Happy Labor Day, startups
On the day set aside as a holiday to celebrate workers’ rights, it is my privilege as a startup founder to spend it working.
Max Weber was the first to identify a linear progression in the evolution of management. He termed the three main categories of managed structures despotic, charismatic, and bureaucratic and, in doing so, codified what was very newly arrived in his early 1900s Germany: a nature of work in which people could replace each other like cogs in a machine.
Despotic was common in the earliest governments where the capacity to cause fear and take power equaled leadership. Despotic was the Game of Thrones era of management. Charismatic is best seen in churches, in which people choose to follow a leader because the inspiration and vision that their leader provides them. Bureaucratic is the modern machine: the assembly line or the Amazon warehouse in which everyone has a small job that, in tandem with all their coworkers, results in a larger product. The American government was the bureaucratic iteration of national management with its term limits for leaders and checks and balances of power. In retrospect, governments and companies guided and run by replaceable parts seems like progress, but Weber thought it was terrible. Dehumanizing.
In old times, a worker like the horse shoe farrier could never take time off because the small economy that needed him did not offer any other option for his services when he was away. Day and night without ceasing, despotic and charismatic professions meant that people worked all the time. Without the constant availability of workers, pre-industrial economies would not function. With industry, this changed. Workers becoming replaceable gave rise to the weekend, the holiday, the time limited work week. If the machine (factory, office, etc) functions by interlocking cogs, all you need is more than one cog to be able to give each other a rest. Seeing that a) cogs are critical to the running of the machine, and b) the business would not grind to a halt if every single cog weren’t present at the same time, workers united and formed labor unions to stand for improved treatment of their cog-selves and, when they won that hard fought battle, the notion of the day off was born.
Sometimes, I think of startups as a fourth type of management that has evolved past bureaucratic. Startups manage for efficiency above all else. It is a new beast that sacrifices long-term potential security for short-term growth. Paul Graham says the most important feature of a startup is that it is structured for fast paced iterations that result in exponential, rather than linear growth curves. Startups are best defined then by the measurement curves known as hockey sticks.
On the other hand, startups might be the culmination of all other types of management put together. Despotic leaders demand high output, and they only gain the acceptance of the hard working conditions from their teams if they are charismatic in sharing the vision of what they can produce. And yet, they have to be rigidly disciplined to not create new tools like code or approaches to UI/UX — using everything already created as a cog to make something that is a new iteration of the world as we know it.
What startups do not typically offer is the day off. Founding teams work around the clock. Even when they are not working at their desks, they are thinking about work with some part of their brain. The best metaphor for startups is the rock band. In our own team, there are three of us founding partners. Even if it appears there is a frontman akin to the lead singer, it obscures who is providing the most leadership at any moment. In truth, we all take turns taking the lead in projects and the outcome, like a great rock anthem, depends on us all giving our hearts to everything we do in creating our work. It is very charismatic, and yet it can only scale if we also introduce cogs as clones to ourselves. We are a rock band that wants to become an orchestra. A very good, very dedicated, world changing orchestra.
Even in France, with the strictest labor rules in the world, startups are exempt from the limits to hours people can work per week. These laws recognize that startups are a new form of labor and management that need different rules. It is my honor, my pleasure to spend this Labor Day working for my startup. It is my privilege to find myself in this newest form of management where every day is a new creation, a new rock anthem that might be the one that changes the world.
I wonder what Max would think.
