"When you go to the Valley now, and when you go to China now, they are working seven days a week in the fastest-growing companies," says 20VC founder Harry Stebbings.
What I don’t get is…they can just hire more people to do the work and expand the company? When you consider this, you realize that they’re just asking people to work 40% more without an increase in pay (hence hiring more people is not an option)…then they call it “productivity gains”.
In software development, it’s not that easy. Having multiple people working on the same code adds a lot of overhead. Also, finding another excellent programmer is slow and expensive. (The “fast, cheap, good: pick two” rule applies.)
Plus, do you want two software developers with a good work/life balance and fulfilling ways to spend their free time, or do you want one software developer with mental issues that, among other things, leave him with nothing to do except work and no source of meaning in life except getting work done? The first option is more dependable, since the guy in the second option is crazy. However, if you’re building a startup then you need to take risks and the second option is the one more likely to create something amazing. (IMO, of course.)
Having more people always adds overhead. It’s not only software developers.
You don’t need to have two developers working on the same piece of code, you can have each one working on a feature. And different teams can develop different projects/products. If a project takes 1 year to complete but you want an output of 2 projects per year, you don’t need to overwork your current employees. You can hire a new team so there are 2 simultaneous projects being worked on at the same time.
Instagram: When Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012, the company had only 13 employees and was valued at $1 billion.
WhatsApp: When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, the company had around 55 employees, but it had previously raised funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion with a much smaller team.
Duo Security: In 2018, Cisco acquired Duo Security for $2.35 billion. At the time of acquisition, Duo had around 10 employees.
Nutanix: While not exactly a small startup at the time of valuation, Nutanix was valued at $1.2 billion in 2013 with around 10-15 employees.
(disclaimer: I sourced these from gpt and have not fact checked them)
I’ve worked in startups most of my career and co-founded two companies. This is dumb. Most startups fail and it ain’t because people aren’t working hard enough.
This seems short-sighted. You want to hire enough people and give them what they need to grow their skills as they work. Invest in your employees a bit. Then you get the quality without the burnout and mental crises, plus you get a company that feels good to work for.
Plus the fundamental insanity of saying efficiency is a single monolithic thing that can only be effectively worked on by a single person. The only reason you have that is because the type of coder these people want to abuse is the same type of person who’s bad at designing code. They just keep stumbling on subsuming additional features into the monolith because encapsulation and code design is uninteresting to their reward centers. That’s why multiple people can’t work on it, not because there’s some fundamental inability to effectively partition work during the production of innovative software.
What I don’t get is…they can just hire more people to do the work and expand the company? When you consider this, you realize that they’re just asking people to work 40% more without an increase in pay (hence hiring more people is not an option)…then they call it “productivity gains”.
Then they’ll complain when no one wants to work those ludicrous hours and they’ll sing one of the greatest hits of all time:
“nOBodY WaNts To woRk ANyMorE”
In software development, it’s not that easy. Having multiple people working on the same code adds a lot of overhead. Also, finding another excellent programmer is slow and expensive. (The “fast, cheap, good: pick two” rule applies.)
Plus, do you want two software developers with a good work/life balance and fulfilling ways to spend their free time, or do you want one software developer with mental issues that, among other things, leave him with nothing to do except work and no source of meaning in life except getting work done? The first option is more dependable, since the guy in the second option is crazy. However, if you’re building a startup then you need to take risks and the second option is the one more likely to create something amazing. (IMO, of course.)
Having more people always adds overhead. It’s not only software developers.
You don’t need to have two developers working on the same piece of code, you can have each one working on a feature. And different teams can develop different projects/products. If a project takes 1 year to complete but you want an output of 2 projects per year, you don’t need to overwork your current employees. You can hire a new team so there are 2 simultaneous projects being worked on at the same time.
I assumed that the VC is talking about small startups, the sort that have a dozen employees and just one project.
Can those be valued at 1Bn?
Ok, yes, there are these examples:
(disclaimer: I sourced these from gpt and have not fact checked them)
I’ve worked in startups most of my career and co-founded two companies. This is dumb. Most startups fail and it ain’t because people aren’t working hard enough.
This seems short-sighted. You want to hire enough people and give them what they need to grow their skills as they work. Invest in your employees a bit. Then you get the quality without the burnout and mental crises, plus you get a company that feels good to work for.
Plus the fundamental insanity of saying efficiency is a single monolithic thing that can only be effectively worked on by a single person. The only reason you have that is because the type of coder these people want to abuse is the same type of person who’s bad at designing code. They just keep stumbling on subsuming additional features into the monolith because encapsulation and code design is uninteresting to their reward centers. That’s why multiple people can’t work on it, not because there’s some fundamental inability to effectively partition work during the production of innovative software.