Number One Employee

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Number One Employee

A few years out of undergrad, I was finally getting comfortable with life in the Real World. I had a decent apartment, a good job, and a long commute. I had a budget spreadsheet with lots of black numbers, business cards with my name on them, and student loan payments above the minimum. Every so often, chatting about jobs, life, or esports, someone would joke about taking me away from all that.

…And then I got the e-mail: “Please find attached our official offer of employment.”1

I’ve exaggerated the spontaneity of the thing in pursuit of comedy, of course. At that point, I’d already made up my mind to accept the position. I’d plateaued at my current job, without much hope of meaningful advancement despite a great boss and supportive team. My girlfriend was nearing the end of her graduate program, so a potential long-distance move was in our future. I was tired of driving a hundred miles a day to work fifty hours a week, and I agreed philosophically with what these guys were trying to do. So, I gave my notice, bought a nice big desk for my home office, and started work at Apsis Labs.

Onboarding

Being the first employee at a startup is a funny experience. I flew out to Seattle for about a week in early February of 2015, to get a feel for the day-to-day business of the company, get a development machine set up in person, and work through some small tasks to get acquainted with the code bases and tech stacks. But before we could do any of that, we had to run out and buy an office chair so I’d have someplace to sit. The next day, we mounted a nice, big whiteboard. It was actually a great experience that gave me a lot of confidence in the sort of transparency and efficacy I could expect from Wyatt and Noah as founders.

Twenty Hours

The most common question people ask me about this job is something like: “You only work twenty hours a week? Really??” So let’s talk about that.

First of all: yes, it’s twenty hours/week. The thing to realize about that number is that it implies greater-than-usual respect for the time of everyone involved. The respect for my time is obvious: I get more productive hours each week to devote to my life outside of work. But the twenty-hour flexible week is also a way to respect our clients’ time.

In a typical 8-5 environment,2 employees are expected to be “working” (translation: billing clients) the entire time they’re at the office. The trouble is, software development doesn’t always fit that schedule. Developers are often expected to—and indeed, may want to—drop what they’re doing for five minutes to help a coworker on a different problem. A five-minute interruption carries a much greater cost than the actual length of the disruption,3 and the client ends up paying for the time spent getting back “in the zone” afterwards. Don’t even get me started on meetings scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon!

A flexible twenty-hour work week—and the expectation not to drastically exceed it—frees everyone from that mindset. When there’s a meeting I really do need to be at, I can organize my day in advance to ensure it’s not disruptive. If I get interrupted, I can spend a couple hours working on a side project until I get back in the right mindset. Gone are the days of billing for time spent in context switches. Fewer billable hours allowed each week means I can (should!) be picky, and allocate them whenever I’m most productive. As a result, I get more done in twenty hours most weeks than I did in forty or more in the past. That’s a win for me, and it’s a win for our clients. Where I come from, that’s called a win-win situation.

Culture

What makes this whole endeavor succeed is that we are upfront with each other and with our clients. We all4 want to make the best use of our time, and we want to feel good about our contributions to the world. That means helping our clients make the best use of their time as well, by developing new tools to streamline their business processes or pushing back on excessive meetings. It means asking for guidance right away when someone else on the team has greater expertise in an area, rather than spinning our wheels on our own. It means taking the time to do things the Right Way. It means soliciting feedback on our work, and listening when it’s given.

But that’s a lot of work talk, and what you’re really asking when you ask about company culture is what it looks like the rest of the time. You want to know how the company League of Legends team is doing (Silver); how my side project is coming along (slowly); how Wyatt’s 3-step drop looks (terrible). To get those answers, you’ll just have to ask us.

Footnotes

  1. Becoming a company’s first employee is much more flattering than frightening.

  2. Based on limited first-hand experience and conversations with others in various fields in America.

  3. For me, anyway.

  4. All humans, that is.


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