As with everything else, it’s not that simple…

In the successful startups I’ve worked at, a core of people staying late, working long hours, was a symptom of having an idea that people can believe in.

I have not seen any very successful startups where the developers weren’t at least a little monomaniacal about their work.

On the contrary, I’ve been at two successful startups (defined here as wildly successful IPO’s) where having those fanatic developers was a core reason of why they were successful.

The people who were putting in overwhelming hours at those companies weren’t doing it because they’re workaholics. They were doing it because they were true believers. Both in the company itself and the product they were building.

It’s not about the workaholics making the company successful, it’s about the company being one that the employees can believe in, to the point of _wanting_ to be there, wanting to be making it better.

In those cases, you don’t fire the people who are passionate about building your company. You support them, and accept that they’re going to crash occasionally, and try to nerf the crash some…

In my experience, it’s the fervent employees who are the core of successful startups. This was true at McAfee Associates (went public in 1992), and PayPal (went public in 2002), both successful startups that I was part of.

You also need people who aren’t as fervent, who can see a wider view, so it’s always a balance. So you can’t really ‘fire’ either of them, out of hand.

I’ve been that true believer, focusing everything into a job or project that I deeply care about. I’m a much calmer, more balanced person now, though. We’ll see what happens in 2012…

– Morgan

I have an important personal announcement!

My wife and I have a baby on the way; he is due in early May!

(The linked post also includes details on what I’m working on for JBidwatcher2.)

As I say in the post, we’re incredibly excited, and a bit scared. It’s going to be an amazing journey.

I’ll post more about it later, but it’s…well, it’s been incredible and wonderful, and terrifying and astonishing.

I’m not entirely sure I’ll know how to be a good father, having lacked that particular role model in my own life, but I’m sure going to try.

The joy and thankfulness of a new year is upon me, and the vast majority of it surrounds my wonderful wife and our growing baby-to-be.

Happy New Year to all, and best wishes for a great 2008!

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Programming should be fun, it’s what gets us programmers into it in the first place, and it’s what keeps us going at it.

Too many layers have been heaped on programming these days; most IDEs are oppressive, process-oriented beasts.

I, and many other programmers, have been concerned about how the next generation of programmers are going to be introduced to the joy of programming when all the tools out there seem to suck the fun out of it.

Enter why the lucky stiff, and Hackety Hack!. Taking one back to the days when programming was as easy as typing something in, and hitting enter.

Hackety Hack! is about learning to program, and being able to do really cool things in a very few short lines.

I’ve been a fan of _why for a while, with a really wild approach to teaching Ruby, and a lot of really interesting code, and this is even cooler.

If you’re new to programming, or have kids, or just want to play with one of the simplest ways to write programs, get Hackety Hack!

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

This is a hard thing to explain if you haven’t been there. I’ve been there twice, once with McAfee Associates, in full-bore, turbo-charged engineer mode, fighting against the world-wide virus writing epidemic in the very early days of McAfee Associates (from 7 people to more than 120 people). Fewer people would recognize that world as would recognize the world of a modern web site developer, so I’ll focus on the second, PayPal.

I remember working at PayPal during their heyday just before and just after going public, when we were fighting the ‘good fight’ against eBay, and I’d work all hours of the day and night not because I had to, but because it was deeply, personally important to me that we win, and because the work was so deeply enthralling that I lost track of time entirely. That everything be right, and that we be first to market with features, that our code be spectacular, that we be innovative and brilliant and FAST was our world. And until we were bought by eBay finally (demonstrating, imo, that we had the better service), no matter the hour, I never was alone at the office.

When you’re part of a brilliant team, trying to honest to god change the world, it’s not about deadlines. It’s about a form of love. It can be thoroughly, caustically destructive to everything else in your life, but it’s an experience I would be a lesser person if I had missed.

If you’re clocking hours at work, and the passion of what you’re doing isn’t keeping you rooted to your chair at all hours, loving the pure joy of creating, fighting the good fight, and trying to change the world, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good job. It’s just not THAT experience.

I promise, there’s far more call for people who work regular hours, meeting normal deadlines, doing solid, good work, than for those of us who burn so very, very brightly, but for so short a time.

If you’re really in passionate love with the work you’re doing, it’s not about working to 3am to meet a deadline. It’s about finally reaching a temporary point of closure for the days work, and raising up your head to suddenly discover it’s 3am.

And if you really, truly believe in your company, and you believe in your project, and have a fire to ‘win’ in some way (usually against a more powerful competitor) it’s not about accepting an imposed deadline that makes you work hard. It’s about DEMANDING a deadline that makes you work hard, but that you know you can meet. Because you know it’s important, and that every second counts, and you CARE about the company being not just first, but first with a brilliant, innovative, wonderful experience.

After it’s all over, it’s draining. It’s exhausting. It’s mind-numbing. You feel…dead, somehow, once the work is over, and you’ve been brilliant for so long, that you feel like your brain cells have used up all their energy. You go home, don’t show up to work for a week, recharge, find out if you still have any RL friends, do something physical (skydiving, rock climbing, hiking, etc.) to get in touch with your body again. You come back to work eventually, and you work with others to clean up any loose ends, and slowly you get back the energy from your co-workers, and the ambience in the office, and eventually you’re back on track to start another feature that’ll knock the socks off your competitors.

If you’re in a company where you are the dominant force, you don’t work like that. You don’t need to, the hunger isn’t there.

PayPal lost that hunger when eBay bought us. There wasn’t anything to fight for, anymore. We’d won, in a way, and lost in a way. I even asked it, when eBay management had a big meeting with everybody to tell us about their vision for us. I don’t remember if it was the meeting Meg Whitman was at, or not, but I asked something like, “We’ve been fighting eBay for all this time, and now we don’t have to. What will replace that, to keep the drive going?” The answer was a mealy-mouthed mess of future strategy and becoming the dominant payment platform. It wasn’t a battle anymore, we’d become the big company.

I left not terribly long after that, for health reasons. (Remember what I said about caustically destructive? ) But also because I didn’t feel the passion in the hallways anymore.

The woman who I will marry in 36 days stood by me through it despite almost never seeing me, my friends teased that they’d forgotten my name, I ended up needing major surgery for a condition I let go too long… But I was part of one of those winning teams, fighting against terrible odds, doing brilliant work, burning so very, very brightly, and changing the world one line of code at a time.

I think Mark understands that, as Google has Microsoft with an unlimited war-chest bearing down on them. From what I’ve read, I don’t think Scoble completely does get it. He gets that passion is important (Channel 9 certainly shows that), but the fight against overwhelming odds that drives it to fevered peaks, that brings it to a different level…that’s what’s missing.

But it’s okay. Even I’m working a day job these days. I still have the intense passion to program on my own projects, doing it until 4am regularly, but I’m in a larger cycle of recharge, get in touch with life, etc., before maybe doing it again if I find the right company. Or maybe not. I’ll be a married man shortly, settling down in theory. Maybe I can’t fight those fights anymore. Maybe I should work at Microsoft. Just kidding…

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!