Food and Books
I grew up terrified of my grandfather because he was a disciplinarian who was always grabbing my shoulders to make me stand up straighter—and he had crazy Pai Mei-brows. He raised my mom and her five siblings in Taiwan, and even though they were poor in those days, they worked hard, came over to the U.S., got graduate degrees, worked at Bell Labs, and are living prosperous and happy lives. With so many kids running around and paltry means to support them, people would ask my grandpa how it was that his kids were tall, always healthy and doing well in school. Grandpa was stingy and strict, but he would tell them that he never skimped on two things—food and books.
The startup world has a funny relationship with frugality. Even after raising a seed round I was taking $2,600 per month (pre-tax), and the only thing that counted for was the occasional fist pound from a fellow founder. I was stupid—I thought that because we glorify the entrepreneur who lives out of her car and eats ramen every day (think Cup Noodles, not Ippudo) investors would respect my personal deprivation. I realized that people only get excited about the struggles of the entrepreneur who eventually goes on to become successful, looking at his previous poverty in retrospect like it was a past life.
What’s worse is that in the running-a-company context, you impute heroic deprival upon your team. It’s embarrassing to admit, but half my team literally walked out on me at one point when I chose to put us up at the cheapest motel in Charlotte on a layover to visit a customer. Two team members found the accomodations so disgusting that they left the motel and checked into a different hotel in the middle of the night, and I woke up to find half the team gone. To me, a filthy motel was a deprivation for us all to endure before making it as a company, to them getting a good night’s sleep was food and books.
My struggle was that if you think of food and books—regarding the problem of optimally allocating scarce resources—as merely descriptive of what drives performance and success, you’ll get confused in the startup context because it’s really unclear in an early-stage company how to allocate capital to drive growth. For example, if I paid a teammate $6,000/mo instead of $3,000/mo, would she do better at her job? I think the answer actually is, probably not or maybe only marginally better.
What I see is that $6,000/mo instead of $3,000/mo pays off in terms of the long term sustainability of staying on the team, the retention of that person and the personal and professional happiness of your teammate, and that turns food and books from a mantra that’s merely descriptive into a moral imperative. To me, food and books means doing right by the people who’ve chosen to join your cause and be in your charge by ensuring their nourishment, their health, the resources to do good work, and the opportunity to grow, and the evidence is in their willingness to think about the future with you and then make it happen.
