The importance of morale in a startup | #DailyBlink64
Morale is tremendously important to a startup — so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you’re going to take over the world, and the next you’re doomed. The problem with feeling you’re doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you’re going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you’re going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you’ll fail.
Here’s where benevolence comes in. If you feel you’re really helping people, you’ll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you’ve basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You’ve made something you need to take care of.
Blogger is a famous example of a startup that went through really low lows and survived. At one point they ran out of money and everyone left. Evan Williams came in to work the next day, and there was no one but him. What kept him going? Partly that users needed him. He was hosting thousands of people’s blogs. He couldn’t just let the site die.
— Paul Graham (Excerpt from the essay “Be Good”)
