Startup Wisdom!

It was ten years ago this month that Dan, one of my best friend's from high school, and I were putting the pieces in place to launch Webstakes, an online marketing and technology company which would later become Promotions.com. Between December 1995 and December 2002, we got to experience the entire company life cycle -- from start-up with no revenues to growing to $27 million in revenues with almost 200 employees to going public on Nasdaq and seeing a market cap of more than $500 million to ultimately a successful sale to iVillage, another publicly traded company.

I took away a ton of amazing wisdom from the experience that I'm going to begin posting about but today I wanted to address something timely, given the New York City transit strike.

When we were first launching Webstakes, we couldn't have done it without a physical office. For meetings. For a place to house our servers. For the ability for us to collaborate. For a place to log on to the Internet with broadband connection instead of the dial up we had at home. For a place to hang the white board with the milestones which were critical to launching version 1.0 of Webstakes. For a place to make and receive phone calls. For the ability to say "we have an office."

Today, I'm building my new company, OrganizedWisdom, as a virtual company with a team of extremely talented people each in different locations. I'm proud to say "we don't have an office."

Everyone is working together remotely on getting the first version of OrganizedWisdom ready for launch in early 2006. Our collaboration is done online using a great product called Basecamp where we post documents, manage deadlines and post messages.  If we need meetings in person, we're doing it in "third places" like Starbucks. We have dedicated servers located at godaddy.com. We use Typepad for the corporate Website and this blog. We access the Internet from home with broadband connection using Road Runner. Everyone has cell phones and we have unlimited phone calling with Vonage and are able to receive calls anywhere using Skype.  Instant messaging using AIM.  The cost of this launch will be a mere fraction of the cost that we incurred when we launched Webstakes back in 1995. The convenience factor is equally appealing.

So, why I am writing about this today. Unlike most people who work and/or live in New York, our work day is completely unaffected by the fact there is no subway, bus or transit service (this is not to say that it doesn't matter that there is a strike because it does negatively affect so many people around me). It does, however, underscore how much easier it is for certain businesses to allow people to work remotely so as to not be affected by transit strikes, weather or long commutes.

There was in an interesting article in BusinessWeek two weeks ago about the trend of companies allowing people to work from home called "The Easiest Commute of All". It talks about the increasing percentage of people who are working from home...and how companies are finding that allowing workers the flexibility to work remotely actually contributes to increased productivity. (Sun Microsystems says "its virtual workers are 15% more productive than their office-tethered brethren. Our people working these remote schedules are the happiest employees we have, and they have the lowest attrition rates." More than 50% of their workers are able to work from home.

I believe that the one positive thing about this transit strike is that it will cause more businesses to consider allowing their workers to work remotely from home.  I'm not sure how long we'll be able to build this company with no office at all but I'm a believer that, as the article says, "the future of work belongs to those who will log their hours when they want, how they want, and, most important, where they want. Companies will hire brains, not bodies."

Comments

[peksoadsKep]

The boss returned from lunch in a good mood and called the whole staff
in to listen to a couple of jokes he had picked up. Everybody but one girl
laughed uproariously. "What's the matter?" grumbled the boss. "Haven't you
got a sense of humor?"
"I don't have to laugh," she said. "I'm leaving Friday anyway.

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[queestype]

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