Editor’s note: Veteran Triangle entrepreneur and author Joe Procopio believes that “startup must be fun in order to be successful.”
DURHAM, N.C. – For the last few years of my startup journey, with wisdom behind me and old age in front of me, I’ve been more of the mind that startup must be fun in order to be successful. So when one of the young(ish) dudes I’m mentoring told me that one of his goals for the next six months was to do 20 minutes of standup at an open mic night, my day immediately got 100x better.
And look, I don’t mean to oversimplify the concept of fun when I talk about startup. I’m not talking about shoehorning beer Fridays or a ping-pong table into the culture at an early stage. In fact, those two examples themselves are played and silly.
Beer Fridays are stupid. There’s no better way to lower productivity and open all sorts of liability windows than plopping a keg into the middle of your workspace at noon on a Friday. Plus, I’ve always been of the mind that drunk is drunk. If I’m going to have a beer, I’d much rather have six than two (be responsible, kids), so I make sure of things like not having to drive and, you know, not having any laptops around.
And there’s a startup I get to walk by sometimes (trying to keep this anonymous) where they have a ping-pong table tucked into the corner of their office, where it’s sat since they’ve been there. I’ve never seen even so much as a sign that anyone has ever played a game — the table halves have always been askew, you know, not completely flush. But I’m assuming said startup thought it was mandatory to make their place a fun place to work.
Startup culture is deeper than that, it should permeate every seam of the fabric of the company.
There’s more to the story – read the full post at:
http://joeprocopio.com/startup,-standup,-and-the-importance-of-being-funny.asp
(C) Joe Procopio
