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It will be because the mental image of a startup involves herman miller chairs and everyone in one room, grinding out broken code while sleep deprived against a background of colleagues fighting in a corner. With beer.

That this stereotype is self evidently absurd doesn't really detract from the psychological pressure to imitate. It's like the companies who carefully copy all the hiring practices they've heard about from Google but don't bother with the compensation or aggressively targetting specific university graduates to recruit from.

It's really easy to get a single room with a beer fridge and make everyone stressed, and some successful companies had that property, so let's copy the properties we know how to.

An alternative game plan would be to try to copy the aspects of companies that made them successful, as opposed to the aspects that are easy to copy, but that's very much harder to do.




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