|  
  
January 2007  
  
 _(Foreword to Jessica Livingston'sFounders at Work.)_  
  
Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and
spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's
that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most
productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was
like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.  
  
The striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different from
most people's idea of what business is like. If you looked in people's heads
(or stock photo collections) for images representing "business," you'd get
images of people dressed up in suits, groups sitting around conference tables
looking serious, Powerpoint presentations, people producing thick reports for
one another to read. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And
yet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.  
  
Why the disconnect? I think there's a general principle at work here: the less
energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to
compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive
makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in
which a car magazine modified the "sports" model of some production car to get
the fastest possible standing quarter mile. You know how they did it? They cut
off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to make it _look_
fast.  
  
Business is broken the same way that car was. The effort that goes into
looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less
productive. Suits, for example. Suits do not help people to think better. I
bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up
on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee.
That's when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if
people could think that well at work. People do in startups, at least some of
the time. (Half the time you're in a panic because your servers are on fire,
but the other half you're thinking as deeply as most people only get to
sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)  
  
Ditto for most of the other differences between startups and what passes for
productivity in big companies. And yet conventional ideas of professionalism
have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by
them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem
"professional." We'd clean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange
that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact,
programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during
office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for
programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the
morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are
supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. Even we
were affected by the conventional wisdom. We thought of ourselves as
impostors, succeeding despite being totally unprofessional. It was as if we'd
created a Formula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car
was supposed to look.  
  
In the car world, there are at least some people who know that a high
performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan with giant rims
and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk. Why not in business? Probably because
startups are so small. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only
has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens
of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.  
  
This book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till now, only
a handful people got to see: what happens in the first year of a startup. This
is what real productivity looks like. This is the Formula 1 racecar. It looks
weird, but it goes fast.  
  
Of course, big companies won't be able to do everything these startups do. In
big companies there's always going to be more politics, and less scope for
individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least
show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when
instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to
seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.  
  
  
  
Japanese Translation  
  

* * *

  
  
  
---  
  
  
---  
| | **Founders at Work**  
  
There can't be more than a couple thousand people who know first-hand what
happens in the first month of a successful startup. Jessica Livingston got
them to tell us. So despite the interview format, this is really a how-to
book. It is probably the single most valuable book a startup founder could
read.