Small company culture
by Andrew Smith on 30/08/07 at 9:51 am
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Joel Spolsky (owns a software company) has this to say about small vs big:
Basically a small company has a flavor to it, whereas a big company is sort of like checking into the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It’s a nice hotel but it has 5,000 rooms, so don’t expect anybody to remember your name. A small company is more like a bed and breakfast. You’re going to have a great time because you get along with people and it’s a much friendlier experience. You don’t really mind that the bathroom is down the hall because the people made a special vegetarian meal for you and then showed you around town. On the other hand, you might be at a bed and breakfast where they have weird leather implements and lots of cats.
He used to work at Microsoft, so he has experienced both types of company:
There’s something really weird about being a little gear in a very large project and not really being able to describe to anybody what you do, not really being able to influence or affect the way things happen. Pretty much 95 percent of everything you do at Microsoft is in some way feeding the beast. You’re working on Microsoft, not your product. You’re not directly causing your product to become better. You’re trying to create the meetings that will cause the things to happen that will cause at some point some part of some product to be better.
He speaks about his experience as the CEO of a small company, and how that role often facilities growth:
Basically, what I do at any given time is whatever new thing Fog Creek suddenly has to do as we get larger, and nobody is around to do it. The difference between a small company and a large company is that at a small company, you still have to do all the same things, but you have to do them less. So you need somebody to do, let’s say, marketing, but it’s really only .03 percent of a person. You need somebody to take out the garbage. You need somebody to do the bookkeeping, but you don’t really have a full-time bookkeeping need yet; even to this day at Fog Creek, bookkeeping is about one day a week for one person. So you can’t really hire a bookkeeper at that point. For a while we didn’t have an office manager or anybody to answer the phones. As you get larger, those tasks start to hit the point at which you can hire full-time people to do them, and the CEO stops doing them.
Read the whole interview here.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
