Interview with Wil Shipley on Drunken Blog
Published July 22nd, 2005 edit replace rm!
Fantastic interview with Wil Shipley the founder of Omni and Delicious Monster over on the always great Drunken Blog
Wil was ousted by his board of directors at Omni Group and has some choice comments about it that fit in nicely with my Bootstrap Anti Patterns series of articles.
On playing it big
Here he talks about how the other directors started doing things the big company way against his own ideas:
I started feeling like actual evidence and experience wasn’t as important to Omni as was what was written in management and software books; so I was branded the crazy guy who wanted to ignore all the sage advice of my elders. Time and again our old policies, which had led to our success, were replaced by more conservative policies recommended by ‘experts’.
My feeling was (and is): You don’t adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you’re small, because those mannerisms aren’t what made the companies successful.
They’re actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it’s become too big. It’s like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, “I want to be rich, too, so I’m going to start walking with a cane and I’m going to act crotchety and I’m going to get liver disease.”
The really important thing to remember is that what worked once won’t necessarily work again, and in fact is less likely to work again because it’s been done.
Brilliant. In particular I love the analogy with the old rich guy.
On Morale
When asked “How do you keep from mentally imploding so you are still looking forward to coming into work every day?”, Wil replies:
Well, the usual… Booze. World of Warcraft. Driving the pimp-de-pimp-pimp-mobile. Shirt shopping.
On building the team
The biggest lesson for me has been to realize how much a company changes when you get more people. No matter what you hire people to do, no matter how much say they are supposed to have, they are going to have a say in how the company works.
On weeding out the team
You earn it, or you’re gone. I’m not saying, if you have a bad month, your ass is grass. I’m saying, if you’re consistently not helping the company, you need to go or you’ll infect everyone else, and it’s just not fair to anyone.
