Should Startups Be a Family?

Welcome back to their episode of the Startup Therapy Podcast. This is Ryan Rutan joint, as always by my friend, the founder, and CEO of startups.com.

Will, Schroeder will, speaking of friends, speaking of friends as as founders, often, uh, I think we, we have this feeling that like, you know, we, we wanna call our startup a family and hug fest. Culture can feel great, uh, right, until you have to fire cousin Eddie. But like, well, like maybe early on, especially we, we wanna be everybody's friend.

But I think one of the things we wanna dig into today is like, does everybody actually wanna be our friend, right, as the founder, does everyone want to reciprocate that relationship? Where are the boundaries? Where, where do we need to draw these lines between like, let's say healthy empathy and the potential for a liability hangover? Yeah, it's a great way to put it. It didn't occur to me for a long time that people wouldn't want to be my friend. Like this is me being narcissistic.

I mean, it's just me being more like, just unaware.

So Ryan, early in our careers, we both got started, you know, very early, like, you know, in our early twenties and at the time everyone was just like naturally peer, right? Yeah. So like all of my coworkers at Blue Diesel, my first company, interactive agency, were all my age or older. And by older I mean like I was 22 let's say, and they were 26 or 24. I mean like I remember we had one guy that showed up and he had turned 30 and we gave him endless crap. I'm sure we bought him a cane.

We like it just like it. And it was funny. Is as crazy as it sounds now, right? What's funny is we are fairly serious. Like, like we're like, dude, you're aging out right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. They, they, but on a relative scale, it was significantly older. But I think there's something to that will Yeah. And it'd be interesting to, to talk to some founders who started a bit later in their founder career. Yeah. To see if that same muscle got built.

One of the things that I realized was that because of the age which I started and because of the things I was foregoing by virtue of having started a company, we've talked about this on other podcasts, right. Wasn't going out to parties, didn't join a frat. Yeah. Wasn't dating a lot like all these other things that I was foregoing. Yeah. And late nights working. Right, right. Always on thinking about the business.

So I didn't have room for socialization, friends and other family, so I adopted or wanted to adopt my colleagues. Yep. As my friends and my family based on my own need. Now, a lot of them, all of them. Had a very different level of attachment to the business. It wasn't their business. Right. They were working for me out of my college home. Right, right. Yes. There was a cool Counterstrike server that we had at the end of the day and they all loved that.

But if I turned that off, I wonder how many of them would've left immediately. Right. Point being they didn't have the same need. They could go out at five or six o'clock when, when work was done for them and have a normal life and have other friends and have family relationships. I didn't, and so I think part of what set that pattern of my startup is my family. Was, I didn't have an alternative. Yeah, I get it. And you know what? It didn't occur to me that anything could go wrong in my mind.

Like what could possibly go wrong. And now having done this for over three decades and across nine companies across lots of different staffs, yeah, I'm well aware what can go wrong Now? A lot of stuff can go wrong. And what's crazy is it goes wrong with what I would call across the board wonderfully good intentions. Wonderfully good intentions, right? A hundred percent. Like not, oh, like, you know, we're, we're, we're trying to make people our friends or whatever.

It was like, I genuinely care about you. I care about your welfare. I wanna see you do well. Right? Like, everything you would actually want out of a friend, and these are the people you spend your waking hours with. Like, most of my, all, all of my day that I spent with other people. Was spent with those other people.

When I hear startups say, we're a family here, you know, together. And all I think to myself is, that's gonna end so poorly. Yeah. Oh my God. I've got a great anecdote for this one. Yeah. Yeah. At some point I made a post along these lines, which is the like, and, and I, I used, somebody else probably dropped this before I did, but I had been using the, the, the metaphor of, or the, the analogy of like, it's more like a professional sports team than, than than a family. Right.

And somebody came in and started. Heavy trolling, this LinkedIn post heavy trolling, this LinkedIn post. And so I was like, I'm just gonna go over and see who this is. Some management consultant guy. Right? I don't remember who he was at this point. Some management consultant guy. I looked through a couple of his, a, a couple of his posts and I, I get to like the third or fourth one. You can't make this shit up. I get to the third or fourth post. And what does it say?

There's only one thing worse than working. There's, there's one mistake you can make worse than working with friends. And I was like. Okay, go on. That was the hook, the punchline. Working with family. This is the guy who was telling me I was wrong for saying that a company shouldn't be like a family is literally saying the only thing worse you can do is work with actual family. It's like, okay, so you don't wanna work with actual family? Well, he wasn't wrong about that part though.

Turn your employees into family. Like, yeah, come on. I, I think there's a ton of genuine danger here. And again, I think as founders, all of us, we go into this idea that I want to be friends with everybody. I want this to be a family. I want this to be tight. I want all these things. And I, and I genuinely believe that has great intention. What I also believe and certainly have seen is that that also has the ability in more cases than not to backfire so badly. Big time, man. Big time.

If your org chart could easily replace your Thanksgiving, uh, seating plan, good luck to you. When it comes time to trim headcount, when people have to be replaced, when, when people need to be reprimanded, when whatever ends up happening, man, if it truly does feel like that level of family. It puts up all kinds of blockers and false expectations on both sides. There's so many things that, that we talk about in this podcast that we say only work in good times.

Ryan, if you can think this far back, one of the first episodes we did was about whether the founders should be transparent. Like be transparent about everything in the organization. Yep. And I remember I said back then, I said, that only works when things are going well. Yep. When things are going crazy. Transparency sounds awesome. Right. You know, here's how much money we're making, how fast we're doing over, around. Yeah. We off to be acquired. Oh, high fives Be transparent. Tell me more.

Yep. Let's money build in public money for payroll. Shut up. Turns around really quick. Yeah, this is, stop talking. This falls in the category of when it's good, it's great, and when it's not, it's terrible. Let's unpack this a little bit. You know, let's kind of break down like where it, where it falls off, you know, goes off the rails, why, and kind of what we should do about it. Right? Kind of how we should approach it. Yeah. 'cause I think the, I think the startup family myth is like.

It's super seductive, right? It's, it sounds great. It does sound great. And, and I think it's one of those things where we might even enter into it with slightly different thoughts and then I think as you realize, what, how is you always put it running naked into the abyss. Yeah. And you're running naked into the abyss. You're like, it'd be nice to have some friends and family around to, to help me out through this.

Right. And so then I think even if you started off with the intention of like, no, no, I'm gonna run this very professionally. All of a sudden those lines get really blurred because mm-hmm. You have an emotional or psychological need for that. Let's talk about how the, where that comes from.

Okay. And, and you've talked about it in a number of ways, but I, I think the startup experience breeds it. Okay. So the first thing you deal with the. Is, uh, shared risk, shared terror, right? So it's like, Hey, we're all in this together. We're all putting our hearts in. We've all risked significantly to be here. So we have that commonality. Yes, it's soldiers in a foxhole. We're all fighting the same battle together at the same time.

Yep. Which breeds incredible, uh, trust bonds, communication, et cetera. And all those are wonderful. All those are wonderful. However. Where it starts to break is often that bond that has to do with being in a foxhole together gets mistaken for a different level of friendship, or, yes, the concept of friendship gets mistaken for work. Right? Right. And so you and that person are fighting side, side by side, and it feels like, oh my God, we're so tight, we're so close.

This is, you know, my brother, my sister, you know the family. Right? And then things go sideways and you're like, huh. All of a sudden that metaphor of family doesn't hold up at all. It doesn't. And I think the challenge there is that we misinterpret shared context as shared perspective, right? Yeah. Or friendship. You can go through the same context and have very different perspectives on.

I think that we start to superimpose our perspective on the folks around us sometimes, and that can be really tough. But again, where does that come from? It comes from the fact that we, we've talked about this podcast probably 20 other times in different ways, but. When we need somebody to talk to, who else are you gonna talk to? Your friends and family do not, this person has perfect context. They don't have any understanding of what you're going through.

So at least with the team, there's the shared context. They see, they understand some of the struggles, maybe at the same level you do. Mm-hmm. But they have more shared context than anyone else does. But that does not mean they have the same shared perspective. Right? Right. You're looking at it down from the top. They are not, they're some version of looking up to you or at you, and that's gonna be very, very different for them. There's also not a lot of relationships or situations.

I think this is important for the, for the construct of, of friendship. There are not a lot of, a lot of other situations where you become friends with someone where there could be a very specific. Externality that forces you apart, right? Ergo we lose a funding round, right? Her name was April, but yeah, it was April. Screw her.

No, but like, one of the interesting things about a startup and, and we did, uh, again, one of our first episodes, we did an episode around what we call, uh, startup shedding its skin, that as a startup grows and evolves, the people within the startup, sometimes the founders inclusive, don't always grow at the same rate. Right. And so when you're first starting, and the guy who came in as the CFO was the only person that took an accounting course in college. Right? Right.

So that, that was his credentials. Yep. As the thing grows. And you need real finance from a real CFO, that guy's out of a job all of a sudden. Yeah. And you feel shitty because you're like, oh man, he was in it from the beginning. He worked so hard. You know, thi this is somebody I care so much about. And it's like, yes, but the circumstance yes. Has driven a wedge. The circumstance has kind of pried that apart. And the problem in startups is that circumstance is almost a given. Right. Right.

That stuff's gonna happen at some point. Yeah. We've talked to this before. People grow at different rates. Startups grow at different rates, but like when the, the startup outgrows one or more of the members, but not the others necessarily. Right. If, if the CEO and the COO and the CMO have all moved along and, and the CFO is somehow lagging behind. That gets really tough, right? It gets really, really hard.

One of the first times I started a company and my co-founder was a good friend of mine, when the company started to do poorly, like we did a fairly good job, I think, of like maintaining our friendship. But in the end, if I look back, this is like 20 years ago, but like when I look back, it did end our, our friendship. Like we still talk to this day, but we're not friends the way we used to be and kind of what brought us there. And I think about it a lot. I think about like.

What could we have done differently? Okay. Right. And the answer is not much. Because essentially, again, this externality of the startup drove a wedge in our friendship that had a real cost to each of us. He was a great guy. He did nothing wrong, right? Like, you know, uh, and nor did I, like, not neither of us did anything wrong. It just didn't work out. But at the time, it created enough of a wedge, enough like hardship between us that it kind of busted our friendship.

And that's at a co-founder level. Like somebody that you're kind of supposed to be tethered to. If we take it back a step when we, you know, start looking at all the employees in the company, that's even more significant because with that, where we've got all these employees, they come and go. Yeah. I mean, they're like, Hey dude, I got a better job. Peace out. Right? Yep. And you're like, oh, I thought we were friends. And it doesn't occur to you that you are friends and this is a job.

Yeah. This is a job. And that's another job. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because we can, we can clearly separate that, right? Like if your friend works for pwc. Yeah. And then he, he moves over and decides to work for. Someone else, like you don't stop your friendship with that person because they no longer work for pwc. Like who cares? Right. Right. Because that's not what your friendship was predicated on.

When your friendship is predicated on the fact that there was the employment and that somehow it co-mingled and that becomes a, a much more difficult thing to navigate. Said differently. The idea of building a friendship solely based on a. Startup, whatever it lives by it and dies by it. Like it works as well as the company now. Now there's another way I've seen that relationship strain, which wasn't, hey, we ran of money.

The other way I've seen it strain is, like we said a moment ago, where the startup just keeps growing, right? And that person simply doesn't grow with it. When we were growing the agency, we grew so fast and a lot of the people that were there from the start felt entitled. And usually that's a negative word. It's the one time where I'm not gonna use it. Uh, negatively felt entitled. Like I thought this was like how we grow. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Yes, they wanted to work hard. This wasn't a right. Um, I'm not gonna work hard and I deserve it anyway. This was a, I literally thought this was how I advance. Right. Like by this thing growing, I helped make it grow. It's bigger. Why aren't I still at the top of that org chart, Uhhuh? And it wasn't their fault. Just we got to a point where the person that needed that role needed to have significantly more experience. Different experience. Yeah. Yeah. And it happens. And so those relationships.

Got beat up because they looked at it as like, Hey, you passed over me. You know, et cetera. And it's like, damn. That's in my mind, the best case scenario, best case scenario. We're growing like crazy and there's more opportunity. It never occurred to me. That you wouldn't get it. So that could strain as well. Yeah. Again, I think it goes back to that like you're, you're using the shared context and assuming that there's shared perspective there. It's hard to do.

To be fair, the founder kind of gets a bit of a, a pass on some of this because they're the founder, they're kind of baked into that role. However, however, they also have all eyes on me. Yeah. So like, if you're head of customer support and you're a little bit over employed, so to speak, right? You know, uh, uh, you're, you're, uh, this job's a little beyond what you should be doing.

You might get some shit if you're the CEO or the founder or whatever, and you're over employed, you don't know what you're doing. A hundred percent of the people in the organization are hyper aware of that. As our investors, as our customers, the media, what have you. It's harder to duck that kind of scrutiny. Sure, sure. Regardless, we're all gonna face it in good times and bad times. There's going to be friction.

There's going to be a driving wedge in the early formative years when we're building the company and everybody's coming together for the first time. Right. It just hasn't happened yet. It's like a married couple that hasn't had a kid yet. They have the kid, they're like, oh my God, it's gonna be so much better. Like, ah, not necessarily. It's gonna be different. Yeah, yeah. Be better. You have actually harder, you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure.

And so I, I think that these are the kind of things that are super hard to spot because in the beginning, none of those consequences exist, right? None of the consequences there. It's all upside. Like absolutely on those early days, it's all upside. Being friends and turning your coworkers into a family, it's all upside. The upside is a bit limited though. Right, because there's a level at which it doesn't continue to propel anything within the company.

It's not like, I don't remember hearing too many stories. I'm sure there's some out there. Somebody will, will reference one formula to prove me wrong, and that's fine. We'll call the exception that proves the rule where, because of the fact that we treated it like a family or because of the fact that we, we were, we were friends that that was what drove it. Now, I'm not gonna say there were never businesses that didn't have this. Show me objective proof that says, because this, right?

And there was something that I wouldn't have otherwise done, but because I considered you a friend, I did this and this led to the success of the company. I can't name a one, right? I can't name a single one. Right? And so again, there's a peak, there's a limit to what the benefit of doing this is, but it feels so good in the beginning that you'll do it. And then there's just a super diminishing return and there's a bunch of really, really. Heavy taxes that can come out this when it goes south.

Right. Well, and again, I'm gonna say those taxes are inevitable. Right? It just in the Yep. In the early days you don't see them Again, I, I'm gonna, I'll put it like marriage, but I think there's a side of this that we should also explore, which is, it's not just that this thing could backfire on us.

Yeah. It's that I don't know that the employees signed up for it either. No, I, I think that's the implications, right? Like, I'm gonna make us all a family. They're like, I have a family. I'm not even that fond of them. I don't want another one. Right? Okay. So, so lemme tell you how I've seen this evolve pretty, pretty consistently, and I think the folks in the audience will probably be, be able to align with this. The first core group of people that we bring in.

The numbers are relevant, but let's say it's the first five or 10 people Yep. Spend an inordinate amount of time together. Right. Yes. At a very specific formative stage of the company where they're all like making the baby together, so to speak. Formative decisions. Seminal work. Yep. Everyone's contributing. Like the funny joke everyone gets, because you can say it in a way that's literally contextual to every single person. Yeah. And everyone has that, that shared perspective, et cetera.

Now, person, I'm just making this up, 50 shows up. Okay. Yeah. And they don't give a shit about any of that. Right, right. They don't care about your inside jokes. They don't care about, like, the fact that you wanna go out for beers. They don't, they don't care about any of that. They took this job, I just did this last week. What's that? I just did this last week. Do you remember?

I referenced an inside joke that I think you, me, and one other person got, and it didn't occur to me until, no one reacted that no one else had that shared context. I had just forgotten how far back that was. How much the organization has changed. You know, something that's really funny about everything we talk about here is that none of it is new. Everything you're dealing with right now has been done a thousand times before you, which means the answer already exists. You may just not know it.

But that's okay. That's kind of what we're here to do. We talk about this stuff on the show, but we actually solve these problems all dayLong@groups.startups.com. So if any of this sounds familiar, stop guessing about what to do, let us just give you the answers to the test and be done with it.

Okay? So Ryan, I've got a great throwback for you. Early in the days of this company, you'll remember who this person is. Of course, I'm not gonna say who they're, but we were a very freewheeling family. Right. Everyone was super tight, if I'm being honest. It was almost all dudes at the time. Right. So had a very kind of frat feel to it.

And we hired a, a, a, a woman outta college, maybe a year or so out of college. Pretty straight laced. Pretty buttoned up. Definitely not aligned with how this company was running it. She was not in the bro adjacent space. She was not in the pro adjacent space at all, and this is my fault. Did not occur to me. That was a problem. And it wasn't a matter of being insensitive, it just, I didn't understand the delta. Right. Because up until that point, we didn't have one. Everyone was on team.

Bro. I know that that has such a horrible, uh, connotation right now. It wasn't. Maybe it was that bad, but I don't know. Uh, point is everyone was so happy to be there, right? It didn't occur to me that someone could show up in this environment. Not enjoy it. Not enjoy it. She showed up in this environment. She did not enjoy it. She did not enjoy it. Right?

Yeah. Now, to her credit, I even said this to her, you know, years later, in her last day, I said, you fundamentally not only changed the cultural course of this company, yes, some for the better, some for the worse, but you also helped me understand it, like, help me understand the delta. So she said to her credit in all of our benefit, right? Yes. She, she sits me down, I can tell, like this is welling up in her.

Okay. And she's like, will, I don't feel like the culture here is as professional as it's supposed to be. And I'm like, high fives right? And she's like, no, not high fives. Fist bumps. Exactly. Chest bump. Right. And, and again, Ryan, you and I are two the most empathetic people I know. Like, and so before you hear this and say, oh my God, those guys are a bunch of douche bags, you'll probably write about that.

But please understand that like we also listen incredibly closely and so she sits down and doesn't mean we're not ignorant sometimes. Yeah, exactly. Look, we all make mistakes.

And so she sits down and she's like, look, we've got rap music playing all day throughout the the office, right? Like. It's fairly appropriate, right? Yeah, exactly right. I I was like to, to take that off the website. Is it making it hard for you to hear the NBA jam machine? Yeah, because we can, we could, we could turn that off. She was like, she was like, people are playing video games in the, uh, middle of the day, which is very distracting.

She said that people talk about their personal lives with no boundaries whatsoever. And at the time I'm like, okay, fun, please. Thanks. Right. But I realized, and again this is, this is to her credit, she made me realize that because we were on board didn't automatically make everyone else on board. Correct. And I was like, damn, that's heavy. Yeah. It's back to that same, it's that shared context. We were all in that same video game. Testosterone driven rap background, music environments.

But the perspectives were, were different, right? At least one or two of them were, and she was, I mean, obviously she wasn't wrong and, and I remember coming home and talking to my, my wife about it, and I'm like, it's killing me because she basically fired a bullet in everything that I enjoy about this company and it's killing me that she's right. And my wife was like, you had to know this was coming. And I said, what kills me is I didn't know it was coming.

Yeah. Also, no. Yeah, no. And, and, and again, not because I, and we changed, we modified the culture because of that. We got a snowboarding game in the basement instead. It was way different.

What I think is really interesting about this is when we build this family culture, when we had to decide we wanna be friends with everybody, we easily overlook that because it's good for us and we signed the contract. We're not allowed to just sign everybody else up too and be like, it's your fault if you don't like it. It's exactly it. I, I think that, you know, we, we do understand consent in a lot of ways, but I think that consent also applies to culture.

Right. And I think that we, we just have to be very careful about presupposing, that everybody wants emotional VIP access. Right. Right. And it's their right to not have it. It took me a long time not to understand why it's not their right, the right part. I understood right away it was that they wouldn't want it. Because I did, right? Like I wanted to share how things were going in my life with everybody.

I wanted to hear about how things were going with everybody else and, and I think this is a very big part of like, probably what makes us very active advisors, Ryan and parents, et cetera, is that we wanna help when someone says, man, I had a really tough situation, like personally our first thought, and this is literally what we do here. Is to help. My wife gets on me all the time. It's hard to be

empathetic without information, right? And so we seek that information. I like, my wife gets on me all the time. She's like, well, you don't realize people have boundaries that you don't have. And even when you're well intentioned, when you're trying to help, you're still crossing a line that someone else may have. Right. Yeah. Like we'll be at dinner with a couple. We don't know that.

Well, and I'll, I'll hear one people on the other side of the table, like complain about something and so I'll just start asking 'em questions about it. I think you're aware of this, most people don't ask like meaningful probing questions, kind of like a psychiatrist would. Right. That was the only questions I have. Right. Yeah. I've been capable of small talker. I don't care what the weather was like that day. Yeah. Like tell me about your relationship with your, with your dad. Why you crying?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. And Sarah's like, look, they didn't sign up for that. Like, that's just because that's your default. It's not their default. It makes certain people very uncomfortable. I know you, you mean. Well, but that's, it is still not okay. Yeah. I blew my mind full. I get it now. It, it's not even just the questioning, right? It's not even just the questioning, because like, I think even just oversharing can become invasive.

You may be exposing 'em to things that they don't wanna know, but I think the, the, the larger symptom that I've seen when, when I've become guilty of this is that. People feel like they have to reciprocate a hundred percent. Yeah. Right. They feel like, ah, because you're doing this, you're trying to draw this outta of me. And maybe I probably was right.

But again, from a well-intentioned place of wanting to be able to be empathetic and wanting to understand, you know, what your context is, but not everybody signed up for that, like you said.

Right. They, they're here, I'm here to do my job. I'm here to like run social media. I didn't ask to join your therapy hour. Right. Either as doctor or patient. Right. It's not, not why I'm here. Um, so I think for me it's like at this point. I still do welcome those interactions, and I don't, I don't shun them. I don't push them away. I don't, I don't deny them.

But I think the, the thing I'm trying to do at this point is to default to professional distance and let the team invite deeper, more personal rapport. Yeah. And I, I gotta say, I hate it. I hate it. Yeah. Um, I'm doing well, itm exactly what you're doing and I hate it. It's because we're impatient. You wanna know it's, it's because I literally wanna be helpful.

When I see somebody and it looks like they're struggling in some way, my first instinct, even to strangers, I don't even know who they are. Right. My first instinct is to try to be helpful. Uh, again, I'm the person that when I see you, like you're got a flat tire on the side of the road, I will pull over to help you. Yes. Right? Like that's my first instinct. It doesn't occur to me that you wouldn't want my help. Right? And again, that that can be annoying in its own right.

But now if we institutionalize that, if we make it so that like, Hey, you joined this company, and I guess we're all gonna share how our weekends went. Yes. And you're at lunch or you know, in a conference room or something and you're like, I don't wanna tell you guys what I did this week. I know your goddamn business. Right. The emperor's new clothes come to mind.

Like, it's one thing when the emperor's walking around with his new clothes on and everybody has to suffer through seeing the the emperor nude. It's a very different thing when the Emperor asks everyone else to don those clothes too, or they feel like they have to, then it becomes a very different situation. And I don't think we do it intentionally or deliberately. No, I, I think it's done by circumstance.

I think, you know, we create this culture where you and I in a meeting start talking about how our weekends went or how things are going with our kids, and then by proxy, everyone else in the meeting assumes that they have to contribute at that level, especially if we're there. Yeah. Their boss, et cetera, and that makes people freakishly un uncomfortable. Yeah. Now some people are like, this is awesome, and they gush and they can't wait to talk about what they were doing that weekend.

Where it becomes a problem is for that employee that I mentioned from years ago that was brave enough to stand up and say, Hey, I'm not okay with this, and, and have us go. Really, and not in a way where she deserved that recognition, uh, and deserved the response. What, what threw me off wasn't that she asked, it's that it didn't occur to me that, that she would, and you know, that that certainly, you know, left a mark in a good way.

I also think that as we get into this, if we look Ryan, if we look at both the side of it, where we're overstepping, abound, you know, like we're sharing too much and the side of it where maybe our employees don't want to, yeah, I think we need to step back and say.

I've gotta tread very carefully on this notion of what these relationships are, or how deep my relationships are gonna be with people, because one, if I invest heavily again, that wedge that's gonna break this thing is right around the corner. Right? Yeah. Just the nature of startups, they're very fickle, right? Shit's gonna go wrong, and, and things can go wrong in a positive way too. People think, oh, you know, we're run outta money.

Things can just scale very quickly and that person doesn't, you know, make sense for the job or just anything. Or there's another version where that person, uh, has nothing to do with what the company's doing. Just like maybe doesn't get along with people anymore, or just like, is maybe just a bad apple. Yep. They're your friend, but nobody else likes them. You know? Nobody else. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And then the other side, like I said, is we're creating a culture that almost demands this level of, uh, inclusiveness of like openness of et cetera. And while those words sound great, they don't always apply, and especially not when, when they become the currency that feels like it buys you into the club. Totally. Right, right. Yes, absolutely. That's where it really goes south, where it's like, well, I have to have something know.

Go home and talk to your partner, like, we're gonna have to adopt a cat or something. So I have something to talk about. Right? Everybody's talking about their kids. It's like, I, we gotta, I gotta have something, I gotta have something to contribute here. It's so funny you should say. That's where it becomes really problematic. I remember having this feeling.

Okay, so yeah. Yeah. When we were growing the agency, it was getting bigger and bigger and we built a board, an actual board, like, and they were all like the operating heads of the different parts of the company. We had about maybe 700 people at the time. I was the youngest person in that room. Buy a lot. Now, when I say buy a lot, I was probably 26 at the time, and the average person there was like 42, but everybody had five kids or so. It seemed. Everybody loved golf.

Everybody had all these things that had nothing to do with me. And I remember then we'd go on client meetings and we'd be with client from Best Buy or BMW or whatever, and that dude would be 42 years old with five kids in a golf membership. And all people would talk about instant camaraderie. Right, right. Was five kids in a golf membership. And I remember thinking like, this sucks. And feeling so on the outside feeling like, like I, I'm not even kidding.

I took golf lessons just so I could know what the hell these guys were talking about. 'cause they were, they thought their golf puns and jokes were so goddamn funny. Turns out they're not. They're actually super stupid and I have no idea why people get so like, worked up about them. You are like, oh, you overshot on that one. Oh my God. Right? And everyone's like belly laughing. I'm like, what the hell is going on here?

Right. But I remember feeling so much on the outside because they had a a, a compact between them that this is what we're gonna share, this is what we're gonna value, and if you contribute, you get high fives and respect. But if you don't. You're ousted, you're just on the outside. Yeah, just, and, and again, I I say this to say, as you know, a middle-aged white man, like, you're, you're, you just assume that I'm always on the inside, right? Like it's just kind of the way the world looks at it.

And Yeah, some we're sometimes on the outside too, and it all, it does feel really shitty. And now you think about like the instantiating that into a culture. However you, you know, build that culture. I'll give you an example. There are certain cultures, I'm gonna use Google in this case. Okay. That was, uh, it is an incredibly liberal culture and they've had wildly big problems with folks in their culture that were not liberal. Right?

Yeah. Uh, if you remember that, that one developer that they had Yeah. Uh, that sued Google and I think won for like a hundred million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. It was a, they basically saying like, I don't identify with your politics, et cetera, and I got fired for it. And I thought to myself, it's a problem because it lacks a certain amount of self-awareness on Sure. Within Google as the culture they had created, well-intentioned as it were, that it was actually becoming a problem for itself.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Anything taken to an extreme tends, tends to do that. But I think it's interesting, right? Like I think this is where like. We have to be careful where Founder Ego enters the mix here and can absolutely stomp all over organizational clarity, right? Like where we, we start to believe something fundamentally and we wanna make that true. Does everybody else want to? Right?

Going back to that whole, the, the, you know, culture needs to have some implicit consent to it. And I think, you know, kind of back to your point around like, I just want to fit in here. I want to be part of this. Wanting to be liked should not be equal to being effective. And of course that's not what we're trying to create. But I think that's the message that can get sent too, right?

Which is if you conform to some of these things, if you start to fit in, if you start to reciprocate in these ways, then you'll be liked, and that seems to be held in higher esteem. Than being effective. Right. Imagine the message that sends to people. Yeah. It's, it's dangerous. I, I think, you know, kind of what this maps back to is that we need to, to lead and we need to organize within ourselves around respect. Not friendships. Right. And, and there's nothing wrong with friendships.

Friendships are wonderful, but I think we need a different construct. And, and I think someone like Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. Yeah. He leaned into this heavily at a time when it was not popular to do this. And he actually had this like hard coded into their, their company manual or, or cultural code or or whatever you call it. And he was very public about it.

He said specifically, and again, I believe this is in their company documents, we are not a family. At a time when that was like just heretical to say, right, sure. Like how dare you. Right. And here's what he said. 'cause he is just a smart guy. He said, look, a family is a family that is based on unconditional love. Right? Yeah. If Uncle Eddie is a jerk, or he is the coolest guy in the world, he's still in the family. Right. This is not that.

He said we are more like a professional sports team. Yeah. He said we share a common goal, we share a common good. We may even share common values, but ultimately if we don't all contribute and perform, uh, equally or as well, we get benched or removed from the team. And I thought that was. A much better metaphor. Holy cow. That would've been useful information 30 years ago. A little bit too late. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Would've been a little easier.

I mean, yeah, when you think about it, like it's yes, you know there there are aspects of a startup team that could start to look like a family. Sure. Right. But I think the analogy is much better if we look at this as a professional sports team, because like at some point. If you stop performing, we have to stop putting you in. Correct. Right. It's just numeric. Also reverse it.

'cause here's the part that we always forget, like what happens if you, if you, if you put the shoe on the other foot, what if we stop paying? Do you keep playing? Because we're family. Right. Not for long. Right. Right. And so I think that that's, again, it, it sounds great and good times when there's any strife, any challenge, then I think the, the family metaphor breaks down.

But I think the question and the question that they were trying to answer, I think this is the, this is a great answer to this question is like, how do you keep empathy? Without eroding authority. And that's really hard to do in a family context, right? The more empathetic I am, the less authority I tend to have with my kids. Let, let, let me give you another vector there. Uh, tell me what you think about this.

I think part of what he was addressing too is that the concept of family comes with a fundamental entitlement. Yes. If I perform or don't perform, I'm still family. Doesn't matter, we're still a family. Right, right. We may not like each other anymore. We might even speak. We're still a family and, and I think that's a dangerous construct in terms of a, of a company because again, that entitlement always ends poorly, always ends.

I've never seen an entitlement where I'm like, man, that that worked out so well. That worked out so well. Well, in this case. Essentially what you're doing is masking consequences. You're pretending that there aren't consequences there. Sure. As shit are right. You could have hired your absolute best friends. Right? And I don't care. It wouldn't have matter what they do. At some point. Like if no one is performing and there's no money, no one gets paid.

There isn't some magic bucket of money that we, that we pay people out of it. It's like, okay, this, this does have real consequences. And so I think it's dangerous for us as the founder to pretend there's no consequences, but I think we never really can truly avoid the consequences. But for the rest of the team, they also have to be very clear that, yeah, there are real consequences here. And if we pretend we're a family.

Where consequences don't exist to that same level, we're doing everybody a huge disservice build on that. So there's another side of it where if the founder believes that this is family, they build an entitlement to say yes. How dare you leave? Right. We are so tight. No, dude. I'm gonna leave the moment. Some other opportunity is a better, uh, dare. How dare do you expect to raise?

Yeah. Right. I'm like, I'm gonna leave as soon as there's another opportunity that's, that's a better, uh, opportunity for my family, my actual family, the people that I have to provide for. I'm gonna go somewhere else, not because, you know, I think you're the worst person ever, but because you know, I have better opportunity to do something to grow, to get paid, whatever, somewhere else.

So if this whole time you founder person thought that I was going to stay out of some entitlement you had over me about this, this false construct. Then shame on you again. I've seen a lot of that where I hear the founders either their butt hurt because someone left and they're like, I thought we were so close. I was like, yeah, you created a construct, a force field, essentially for this person that they never asked for. Whenever anybody's ever left our organization.

Certainly anything I I've ever done, I've never once felt. They deserve to stay because of some false entitlement that I've had. Yeah, I have said on certain cases, like you worked here for a year, did absolutely no work, and took all my money, right? And pissed about that.

So look, I think when it's all said and done, like we have to be human, we have to be kind, we have to be empathetic. But we have to remember that we are running a team, right? We're not hosting a family reunion. We should shoot for respect, sprinkle in some empathy, and leave the group hug for later. Overthinking your startup because you're going it alone. You don't have to, and honestly, you shouldn't because instead, you can learn directly from peers who've been in your shoes.

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