Damien Katz

Nice. Wish that more companies followed those rules. Man, I wished that the whole nation followed them.

Great that you were able to stick to your rules. It is hard. Good luck with your company :)

Sane organizations already hew to some of those goals, though you're definitely a lot more ambitious in others. The notion of equity for everyone + no firing is particularly striking. I wonder what the over/under will be on headcount / years in business before those two points have to be put away...

Please let us know what worked well and what didn't work well, since you have been doing this for a year.

How many employees? Is everyone happy with the salaries?

Please give an update every year or two. It would be wonderful if it works out. I think you will hire 19 great people and 1 bad person will get through. The person doing near zero work is what I want to hear about. Is everyone okay with it? Can you scalably absorb it? Normally good people come and go, but bad people camp forever.

I love the claim. Please let us know how it progresses. I'd love to hear the last 12 months so far.

Bryan S, we've only been funded since december and only just now got our office set up. We are still very young.

So my thoughts are, If someone is a problem employee, then they will be asked to leave the project and/or working environment where they are causing problems. If they cannot do this, if they harass people, they can be fired.

But if they insist on not being productive, they can't be fired.

Good luck with this model.

I believe you have some good points, but some other points may just lead your company into the ground.

I have been with, and leading, startups for over twenty five years, I also contribute to OSS, so here's my take on this.

Plus points:
- Only open source contributors, that will definitely earn you good programmers an some of the best.
- Every employee has a stake, I thought every tech company was already there.
- Providing hosting and services, call it web applications, this is all about outsourcing your customers' non-core business.
- Never fire on performance, every modern tech company already does this. But in the bad times, you'll have to cut where it makes sense, and guess what, this will be based on past performance.

Minus points:
- Only open source contributors, you'll also hire a bunch of Divas completely disconnected from the real world,
- No managers, you probably do not have any idea what good managers are for. They certainly are not OSS contributors, so you will never hire a good one, let alone you might never have a real CEO.
- No sales people, are you kidding? You can't outsource sales, you'll get ripped. HR maybe, but not sales. You have to have sales people in house and you'll have to learn how to manage them.
- Encourage forks internally: watch out for uncontrolled chaos, a company is not the OSS community.
- You were wrong turning down "an eminently qualified hire with a very positive energy" because he was not an OSS contributor. This hire might have brought some balance to your team. The world is not black and white, OSS or Microsoft.

You need to learn these lessons and fast.

Good luck with your business and thank you for your contributions to the world.

I admire your obvious inclination toward being a force for good in the world.

It reminds me of an alternative I came across for how you can set up your governing documents to better align them with this idea: http://www.bcorporation.net/

I'd suggest taking a look, if only because it was created by business/finance people who I suspect are as committed to aligning business' interests with the public as you are.

Jean, thanks for the feedback.

Everything you say might turn out to be true. Which is why we must be very careful in our hiring. And if it still doesn't work out, we'll have to adapt.

And we will hire salespeople if they have experience with open source. If you have sold open source products and services, then you are enabling open source. Like salespeople who worked at MySQL.

So are you guys all running on open source Ubuntu or are you still on proprietary os x? :p

Patcito, you are reading too much into it. We aren't open source fanatics.We use it when it makes sense, and not everything we do must be open source.

But we must have all made contributions in some way to open source projects. Understanding the culture is critical.

I like and use OS X.

Great mantra, very familiar to what Monty lives by:

http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/The_hacking_business_model

As per how one survives with such a model in a competitive space, Monty continues to lead the way:

http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/05/open-database-alliance-founded.html

That said, I've found a very interesting phenomena in both science and business: some of the most productive developers I've worked with seem to crave a surprisingly large amount of "top-down" management when it comes to direction. We certainly lost at least one significant hire due to following the basic principle of self-direction.

Damien, ok I read "Our companies mission to make the world a better place through open source software." as "we'll release all our stuff as open source to make the world a better place". Also, I hope you didn't equate being an ubuntu user to being an open source fanatic.

I like and use Ubuntu :)

hey damien,
you say:
|But if they insist on not being productive, they can't be fired.

why is this?

Well, I think your strategy could bring some happiness in the begging, however it will be very very difficult to keep it in the long run.

At some point some people or at least a single person will become less interested or less productive (we all are humans) than the others. In this point the moral or productivity of "the good guys" will be lost too.

I also think that it'll be valuable for you to read up "Atlas Shrugged" (if you haven't). The philosophy behind this book is just against your kind of company and you'll see what really can kill it.

Man, I really like your product and wish you lots of luck and success. I hope you'll be sustainable in the long run.

"...But if they insist on not being productive, they can't be fired..."

Damien, so let me get this straight.. If someone passes the interviews and then refuses to be productive once in the saddle, they can sit there and collect "welfare" off you ?

I can see how noble that is, and hopefully the team culture should prevent that from happening.. But it sounds like an invitation for trouble. How do you expect to mitigate this risk ? After all, if you get some clown taking up wages that could be given to someone you need to hire, who will get the job done, what do you do ?

My experience has been, if there is no accountability, then people just walk all over you.

The idea is that if you hire a smart person, they wouldn't be able to stand being not productive. It comes naturally to them. So they'd eventually not be able to stand it anymore and maybe at that point they create something some awesome it was worth the wait.

The big problem we try to solve with this is measuring productivity. Our solution: don't.

As a team we still help each other to know what the important work is.

Damian, I agree with most of your philosophy, except "you can't get fired for lack of productivity or being stupid or foolish" (and that you don't need good managers or sales persons).
:
The thing is that people change and the person you hire may not be the same person after a while.
In other cases the person you hire may not be the person you thought you hired (Hustlers are the most convincing persons in the world..)

I agree that one should not fire people without very good reasons and there should be clear rules the firing process.

In MySQL AB we had from the start the philosophy that we don't fire anyone without a very good reason. Whenever there was a problem, we tried to reallocate the person to do something else and in the worst case we put them on probation and monitored more actively what they where doing. If they where not productive again after 3 months, then we did fire them.

I know of at least one case where the person we hired never produced anything worthwhile (and probably did not ever intend to produce anything). There was another cases where one person encountered a personal tragedy and started to game the system to make it look like he worked but in reality never did anything. We did not have any other option than firing him when we found out. However, according to your rules, he would not have had to game the system but could just openly be unproductive which would not be good for the morale of the other employees.

I totally agree that you need to respect people and give them a fair chance to come over times of unproductivity. At the same time you need, for the sake of all other employees, be able to fire people that are not ever going to produce anything worthwhile and will never be worth the salary you are paying them.

Another interesting topic is what is the definition of "an open company"? I have suggested a definition for this on my latest blog.

Good luck with your company!