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Saved by 13 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-04-21


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Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.

Highlighted by lfriedl

Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail. Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.

Highlighted by lfriedl

Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.

Highlighted by roarsk

At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit.

Highlighted by roarsk

If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often make good startups.

Highlighted by roarsk

Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.

Highlighted by nabhishek

Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.

Highlighted by roarsk

Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. Could there be a connection?

Highlighted by roarsk

You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.

Highlighted by roarsk

Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don't think you're going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.

Highlighted by roarsk

From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.

Highlighted by roarsk

If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed.

Highlighted by roarsk

There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.

Highlighted by roarsk

If you're really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill. And practically all startups, even the most successful, come close to death at some point. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project.

Highlighted by roarsk

If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. In the long term the most important may be the potential employees.

Highlighted by roarsk

And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic.

Highlighted by roarsk

Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can.

Highlighted by roarsk

Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.

Highlighted by roarsk