The Former Facebook CTO Is Building A Brilliant Office Culture That Every Startup Should Follow
Aug 24, 2014, 20:17 IST
Jolie O'Dell/FlickrBret Taylor speaks at a Facebook conferenceBuilding a startup from the ground up is extremely difficult.
As rewarding as it is, startups are usually very demanding and take huge amounts of attention, which often lead to long working hours.
That's why it's really hard for startup employees to find the right work-life balance.
Fortunately, more and more startups are seeing this problem, and are starting to put work-life balance on the front burner.
Quip, the mobile/Web word processing software developer, is one of them.
Its founder Bret Taylor, who served as Facebook's CTO for three years, had this in mind from the beginning, and wants to make sure his employees aren't overwhelmed with work. When asked about it, he told us the following:
"We're really trying to create a company that, if we have the good fortune of being successful, which is not a foregone conclusion, people won't be burned out - which I think is a very common problem in startups.
Both my co-founder and I have kids, and we aren't working a 100 hours a week - although I'm thinking about work 100 hours a week. We're trying to make our culture compatible with having a work-life balance. So we make a point of leaving the office at 5:30PM every day. There's no social pressure to stay later, and we are still very productive here."
Perhaps, this explains why Quip has been able to add over 5,000 new clients, including Facebook and Instagram, in just a year since its launch. It was also featured in Apple's WWDC keynote last June.