I’ll have an announcement to make tomorrow if we can find a printer to print this contract http://simpleform.com/
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Ugh, Nick’s post linking to 37 Signal’s post about not using puzzles and and riddles to hire people reminded me of the time I interviewed at [redacted].
I was awful. Embarrassingly awful. I can’t even describe how ridiculously bad I was at talking through a problem on paper. Looking back I probably should have just said, “Oh hey, can we try something else?” But I wanted to prove I could do it and just ended up getting it all so wrong I wanted to just get up and walk out of the room.
A friend went through the gauntlet of hiring and he was hit with all the puzzles and algorithms you hear about. He studied really hard for them and did really well; he had his pick of jobs to take. But talking to him now it seems that he ended up at a company lacking any culture and a few odd people he doesn’t care to interact with.
I think I do pretty good hiring people. I tend to do much more talking and challenging ideas than I think most people do. Yes, reading their code is probably the most important thing you can do before hiring, but if you can’t hold a conversation with someone and can’t see having lunch with them, then why even get to that point?
Occasionally I will be writing this year about progress on Simpleform’s transparent books.
Last week I learned how to retrieve and parse my bank account’s transactions. They’re in a format called OFX which sounds awful but is actually pretty straightforward. If you ignore 95% of it, in the end it is a list of transactions identified by GUIDs which I am stuffing in a MySQL database.
My goal is first to collect it, then clean it up locally by adding better descriptions and categories, and then push reports to a server that we can all see.
I will share this code.
“The object of the game is to hit the pig with the bird.” — Angry, Productive Birds by Mike at Stamen is a great look at designing a system to help everyone on the team to learn from their project scheduling and time usage.
Simpleform, the company I started with my wife, is entering its third year. We built some stuff for clients, we built some stuff for ourselves, and now we’re back to building things for clients and I think we might be doing this for a while. In the past two years I have learned a lot: some about startups, but way more about businesses and running them.
This idea of building business systems started clicking in my head about six months ago as we were returning to consulting. When we were 100% dedicated to MLKSHK we were shipping daily, processing bugs as fast as people could find them, working through features, and had between the three (or four) of us developed a tight development relationship. It was a fantastic system for shipping code for our users.
When that ended I felt a bit lost. We had systems for deploying and determining where to focus, but working for clients is a different thing. So…why not develop systems for client work?
For year three of Simpleform I am trying out three things:
- Open books. Anyone who works here can see what we’re earning and how much we’re spending. If you can push code to the servers you should be able to see how healthy the business is. These things are related and should be signals for making decisions.
- Meticulous project scheduling. The purpose of our business is first to make money and second enjoy what we’re working on. This does that. I can’t enjoy my time at Simpleform if I don’t know how the business is doing and I don’t think anyone else who works here would either.
- Continuous business development. We probably never should have switched to MLKSHK full-time. It was a gamble, but looking back I see we should have kept looking for work. It was too optimistic. From now on we will try out ideas but keep the business going.
Another good post by a co-founder of AngelList called Why You Can’t Hire is the other reason I’ve been thinking about a transparent business. I don’t have ten million dollars in the bank and melting servers. I can’t compete for people who want to work at Facebook or the next Facebook. We don’t have perks, we have a water cooler and a nice plant.
What I do have is an offer to be more than just an employee with a half-of-a-half-of a percent of a business and no real connection to it other than a hope for a quick sale and a free hoodie. Everyone who works here is a partner and will have access and a vote for where we go and what we do. We get to tinker and toy with the business—as long as we are successful—and use what we learned to make our business even better.
I’m currently working through my network to find Python engineers to join us. The profile I’m using is someone with enough experience in startups and non-startups to know this is a good deal. I have one person I think is perfect and a few ideas on some other people, but if I missed you pleased get in touch.
While having lunch today with rodbegbie we talked a bit about companies we like that we pay to use and are happy to pay to use. I can think of four right off the bat, but I'd love to hear if you have any you particularly like.
These companies are of course a huge influence on my thinking in this post about Simpleform and mlkshk, and absolutely what I am trying to emulate.
@ me on Twitter, I'm torrez.
Update: Some nice companies sent in via Twitter:
As we get Simpleform going one thing I think I've absolutely settled on is that I don't want to take any investment money from anyone. We have earned (old fashioned LOL!) enough this year while consulting to not have to think about it as we set out to build our product, and I think we'll be fine for next year too, so we have some running room. Plus I can sell a guitar or something if things get crazy.
Dear Friends,
I've been away for a while, but now I'm back. Here is what happened:
- I left my job at Federated Media.
- I started doing client work.
- I realized I dislike client work. The "client" part of client work.
- I worked on a secret project for someone else to be announced in a month. Kind of like client work but without jerky clients.
- Made enough money the past few months to take a stab at a real-live start up with my wife.
- http://www.simpleform.com/
PLEASE sign up for the Friends of Simpleform list. I promise there is very good news coming soon (like tomorrow).
I haven't written a post in over a month. That's rare. I think I've just grown too consumed with work that I no longer have time to read my newsreader and post anything.
Stuff that has happened: I got an iPad of course. After a month of using it I ditched my laptop (didn't see that coming).
To replace my laptop I'm now running an iMac Quad i7 with 8 gigs of RAM. This computer just SCREAMS. I love it. It's been a few years since I've worked on a powerful machine.
My iPhone broke, but Apple wouldn't replace it so I bought a Nexus One. I'm giving the thing a month (for real this time) but we're already about two weeks in and I think we're hitting snags. Too soon to tell.
Simpleform's first product is going to be announced soon. I'm in charge of putting the web site up and I am not good with CSS or HTML so it's taking longer than I had hoped. So as soon as I get that sorted then the site will be up and the product sort of announced.
Two recent posts about punishing a large group over one person (or company's) actions:
First Derek Siver's post titled "Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person's mistake".
Next John Scalzi's post about Amazon's actions this past weekend regarding the Macmillan pricing disagreement. Don't let the unfortunate use of the word "fail" here discourage you from reading it.
After four and a half years I've decided to leave Federated Media. It has been the most rewarding work experience of my life. It wasn't always easy, but it was always worth it.