In the mid-2000s I worked for a crappy little startup.
Everyday they would order in the same Chinese food cuz they didn’t want any of the engineers leaving to go out for lunch. While the executive staff would go out to expensive restaurants like Morton’s.
And then at some point they decided to buy like 5,000 fortune cookies for some show, and then they decided to try to encourage the engineers to eat them because they had so many leftover.
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Years later I turned down a job because they had an unlimited candy bar machine in the breakroom, and all I could think to myself is it would be the worst possible job for my health.
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Now to answer your question.
The last startup I worked for it was entirely work from home, and I would just frequently stir fry frozen vegetables and protein and try to limit lunch to 30 minutes.
Unfortunately I’m no longer working because other startup-related health things got me I f***** my hands up too bad during a release and I haven’t been do software development without being in extreme pain. I’m not actually sure I’ll ever recover.
As my coworker would remind me it’s a marathon not a sprint - too late now though.
I absolutely agree on storytelling is a huge deal. I worked directly for the CTO of one of the largest companies in the world and while I don’t respect him has a businessman or technologist his storytelling skills were just amazing, he could enrapture people and convince them of anything it was like he could hypnotize them for 30 minutes. And his enthusiasm within carry that into new business deals and into markets where we really shouldn’t have been in.
I think the hardest part is really trying to figure out what to focus on in the right way and it’s amazing even senior people who I feel should know better totally get lost in the sauce and end up focusing on the wrong things. Even I do it and I know I shouldn’t do it.
I’m convinced it really takes a team to constantly scrutinize investments and early stage startups to make sure that you’re working on the right things and to call each other out when somebody gets focused on the wrong thing. It seems like it’s far too easy for everybody ends up working really hard on the wrong things - things that don’t validate the market, things that don’t improve customer experience, things that don’t ultimately add customer value.
Or maybe I haven’t had the fortunate experience at working at a small startup that has the discipline to constantly be asking “should we be working on this?”
I’m also very jaded because working hard has caused my health to be destroyed, no amount of hard work or money can make up for your health. So if you’re going to work hard it should be on the right things.