn things is true. This
is just normal, shrug.

------
Umalu
There are two distinct skills. One is building a great product. That can be
done with a tiny team. The other is building a great organization. That
obviously cannot be done alone. To me an interesting question is whether we
need great organizations. There is a great imperative once you have a great
product to grow and scale, to go from being a product builder to being an
organization builder. It is undeniable that an outstanding organization allows
us to leverage our talents in ways we could not do alone, and I suspect
success in the massive monetary sense depends more on an ability to build
great organizations than on building great products. But I would like to think
building great products is enough, and unless you need massive monetary
success I expect it is.

~~~
dmethvin
Great organizations are wonderful when they're effective at supporting the
product or service. With a startup, it's hard to know the organizational size
required because you usually aren't even sure of the size of the market.

Some companies look at early exponential growth, think of it as a nearly-
vertical line, and build an organization that thrives on that growth. But at
some point the growth will start to flatten, and the organization has horribly
overshot the mark by then. If building organizations is hard, pruning them is
ten times harder.

------
yuvadam
Forget hiring.

DDG is run by Gabriel solo for 3 years???

This changes _everything_ I thought about starting up...

~~~
didip
There are a few more sterling examples:

* Craig Newmark was running craigslist solo for a couple of years, when it was still a mailing list.

* The imdb guy (Col Needham) runs it with only a handful of volunteers until it was sold to amazon.

* Brad Fitzpatrick ran LiveJournal alone for a while when it was still headquartered in Oregon. During that time he wrote memcached.

* Drew Curtis runs Fark.com alone, since 1999.

* joshu was running del.icio.us alone while still having full time job.

* Markus Frind is the poster boy of doing it alone with his plentyoffish site.

* Marco was doing instapaper as side hobby while being CTO at Tumblr. Couple years later he went full time on it.

~~~
iloveyouocean
Drew Curtis does not run Fark.com alone. He has had several employees for
years now.

~~~
didip
ah, Wikipedia failed me. Thanks for the update.

------
nanijoe
Gotta give you props for your "roll up your sleeves" philosophy..You know, a
blog post you wrote a few years ago, had something in it about things not
being as hard as they first look. That one line inspired me to go learn
Python, then ruby, rails, javascript, css etc I guess its time now to stop
mucking around and learn some photoshop.

PS Just noticed this was not posted by the author, but the comment still
applies

~~~
civilian
Link to the referenced blogpost?

~~~
nanijoe
Unfortunately, I can't find it on his blog, but I believe it was a post that
had general startup tips, including how he did his hosting etc It's been a few
years, so I may be mixing up blog posts

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I think I know what you're talking about, and it was before my current blog.
It was a part of a longer thing called A hitchhikers guide to startups, but I
ditched that in favor of the blog.

------
trunnell
_interaction design. I agree this is super important. I also still think the
founders should be doing it._

One could argue that for many products, traction starts with interaction
design. Good interaction design involves finding out how your user thinks
about a problem and then finding a solution that naturally fits inside the
user's mental model. Wireframes, etc, all flow from that core revelation. To
do this, sometimes you need to interview (potential) customers, study their
habits, and really understand their needs.

So it should go without saying that founders should be doing interaction
design, but this is first time I've ever seen it put plainly.

The opposite situation, where founders don't have a deep sense of their users'
needs and habits, is a recipe for failure.

------
ookblah
Like most everything... I think IT DEPENDS. I don't think you need to hire
more people in order develop your startup, but I think there are some key
things you can do w/ the right people.

1) Iterate faster. If you have 2-3 devs working on something vs 1, then you
can figure out more quickly if your hypotheses are correct or not.

2) Certain markets (like ours in the non-profit space) require that you have
more direct interaction w/ those you are trying to reach. 1 person might have
worked well for DDG, that isn't applicable to everyone

------
fredoliveira
I think there's merit to a middle ground between not hiring and hiring
recklessly. I've always found that the right person will always move a company
forward, where the wrong hire may screw you up irremediably. The problem with
most hires is that this effect is hard to predict, and sometimes it is
disproportionate/unexpected (a random hire may have a billion dollar idea, and
he could also bring your company down).

Which is why hiring is an art, why companies have hiring managers on which a
great deal of responsibility is put on, and why I ultimately have to partially
agree with Gabriel. _Sometimes_ not hiring is a good decision.

------
thaumaturgy
As with a lot of the articles that flow through HN, this applies somewhat more
to the web-based startup business model than to other models.

I've got two other people working with me now, and I hope to add at least two
more this year. We're a heck of a good team, with our bases covered in
hardware, software development, consumer electronics, home media systems,
Windows and Linux network administration ... there are much fewer things that
we can't handle between the three of us, versus any one of us alone.

------
GBond
> Instead, lean on the powers of incremental improvement and the Pareto
> principle (80/20 rule). Spend time each week looking at a specific parts of
> your design, and iterate on them. It will get better if you put in the time.
> And then for finishing touches, e.g. nicer images (the last 20%), outsource
> via 99designs/freelancers/etc.

This is great advice. Not only because it is free you up from hiring but
design/ui/ux is integral to most web apps and should have a frequent focus of
the founder.

------
ZeroMinx
Agreed, hiring is hard.

If you have specific, defined tasks, it's better to get a contractor. For
example, for my current project, I hired a sysadmin for about a week to set up
a new infrastructure, configuring puppet and so on. Sure, I could have done it
myself, but that would have taken a lot of time and probably wouldn't have
been done as well (I'm more dev than admin).

~~~
noarchy
Contractors can work out well, as long as they are treated like contractors.
I've seen (and personally experienced) too many situations where employers are
simply looking to hire an employee (while calling them a "contractor"),
without having to provide benefits or have them eligible for unemployment,
etc. So they'll bring in a contractor, ask them to be on-site, try to give
them set hours, try to supervise them, and so on. That's shady, and at least
in Canada, won't fly (or, it isn't supposed to).

------
mhd
As I already commented on the blog post itself, I wonder whether I could
continue that long doing something like DuckDuckGo without having someone on
call other than me if things go bad. I know that you have to sacrifice a lot
for your startup, but if at all possible, I'd try to find someone who's there
to restart the server if I'm not available. Never mind that I don't know
whether I would trust my limited security knowledge enough. Just catching 80%
of the crackers isn't enough.

Granted, a freelancer doing a security audit might work out for that. But
restarting servers, solving network and OS issues? Is there some kind of
sysadmin "call center"? And would I trust them with my private data?

Other than that, the article speaks to my bootstrappy heart.

------
johnrob
This post seems less about hiring and more about what a startup should be
focusing on. Given his reasoning, would it not make sense to hire someone good
at customer development and/or customer acquisition?

------
ahi
Employees are assets.

A business organization might be a saleable asset even with a failed product.
A solo founder with a failed product is just broke.

While probably not the best strategy, building an attractive organization may
reduce risk by making the worst case scenario a talent acquisition instead of
a liquidation. Personally, I'm a bit of a misanthrope so I lean towards
Weinberg's position.

~~~
tptacek
This is an unbelievably awful way to look at hiring.

People aren't actually "assets".

Only under the rarest circumstances are they looked on that way by potential
acquirers; a company needs a coherent place to put a whole team that both
meshes what they did before _and_ gives them enough upside to stay. You read
about "talent acquisitions" far more often than you do about the companies
that lay off all their employees, because the "talent acquisitions" make
interesting copy.

You are not likely to profit from the "recruiting arbitrage hedge" you've come
up with; all you're going to do is crater your company and screw up a bunch of
people's employment. Don't do this.

~~~
apalmblad
The idea that valuations can be affected by staff numbers is one I have heard
numerous times. While I wouldn't refer to employees as assets, it seems like a
mistake to completely discount the idea that increasing the number of
engineers won't affect valuation.

The best I can come up with at the moment are some comments in the wake of
Powerset's acquisition: "At that time we knew that a talented engineer in a
tough to get tech was worth about $1.5 million per head. Thus, I knew with
relative assurance that since we were going to hire at least 70 people with
our Series A money, that our worst case scenario was about a $100 million
exit." -[[http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-
cr...](http://blognewcomb.squarespace.com/essays/2010/10/14/cult-
creation.html)]

~~~
tptacek
In many cases the team is a crucial component of a valuation. That is not the
same thing as saying "if the business fails and you built a good team, your
worst case scenario can be a talent acquisition". A talent acquisition is on
the "good" end of the spectrum of scenarios, is unlikely, and appears to
happen only when there's a graceful mesh between what an acquirer wants to do
with a specific team and what that team has already been doing.

