Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Start-up Lessons Learned: JustinTV
Last year in May I got my BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale; three days later Emmett and I officially started work on Kiko and became entrepreneurs. We’ve been working on Kiko full time for the past ten months, and during that time I’ve learned a few lessons as a young (newb) founder that I thought were useful enough to share. I’m not claiming to know it all about starting your own company, or even most of what there is to know (I still haven’t made a dollar of revenue, sold a company, brought a company to IPO, the list goes on…), but I wish someone had told me these things ten months ago.
Don’t hire/co-found-with your friends just because they are your friends.
I said this at
We’re naturally inclined to do things with our friends: play racquetball, drink beer, etc. This is no different for starting a company. However, when picking co-founders, its human nature to either overlook or make excuses for your friends’ shortcomings. This is really bad, because it can lead to situations where you think things like this: I know my friend, Gideon isn’t the hardest worker, but he’s really really smart. It’ll probably be ok if we bring him on, I might just have to pick up the slack a little bit…
This might not seem that bad, but in a startup, everyone needs to be doing 150% of a normal job. And if Gideon is only doing 50% of his job, then you will end up doing 250% of a job. This will probably cause you to become very resentful, and you really don’t want to be resentful about something that you’re spending 15 hours a day on.
Furthermore, when you’ve had enough and you finally want to get rid of your friend, it becomes a non-trivial task, because you have to carefully balance his feelings against your need to divorce yourself from his incompetence. With an employee who isn’t your friend, you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll mess up the weekly poker game.
Justin Kan is the founder and president of justin.tv. Founded October 10, 2006, Justin.tv is the destination site for broadcasting and watching live video online while chatting with friends
Posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Branding, Employee Relations, Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
2 Comments | “Start-up Lessons Learned: JustinTV”
I completely agree with this statement “With an employee who isn’t your friend, you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll mess up the weekly poker game.” It is really hard to work with a close friend especially if you have problem on his work attitude. You will be afraid that you might hurt his feeling and the result is that you’ll end up prolonging your agony.
Justin is so right with this. The same problem comes up when working with family members. A lot of times it’s easy to get caught up in the business and you want as much help as you can get. Taking some time and really thinking about who you’re partnering with or hiring can save some stress in the long run – and preserve relationships.