Startup, Salaries, Risk, Entrepreneurship, Payoffs

No, those aren't tags for the post, but the cluster of words that should go together, but often do not.

Entrepreneurship implies risk and the possibility of a payoff.
A startup, as we know it, is one for of entrepreneurship.

In this context, the concept of market salaries has no meaning at all!

More and more and more startups I see, hear, read about are trying to behave like larger, more structured organizations. The worst part is that they model "compensation" (oh, how I hate that word - its what accident victims get, not motivated people working towards a dream) and other "HR practices" on how-its-done-at-big-co-X. Where is the innovation there, people ?

Here's some ideas and thoughts that are worth remembering/attempting

• Market salaries : this is an absurd phrase for anyone in even a partly decision-making position in a startup.
• You need empowerment, ownership, flexibility way more than you need processes
• Try this : Keep a very small 'retainer' component, and then a percentage of profits, not equity stake etc. Sure, do that as well for the early ones, but since you're small and all, nothing like direct participation in profits, and nothing quite like that to keep folks 'real' and focused on the bottomline. It'll build a business like nobody's business :)

Don't ape the last big company you work at. You never know whats going to work, so at the least give it a shot! And just because you need people, do not "attract" those who're in it just because ots cool to be seen as 'taking risk' without actually wanting to take any.

Posted via email from workFront

Hiring, Motivations, Pay Structures & Rewards

Attended the last Unpluggd where the topic revolved around signing up folks for startups.

And then saw this:



Amazingly, was also thinking (during a bus ride today) about why we do some things despite severe odds, or hindrances, or the need for effort and learning curves, and certain others never get done irrespective of how easy, or 'within our scope' they are.

What is this motivation thingy ?

As a result of all of the above, here's some word/phrase groups to consider:

Reward, risk, compensation, appraisal, objectives, measurement, schedule, 1x1, incentive, weekly status report, stress, problems, constraints, roles, job descriptions, job, prove merit.

Dream, buy-in, belief, desire, effort, solution, honesty, freedom, fail fast and free, lateral thinking, boundlessness.

Of course one's made to sound rosier than the other. But pause and examine which of the above are the truths caused to/by/around you.

We buy ideas, rewards, philosophies at a level we never execute those at - its the day to day efforts and battles that its about. Its like honesty - unless you really really buy it - not as a 'good to follow' truth but somethings that part of you bloodstream - you'll slip here or there in the day to day.

So the stock options stop having any connection with the product features.
And marketing to the guy who's doing the appraisal is the be all and end all.

Would you not rather have people who were paid adequately, and then did stuff purely because they either love to, or they think its necessary to do it ? Would you rather not people have the guts, freedom, desire and authority to, say, pull the plug on something even if its 90% done if they really really get convinced it's no good.

Of course, thats not to say that you need to let chaos reign - but if you have free, smart people, they will listen to reason. They will learn and you will learn from them. Thats an orthogonal problem to solve - but having people who're "into it" can only help even there.

The video proves what I've always believed - creative, fuzzy-result-oriented work needs free minds. Don't try and pressurize these flows - either through incentives or through disincentives. In fact, incentives usually imply measurement/observation, which implies expectations. And sometimes, things that "being discovered" need to be done without those disincentives weighing them down. If the people involved are good, and they're really into it for belief/faith/interest/passion, something useful will evolve.

You cannot buy passion. Or creativity. Or ownership. You will surely lose it if the attempt is to coerce it using fear, however subtle. Do not try corelating risk-reward, probation, appraisal cycles with work directly. People need money to live, spend on nice things, secure their future. Not to work. Do that for them.

Enagage, and focus, on the usefulness, and marketability, and goal-appropriateness of the work they're doing. Not on the carrots and the sticks that those will lead to - thats so last-century.

Good Salary Advice

Joel Spolsky discusses how salaries are fixed in his organization.

I agree with the overall attempt at subjectivity, though I believe it would be great if we could really "spread around ownership" in the truest sense, and that includes transparency in salaries, bonuses and figuring out if, as a company, we did x% on our bonuses, etc. That automatically includes involvement in fixing targets, a participative approach to strategy and tactics, and ownership of a small business that has scope for independent growth, if possible!

There's a very nice point made towards the end of that article:

At the same time, if you hear a lot of griping about salaries, you shouldn't look just at your system for paying people. One thing I've learned from experience is that happy, motivated employees who are doing work they love and feel they are being treated as adults don't gripe about money unless their pay is egregiously unfair. If you hear a lot of complaints about salaries, I suspect that's probably a manifestation of a much bigger disease: Your employees aren't deriving enough personal satisfaction from their work, or they are miserable for other reasons.

This is soooo true and its amazing how often even smart people try and fix just the symptoms. Unless you're totally off the charts, there are usually deeper reasons for the dissatisfaction, and unless there's a genuine effort to fix those, the symptoms will flare up again in one form or the other.

Ziva's search for people!!

Ziva : Innovative mobile search startup engaged in

• whats so different about mobile search (interface)
• what will ppl be looking for (data)
• where will that come from ? (I cannot give too much away here)

We were incubated at IIM-Bangalore and have graduated out of there recently. We are beginning to go big on Zook (http://zook.in) - our own service, after multiple b2c data deployments for various customers.

Looking for:

Engineering:

1. many ppl with 3-7 years work exp
2. a few with <3 yrs

The number of years above should be taken as indicators of expertise alone. Not set-in-stone.

Skills/Domains for the above:

Common skills (one/more of) -

• Core Java (server side, middleware, large systems) development
• Scripting, web services
• OOPs
• Distributed computing/scalable systems
• For leads, experience with a complete product cycle, from conceptualization/prod spec to rollout preferred
• Lead - Information Retrieval/Text mining
• Lead for search platform development (java, java, more java)
• Sr Dev/Lead for our monetization engine - core java, business rules engines, advertising platforms experience will be great to have

1-2 Consulting/Support:

• Customer engagement for integration, deployments, consulting support for our platforms
• Requirements collection and analysis, interfacing with Engineering
• 2-5 years customer facing exp will be very useful

1-2 Senior mktg/sales people with a good exposure to one of :

• The Indian Mobile Industry
• The Search/Online industry - someone whos either done mktg for an online/mobile property, or has ad-agrregation/distribution experience.

We are also looking for a senior person to head Engineering - a very strong technical background, especially in the consumer products is desirable.

If you're looking for a challenging yet sane, fun place to work at, send me a mail at getDOTsameer AHT gmail.
If you can refer ppl, there's decent, good candy to be given :) Lets talk.