The startup guy

I found a post on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog the other day particularly interesting. Jeremy hardly ever writes about MySQL these days, much like me, but I still tend to read him out of habit. Perhaps, like the Sims, it’s because the mundane (such as fixing a leak) can still be amazingly interesting.

An applicant for a job called Jeremy (who works for Yahoo) a startup guy. The usual range of comments followed, including those saying that by working at Yahoo, he couldn’t possibly be a startup guy.

Without getting into the semantics, what’s interesting to me is examining the balance between various aspirations. At times, money and job-security may be of higher priority, in which case a corporate job would be ideal, while at others the creative juices may be flowing and the ideal of seeing a creation you’re strongly personally involved in takes over, in which case a startup is the place to be. Like most human divisions, there’s of course no real line with startup guys on the one side and corporates on the other, nor even a real line even defining the two categories. At all times people share elements of both, and these can shift over time too.

It got me thinking as this my last month at IOL, and I leave to I don’t know quite what (a real startup!), so for me the balance has shifted from safety to creativity (probably even the way I word the options gives my bias away). I’ve always been more of the ‘startup’ type, having a wonderful time at Krypto Plus, a startup I worked at from 1997. I met some interesting and dynamic people (one of whom with I now have another project on the go) and was willing to work excessive hours to get, amongst other things, the first online grocery store ready. Code-wise this was entirely my own (some Perl CGI I’d probably be horribly embarassed by now), and in its entirety the product belonged to no more than 5 of us. Moments such as when an all-to-rare client, organising a dinner party, phoned to say that the wrong goods had arrived, sprung us all into action, and affected us all personally. At IOL I don’t react in quite the same way, by springing into a car and delivering a newspaper to an irate subscriber!

But IOL is hardly corporate – it’s a relatively small company, and one of my main reasons for being here so long (5 years!) was the ability to affect things materially. I managed to sway IOL to continue using MySQL as opposed to Informix (and in the process got enough knowledge to knock out a book 🙂 ), moved editorial staff to Linux desktops (and more importantly they were happy to do so) and launched RSS feeds. At times there were frustrations with certain initiatives being blocked, or more often with the available resources meaning that at times my head was in the sand rather than focusing on the bigger picture. I’ve never worked in a real corporate, and never want to. I don’t like staying in my place, and like to be involved in everything that’s going on. I’ve had to rein that tendency in even at IOL, but I’m lucky enough now to have some sources of income that allow me ‘be a startup guy’ without all the risks, and to get as involved as I want in just what I want.

Let’s see what comes of it!