Funny Stories about Life in High Tech Start Ups

August 19, 2009

Can a start-up company be successful when the staff can’t walk and chew gum at the same time? Can a start-up pull a Homer? Sure they can! Antics, chaos, and humor are the normal way of life within a start-up. They are exciting and fast-paced. Sometimes it is difficult to keep the big picture perspective when you see the lunacy of the day-to-day start-up work place. I wonder sometimes how such organizations can be successful, but they are and they are the very ones that go IPO and become the darlings of Wall Street. Some of the antics and musings of start-up is caused by the younger technical staffs and some by the inexperienced management teams. Let me introduce you to life inside a Silicon Valley start-up.

One company was making a large computer system and at the point of the story, the company had about 200 employees and was still in the development phase. As is typical with hi-tech start-ups, engineers and programmers were the largest portion of the staff. Their office was an open space plan with neat aisles of cubicles. As is traditional in most start-ups, snacks and meals were provided by the company to encourage the employees to spend more time in the office working. There was one group within the company that chose to go for a lunchtime run every day. Given how many endless hours developers spend at their desks typing away at their computers. The contentious point was when this same group of people decided to string old-fashioned clothes lines across their cubicles, where they would hang their sweaty running clothes up to dry during the afternoon. The other engineers and programmers decided to hold their noses and bear the situation until one day when matters got worse. This same group had a habit of walking around barefoot in the office. One afternoon, one member of the staff noted the same group using the urinals in the restrooms in their bare feet and they were not bothering to wash their hands afterwards. Then they were going into the break room, putting their feet up on the lunch tables, and eating from the family-style communal bags of snacks and food. Word spread like wildfire through the organization and others began to note the same behavior. Huddled groups whispered throughout the office, but no one was willing to openly confront the group. The staff’s solution was to wait until everyone had left one evening and hang posters up near the rest rooms and in the break room, which asked the group to be more considerate of their fellow employees. Did it work? No, the group simple replied with their own posters the next day. And this went back and forth for a while, and the situation was never resolved. Employees were asked to tolerate everyone’s work habits. Management asked the employees to bear with them as the situation would improve shortly when the company relocated to a larger facility with fixed closed offices. In the mean time, management decided to order single serving snacks to replace the family style snacks. Unfortunately, the office manager didn’t understand how to order the single serving snacks in the quantity appropriate to an organization of this size. As I was entering the company’s office one day, an 18-wheeler Costco truck pulled up and the truck was completely filled with snacks for the company. The order was so large that Costco had shrink wrapped the delivery onto pallets, which the delivery men had to push and shove into the small freight elevator. After Costco left, snacks filled every available nook and granny in the office. There were boxes lining the hallways, under desks and just about anywhere there was free space. Shortly, the company moved into a larger facility across town and the snacks were abandoned in their offices.

At another company, they tried to solve the problem with sweaty lunchtime workout clothes by installing washing machines and clothes dryers in the offices. The company was even generous enough to provide laundry detergent for the employees. Soon after this perk was introduced, some employees began bring in all of their laundry and their families as well – doing their entire household laundry during business hours. There is always going to become number of employees that will take undue advantage of a perk.

Free snacks and meals are common place in start-ups, and here lies a source of many amusing tales. A director at a start-up, who was a coffee-addict, was annoyed about persons taking the last cup of coffee and not making a fresh pot of coffee. He installed a webcam near the coffee pot so he could catch the offenders in the act. At another start-up, webcams were installed in the lunch room so when the free lunch and dinner meals arrived, a pop up screen could be sent to all the employee’s monitors to show them the meal. They could check out the meal without ever leaving their cubicles. Another installed a camera on the outside of their building so they could see when the mobile lunch truck as it arrived outside the lobby.

Recently, I read an new article about Google curtailing its free meal policy for employee’s that need to work though their lunch time or need to stay late because some employees were taking undue advantage of this benefit. This happens all the time in start-ups. Many employees feel that the free dinner or lunch means that they can provide their entire family will a meal that day. They wait until dinner arrives, take several plates full of food to their desks, pack the food up in Tupperware containers, and they leave for the night with the family meal.

Start-ups are much more efficient than established companies. I calculated one time that staffs in established companies were spending 50%-60% of their day in internal meetings. While start-up staffs spend less than 10% of their time in meetings. While meetings are infrequent, distractions still abound in start-ups. When a round of funding is underway, employees usually find out the asking price per share. Then they start of determine the value of their stock options and they while away hours talking about what they are going to do with the money.

Let’s play “Rename the Company” is another activity that whiles away the time when someone in marketing decides the original company name will no longer due.

One start-up even installed a big screen movie projection system and on every Friday they rented movies from Blockbuster and would have a triple feature starting at lunch time, which also marked the beginning of the complimentary Friday Happy Hour. Friday was not a productive day.

One start-up had the phantom toilet clogger. Someone would use the men’s restroom, flush and viola. Minutes later the toilet was overflowing and water started flowing out of the bathroom into the carpeted hallway. Time and time again, the landlord would be called and plumbers would be rushed in. Augers were used to clean the pipes, pipes were replaced, toilets were replaced by those that could flush tennis balls, and carpeting was cleaned. Men in neighboring stalls had been trapped in the bathroom, seeking refuge from the flood waters by standing on the toilet seats, and yelling for help. No one would admit to clogging the toilet and much effort was expended trying to identify him. I was told that the men would enter a stall and check for any neighboring feet. They were trying to identify the toilet clogger. This was quite a frequent occurrence and people had their suspicions on who was the culprit. The women refused to share their restroom with the men. At one point, the men had to use the restrooms in another part of the building near another company’s office. As expected, the tiolet clogger overflowed that restroom as well. The toilet clogger was never caught but after a company lay-off, the problem quietly disappeared.

Start-ups are not like established companies. They are not mature and polished. The personalities attracted to an early stage start-up create a work environment like no other. Sometimes it seems like a soap opera. It’s amazing what they can accomplish despite their antics. This blog was just for the fun of it!