Article by cooper treuhaft

Push to Start

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ne bland morning at the tech startup Netscape, a specific engineer came into work with an oddly upbeat stride. He had a large cardboard box with him, along with a poorly hidden smirk. He made his way through all the cubicles, stopping at each person’s desk to reach into the box and pull out a handful of bouncy balls and place them on each

employees desk. After several minutes of silent walking, he had put a pile of bouncy balls on every employee’s desk. The office remained quiet for several minutes, but eventually, the first ball flew from one cubicle to the other, within seconds everyone in the office was partaking in a full blown war, throwing super balls at each other. Some employees hoarding balls,

Written and Designed

by Cooper Treuhaft

others going on suicide missions to attack other teams. The war lasted a brief 30 minutes, and was followed by a short cleanup. All of the employees returned to their desk quietly, and with a new sense of relief.

When one thinks of the employees at startups, what comes to mind is a group of highly intelligent and quirky employees, who are throwing every-

thing that they have away to pursue a company that has a miniscule chance of success. “People say the creating a startup is like jumping off a cliff and trying to assemble a parachute before you hit the ground.� Said Jeff Treuhaft long time employee at Netscape and Founder of cloud storage startup Zetta. With a failing rate of 90%, startups aren’t what one might call reliable. But there is a reason why people continue to risk everything they have to pursue a completely new company. There is

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something special within the bounds of a startup.

It is something about the culture of innovation, and community, that keep entrepreneurs coming back to create new companies.

Nearly all employees that have worked at both big corporations and startups agree that working at a startup is much more fun, and this is not only due to the goofy and fun experiences that they all have to tell their kids. In order to have a self sustaining start up, your company has to be innovative, and highly mo-

tivated, and this is part of what makes it so fun.

Employees wake up every morning with the expectation that there is going to be a daily battle, within the company, and come into work eager to win it for t, this can be anything from getting an extra sale or two of your product, or settling an internal dispute over the budget. Everyone wants to get something done, and with companies so small, every bit counts.

This mentality and culture is very different from that of big corporations,

“If you see a rocket ship, join it”

which can be a lot more focused on office politics and maintaining success, rather that trying to create it. When asked about the inner-workings of a team

at a tech startup, Jeff Treuhaft said “An analogy I like to use, is it’s really like a foxhole.

And when you’re doing battle when you’re trying to a win a battle, in a foxhole it’s really important that you trust the people on either side of you. Their

guns are going to be pointing in a different direction. And you need to know that they’re going to take care of their part of the fox hole”. The employees of these companies strive to hit threshold that all of the great startups reach, but in order to do this they must sludge through countless hours of work on their objective, and in order to have a successful team, they have to be able to rely on their team members, and

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trust that they will complete their objective The topic of innovation came up in my interview with Iri Trashanski, seasoned start up veteran. Iri spoke of one of his friends that was currently working on an start-up, titled Juno. Trashanski said “ Juno, you know what they do?. They do Ovens. smart ovens. Do you think there is a market for smart ovens? No it’s a market that hasn’t been disrupted for fifteen years because there is a status quo…..but now they are changing the entire thing and you cannot do it, it’s very hard to do it ” All of the big changes that have come in the tech industry recently have all big from big name companies, and this is because of how hard it really is to innovate. The companies that have been creating

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changes in the industry, such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google, have only gotten to that point because they started off as a start-up that came up with a new and innovative way to solve a problem that the average person couldn’t think of, such as the lack of a good search engine before google, or the lack of a practical electric car like Tesla. In his book, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, author Peter Thiel says “ the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve” (Theil, 115). This quote speaks for itself. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t try to be like Sergey Brin or Larry Page, they should try to be the new Sergey Brin or Larry Page. If one should learn anything

from these great founders, it is that it is good to be different. Each one has a unique story, and the main aspect that all of them have in common is that they created something that hasn’t been created before.

One of the most peculiar aspects of tech startups doesn’t come from the fiscal side of the companies, but rather the culture. You’ll hear stories about the Google campus, and all of its commodities, such as communal bikes to travel from place to place, and slides transporting employees from one floor to another.

Although this stuff may be on the extreme end of the spectrum, it is not far off from the average tech companies. Each company seems to have its own way of getting their employees to relax every

once in awhile, and with such a high stress profession, this is really important. These things can be simple, like a monthly trip to a pub, or more extravagant, like having an office wide bouncy ball war. All of these activities are extremely therapeutic, and become a kind of trademark of startup culture. When this topic was brought up in an interview, Jeff Treuhaft said “Everybody is doing multiple jobs usually I there is always the threat of not having a funding or not finding customers quickly

enough or some really difficult challenging technical problems to solve and they can be extremely stressful so if there’s not a way to break through that stress on a regular basis then people will get burnt out there get very crispy and the likely be not as productive as they could be if they have those opportunities to let some steam off.” These activities, purposed with relieving the stress of employees, can be an integral part of a startup, and a reason why the idea of working at one is so magnetic

Working at a startup is a topic of extremes, high risk and high stress, for very high rewards. Startups are becoming more and more prevalent in the business world today, and for the unemployed thrill seekers of the tech world, there is no better time to start your own company, and create your own culture and company around an innovative solution to an obscure problem. At the very least you’ll end up with some long time friends, good memories, and a lot of lessons learned.

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Works Cited Treuhaft, Jeff. Personal Interview. 21, March 2016.

Treuhaft, Jeff. Personal Interview. 8, March 2016.

Trashanski, Iri. Personal Interview. 29, March 2016 Thiel, Peter A., and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Crown Business, 2014. Print.

Patel, Neil. “90% Of Startups Fail: Here’s What You Need To Know About The 10%.”

Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 15 Jan. 2015. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

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