An Alternate Approach to Starting Up
Our startup story starts in the tiny valley of Santa Ynez. Certainly not your typical locale for any start-up, not to mention one aiming to nestle deep within the tech bubble. Five long hours from Silicon Valley and surrounded by rolling hills, cowboys, and white-oak trees, our little troupe of young engineers, designers, and businessmen are setting out to create something valuable in an all-too-familiar scenario. Fifteen employees, one house. Long, uncounted hours and endless creative challenges. Hard-stops and self-imposed deadlines.
“Can we buy these? I think we will need these.” our COO gestures to the multi-colored laser guns on the second to last aisle of Costco. Our cart is already creaking from the massive amount of house groceries and thirty-racks of energy drinks. I giggle, and our company’s CFO rolls her eyes and sighs loudly in response. Not a new request, not a new denial. These days it seems that every purchase is necessary to forge an exciting company culture with a cooperatively-styled living situation where we share meals, coffee breaks, and celebrations of embarrassing MVP releases. Money, and how to keep it, is the make-or-break factor of our startup, and in our pre-investment phase we’ve found it a challenge to invent alternative compensation to the properly chunky salaries that the team deserves.
Our solution?
Technology incubator. Living together in the rolling hills of Santa Barbara County as a solution to everyday financial hassles to allow for better concentration, communication, and focus. While not permanent, our business co-op has already proven to be a productive and certainly more stable method of birthing a product. The benefits allow for flexible, result-based work hours, tighter company bonds, and closer communication. Contrarily, while these benefits can be useful, there are certain challenges of living in tangent with our workplace. The “result-based” work hours are oftentimes unforgiving, and the necessary umbilical chord to our technology doesn’t allow for much respite from our screens. It certainly takes a team to succeed, but responsibility of supporting one another can oftentimes be quite stressful. And although we’re not the first company to utilize this method of kick-starting a business, counting ourselves among the pioneers of new startup methodologies in such a field can be a heavily frightening thing.
The everyday crunch of startup life is something that takes some getting used to. Its an invigorating exercise in complete commitment, as the intensity of day-to-day critical challenges affords little time for personal hobbies or head-space. Like any group project you’d undertake in school, we’re only as good as our team, and as new and young professionals knocking on the door of the tech world, we all have a lot to learn from each other and the industry.
-Anela deLaveaga, Creative Director, Bread Inc
