Startups – iAm Hiro Shinohara

A company is a band

A startup is a band.
About 10 years ago, a “legend” at my company entered as an advisor. He was an expert who had created a certain software, and he was an extremely famous person. At the time, he had the desire to grow young startups as a post-retirement career, so he joined us.
Although he had joined us as an advisor, I felt that his way of thinking was outdated with every little thing, and it irritated me when we had meetings. I was still okay, but the engineers started to complain too.
Our cultural differences soon came to light, with people saying,

What that person is saying is a sound argument, but he doesn’t understand our development direction at all. The old way of doing things doesn’t suit us at all.

Workaholic or not

In my opinion, it’s important to be a workaholic for any startups. Thesedays I’m working with a great mentor who is a tipical workaholic man.

Jason Calacanis the CEO of Mahalo posted an interesting blog entry like below.

How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)

Fire people who are not workaholics…

Then David Heinemeier on 37signals agrees the intention. However he said he don’t think it’s not good to fire people who aren’t workaholics. There’re reasons why David thinks like that on the blog of 37signals.

Fire the workaholics – (37signals)

I know 37signals decided to work only 4 days a week recently. It means no workaholics they need.

Let me say my thought again. I think it’s important to be a workaholics for any startups in a very early stage. Guys in 37signals may worked like that before, I thought. And they still work like that but they don’t think it’s just work, it’s just for fun for them.

Hey, do you think they could success and respected without hardwork? I don’t think so! I think David means compulsory overwork will not works well all the time. Not just means workaholics sucks.

If everyone in your team works like workaholics without any forcing and stresses, it means you already have a big possibility. In that way, I think I need to be more carefully to find someone work with.

I said I’ll work 12 hours a day in my new year’s resolution but I changed it at a beginning of March. It’s 16 hours a day.