Startup.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’m sure most of you think you agree with this statement, but I bet you are making tons of inefficient decisions because you are trained to expect certain things from your ‘work environment’ aka Job.
But the startup really isn’t a job. To build a startup you don’t need an office, until you actually know why you do – for instance after you have several non-founding team members.
And you most probably don’t need those employees, until you actually know to the hour what they need to do so the founders can build the startup.
And you don’t need vacation, because you don’t have a job. You might need time to think about the pivot, but that’s not vacation. You might need to rest your brain, but don’t expect you will actually unplug. Your entrepreneurial brain can’t unplug. You don’t need time off. If you think you do, you’re in a Job and should stop thinking it’s a startup, because it will fail.
Startup is not a job, it’s just you wanting to achieve a change in the world / other people’s behavior, not taking no for an answer, because you don’t know how to stop, and constantly thinking about a shortcut to the next obstacle on the way. Startup is just a group of people and technologies arranged around the founders that represent the currently shortest way to change the behavior of others. It is the founders passion, and in that it’s similar to works of art – you can’t help yourself but make it work.
Everything else is secondary. Specially (fancy) office space, (expensive) employees and (long) holidays.
Related articles
- Fantasies vs. Realities of a Startup [Comic] (grasshopper.com)
- Startup Trajectories (growthology.org)
- Working At A Startup (cloudability.com)
I have a love/hate relationship with CrunchBase. On the one hand it has great information about startup tech companies. On the other hand, it relies on a wiki-like structure which means it is sometime not updated as frequently or as accurately as old-style databases which used to employ people go over the data regularly.
