Process Refactored

Imagine you’re a hungry young company trying to squeeze into a crowded marketplace. How do you unseat the entrenched competition? You’ll probably start by leveraging the skeleton staff of entrepreneurial generalists that you’re paying with stock options and pizza. You’ll ask them to work late hours and take on the sorts of projects which your competitors wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole: clients they’ve fired, projects they’ve shelved as too ambitious, campaigns that have bounced around between agencies because no one’s willing to tell the client that the idea’s idiotic.

(I’m looking at you, New York-based wireless startup named after a sitcom catchphrase.)

I recently interviewed a candidate who, when presented with the opportunity to pose some questions of his own, asked me how the company made money. This initially seemed like an idiotic question (since it immediately followed “why is the bathroom door locked?”), but in hindsight perhaps there’s a subtlety here that I didn’t appreciate in my rush to get the next candidate in the door.