This is Zen[xyz]joy and we will disrupt!

This is Zen[xyz]joy and this is what we stand for

This is Zen[xyz]joy and we will disrupt!

We will disrupt, we will take on Goliath and we will win. We will succeed because we are nimble. We understand the customer and we understand the market. Our execution will be flawless. We have monster engineers who are #perfect and our investors will help us connect the dots. We are in no hurry to exit. This is not a quick flip. We are in it for the long run and we want to win. We will crush it

That doesn’t mean we do not have fun. We have foosball tables and infinite vacations that we enforce. We have happy hours and we want everybody to have fun together. We are more than a team. We are a family. And we want to look out for you. We want you to succeed; we want you to be able to take a vacation in Belize in 3-4 years from now after your shares have vested.

This is Zen[xyz]joy

This is the memo of virtually any startup that you can see here in the Bay Area. When you are recruiting, be very careful — the pitches may sway you but in the end they largely speak of the same thing. Life is a big team chasing a big dream with a few good men against the world. I recruited once; I actually recruited many a times. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t fun because of the shatter-glass effect. Once you hear one, you have heard them all. And it is astonishingly adjacent to what the next guy had to say. So what do you do?

On a scale from “Sure thing” to “I would do that anyway”, you need to find your happy place. This is not a happy path a la engineering but a happy place in general. It is something that makes you happy.

Uber is a sure thing. AirBnB is a sure thing. Square is a sure thing (if you believe Roleof Botha and I think most of us do). “I would do that anyway” is a variant of the question that we ask ourselves at night when we can’t fall asleep. What if I could do anything that I wanted? What would I do? Translated, it means — If you had time, or competency or people to help you out, where would you dedicate your time? This is the domain of “I would do that anyway”. Most people are locked out of the former and are too afraid of the latter. So lets assume that like the 80% of you out there on a ceaseless rat race, you find your self somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. So what is happening here?

The startup that took a round of funding and got that engineer from Google is trying to become a sure thing. It is trying to become an outlier, a phenomenon. On the spectrum, you start alone when you are at “I would do that anyway”. Ultimately, everyone converges on a “Sure thing”. So you are a Product Manager at this place which is somewhere in that spectrum. Lets do a quick fact check about you.

- You are smart. Given the fact that you find yourself in the spectrum at all

• You want to make a difference that’s why you are not at a huge company. You want to rock the boat
• Huge company = Already Exited and a giant of the industry. GOOG, AMZN

- You don’t want to nuke the boat and start stand-up paddle boating, that’s why you are not a founder.

Please hold off on the “I am learning from my founders on how to run a company”. It is largely meaningless when you run a company yourself

- You are making less than what you would have made at a huge company

- You have equity and ownership. You have some hope of this company striking gold, that’s why you hold on to that equity and structure your job search in accordance with vesting schedules.

- You have made friends who are fairly tolerable at work

- And lastly — At a noisy bar the phrase “I work at this cool startup” travels farther.

Imagine you are the founder. You have engineers. You have investors. Investors give you 1/Portfolio worth of mind share. Lets pick a number and stick to it. Lets say 1/20. The investor is looking out across Sand Hill to the recent billion-dollar acquisition or the rapid IPO and going — “Lets ideate strategically and connect the dots”. You fear the investor is thinking — “You have really let me down here. Look at XYZ; they did so well. Why the fuck did I pass on them? If you were my child, I would have put you up for adoption already”. Your employees want to grow and learn from you. You fear you have nothing to offer. Your co-founder has been on tinder so much more than your console that he has had his password revoked. You are looking down the barrel of fuck-me-town with a handgun pointed at your face. So you can either choose to accept your fate and resign yourself to the market or decide to do something about it.

[Resigning yourself to the market means admitting loss and letting GOOG or equivalent strip you for parts]

Doing something about it — this is the interesting piece. Take Peter Thiel or Ben Horowitz. They advocate a calculus mode of thinking about life. That there is a way, there is a right answer and you will find it. The concept is great!

Now deviate from it a tiny bit and add a little evil. Sprinkle healthy doses of incompetence, interpretation and immediacy. Wow! You just got yourself a cult!

Allow me to digress. The cultural revolution was a deep dark period in the history of China. Mao fucked up. He had people believe in all sorts of ridiculous bullshit. He ordered a famine when he decided that birds that were too chirpy had to go. He arbitrarily unleashed waves of mass hysteria. He was a horrible human being and deserves a place right next to Hitler and Pol Pot for all that he has done.

I am done digressing. The cultural revolution was brought upon by Mao when he advocated his belief unilaterally and enforced the same beliefs. He set unrealistic ideals like “China will produce more steel that the US” when the entire nation was getting ravaged by famine. A mid-spectrum startup can go in a very similar direction. You have an unrealistic ideal — “Disrupt this industry, go after Google! Become brilliant”. You have a talismanic founder and his vision. You don’t have to believe in it wholesale but if you are spending 8 hours a day in front of the computer coding up stuff that has this vision pretty firmly in its sights then you are a believer. The management needs to believe too. Unrealistic timelines and goals are very much a top down feature. No individual engineer ever comes up and says — “ hey! I want to work nights and weekends to calibrate this project when I don’t have any idea what the hell I am building. But hey — whatever it is, I bet I can re-write it in Scala”. No one person is that stupid. But en masse, this delusion is pervasive. You would rather have a vision and a direction than nothingness. It’s the equivalent of Ummm… in conversations. You would rather interject with meaningless word vapor than leave room for silence. Similarly, you would prefer to have a vision — as meaningless and far-fetched as it is than to have nothing. Or God forbid a direction that has been proven to be wrong in all of common sense. This is where the cult mentality comes to the fore. It smells wrong to the individual but collectively, as an employee, you like your paycheck or are too nice to call bullshit. As an employee, you prefer to go with the flow. You prefer to separate your common sense in a chamber and starve it of oxygen while your meaningless sense of being travels wonderingly into the abyss of delusion. And this is where I stop. As a founder, you have a responsibility to not fuck over your employees. If you fucked up and things are not working, you should own it. You shouldn’t pivot to save face but you should talk knowledgably about why chasing this particular unicorn is better than chasing that last loch ness monster. It is a hard life as a founder. I get it. It is incredibly hard to keep everything together. But you owe it to yourself to not dilute the meaning of a startup. You owe it to yourself to not be a faceless dictator arbitrarily pulling triggers. You have a lot riding on your ideas and your words, your thoughts.

Don’t fuck everything up and be that guy.

Idea and Story: Ruoxing Liu