Slashdot Mirror
At Burning Man While Your Startup Burns (techcrunch.com)
There's a difference between clearing your head, and ditching your dying startup to do drugs in the desert. From a report: Whether you're going to Burning Man, Ibiza, SXSW, or some big international tech conference, the message you send is the same. If your startup isn't succeeding, you're skipping out on the dirty work while hoping some miracle revelation or networking connection will save you. And it probably won't. For those less familiar, Burning Man is when 70,000 people build a temporary city of tents and RVs in the Nevada desert where no money is exchanged, and instead everyone seeks to gift strangers with giant art installations, workshops, food, drinks, and celebrations. But I get a sinking feeling when I notice or hear about the leaders of a struggling startup trying to dance or dose away their troubles. Being out of a contact for several days to a week since there's no reliable cellular connection and a stigma against phone use creates a decision-making bottleneck that can slow down your company. Ex-Oculus founder Palmer Luckey here points out how juice presser startup Juicero's founder Doug Evans took off to Burning Man for week. That's despite the company recently admitting it needed to lower prices after Bloomberg reporters revealed you could simply squeeze Juicero juice packs by hand without the $400 machine. In the middle of that week Evans was at Burning Man, Juicero announced it would suspend sales of its juicer and juice packs as it desperately tries to find an acquirer. While Evans handed over the CEO title to former Coca-Cola exec Jeff Dunn late last year, the company told TechCrunch "Evans is Juicero's full time Founder and Chairman of the Board and very active within the company."
Shouldn't people be allowed to take vacations? I have no problem with this.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Everybody need some break from work. And frankly being at work without a solution just shuffling paper around would not help either. You gotta be American thinking you gotta work 110% of your time and have success. Hint : success is 10% sweat, 30% connection, and 60% luck. Beside that Juicero was a stupid product for stupid people, not taking one day off will not help it, it is by now a dead product.
Was clever and original enough when is started, for a few years, back in the 90s. Now? An over-priced Disneyland for Marketing Execs going through their second childhood or third divorce...
Poor Juicero -- fell into the trap that so many people who think highly of their own talents and desires fall into:
As with so many areas where people work on something that is their passion (whether food, music, art, coffee, wine) is that they start to forget that the effort (or depth of intention) they put into it does not necessarily translate into how much other people value it, or how much people are willing to pay for it.
You get people who think that because they slaved away for hours on a painting, essay, cup of coffee or artisinal x,y,z, etc, or that they did it with such depth of feeling means that they can charge big $$ for it.
If that were true, history / philosophy / library science majors would be pulling in huge bucks for all the time they spent studying esoteric things that no one cares about, while people who scrape the internet for cute cat videos would be sitting in poverty. And arc welders who do a job on site, leave, and never have to think about it again would be barely getting by instead of being paid $70 / hour.
The other thing they start to forget is that few people care about the extra details that they care about, because they've been immersed in the topic for years and lost an absolute sense of proportion, such as:
- the ability to remotely cancel juice bags on expiration
- having a squeezing mechanism that saves you 10 seconds of effort but costs $400...
People who go to Burning Man (in my stereotyped way of thinking) tend to have a mindset that belief and values and ideology will carry the day -- and this resonates in my mind with what happened at Juicero. They tend not to be the people who put their nose to the grindstone and do a dirty job that has no glory or isn't "humanity-changing", but pays well and is reliable.
At this point, it doesn't really matter if the CEO is on vacation -- it's just a symptom of what was happening all along. 3 days absence isn't going to change the company's future...
A fundamental rule about businesses is: you should never have anyone who is actually indispensable. If that person gets hit by a bus, the business is toast -- so a company with one of more indispensable people in it is a company in a weak or precarious position.
If the company really can't do without an exec for a week or so, I take that as a big red flag that the company is, at best, teetering. So let them have their vacation, it's probably not making anything worse.
The people who hired him. No more, no less. I don't care what some CEO of some obscure company does or doesn't do as long as I'm not an investor. It is literally none of my business, or yours (unless you own part of the business) what some guy with the CEO title does.
Anything further is nothing more than class envy... Where the folks who assume all CEO's are corrupt, greedy and bad actors who get too much compensation, are shoveling out their drivel about how unfair things are.
What are we anyway? Socialists? Communist? or Capitalists? Take your pick because you cannot have all three.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm a startup founder, I've never been to Burning Man, or any similar events, and probably never will be. I agree that those are not actually networking events, but I don't think it's ok to dictate the type of vacation someone should take. If raving in the desert is what someone needs to clear their head and make better decisions, they should do it. Not everyone gets the same thing from meditation and solitary introspection. Sometimes you just need something different. There are times I need to go take a peaceful hike by myself to reflect, and there are times I need to go to Vegas with an old friend to make bad decisions on purpose.
For a startup founder, your company is ALWAYS in crisis. Every week you're burning cash to keep things going. If you wait for the perfect time to take a vacation, you'll be waiting for a very long time. Whether you can bear to leave your co-workers working while you go is highly personal and unique to every situation... it's impossible to generalize.
Now, I've seen people who do take way too much time off, and do expect to come up with a miracle on the fly to replace the work they should have put in. But that's a different thing.
What is this shit doing on the Slashdot front page? It's wrong in every aspect of business management and is just a long way around to say "work good, drugs bad". It's the prose equivalent of Nancy Reagan wearing a nun's outfit having an auditory seizure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
He has a ... net worth of a couple of million
HE'S WON BABY!
With a $2 million dollars of stocks you can have an income of (around and averaged to) $200,000/year from stock market gains alone. You can live anywhere in the world and that money still comes in. You don't have to put in a single hour of work. It just happens.
Considering the typical person in the world lives on ~$10,000/year and you'd be making 20x that, for doing nothing other than breathing, I think you've got a VERY strange definition of "paltry". Hell, even in first-world top-dog USA where everyone is rich and the median income is $51,939, you'd still be doing REAL fine just living on the gains from your stocks.
Let me make this abundantly clear: Most people still have to work for a living because they cannot simply choose to get out of the SanFran housing clusterfuck and retire with a big-ass pile of a "paltry" $2,000,000. If I were handed even $1 mil, I'd stop working for someone else and start making the things I WANT to make (or fuck around all day like the unmotivated slob I am, but regardless). If you think having a net worth of $2 mil makes this guy a loser, then you need to go travel the world a little. The parts which don't have a cabana boy with mimosas on hand. You need some perspective. It'll do you good.