[update: now with all 18 mistakes]
Transparency is all the rage at Jobster. And the company is at an inflection point after laying off a large part of its work force and refocusing its strategy. (I’m sure there will be more to come on the latter.)
Why did Jobster grow so quickly (to 145 employees in under three years) then decide to abruptly scale back? Jason gave an informative presentation to remaining employees describing what mistakes we have made and how to rectify them. I can’t comment on what he discussed, but while in a reflective mood I decided to apply Paul Graham’s “18 Mistakes that Kill a Startup” to Jobster. (And relax. I’m not saying we are dead. I just want to see which mistakes we committed that Graham warned about. )
Some caveats before I get flamed to death:
- Graham is an interesting read, but his essays need to be taken with a grain of salt. This list of deadly mistakes might be completely wrong. Hey, I need to do something before watching the wildcard games.
- I have a limited perspective. I am a developer who spends most of his time in a cave typing and scribbling on a white board. I don’t know all that goes on behind the butcher-papered windows of the board room or on the booze-fueled sales and marketing meetings.
Anyway, on to the startup mistakes.
1. Single Founder
Jobster is Jason’s baby, but the company was started by him, Phil Bogle, Marty Unger and Neil Crist with funding by Ignition. (I’m probably offending someone by leaving them out. ) Not a mistake.
2. Bad Location
Seattle is a good startup location. It doesn’t have the reputation of Silicon Valley, but is still a top startup region.
3. Marginal Niche
I don’t think this was a problem. We started by automating the process of hiring via referrals and quickly expanded our scope (maybe too broadly) to matching the right jobseeker with the right job. Our initial focus didn’t have much competition, but there was definitely ample demand for such a product. Execution is a different matter.
4. Derivative Idea
Again, not many companies were applying technology to automate referrals three years ago. A challenge for us now is to differentiate ourselves from the big boys (Monster, Careerbuilder, etc.) while still capturing a large segment of the market.
5. Obstinacy
We definitely have not been afraid of changing course. Our purchase of WorkZoo, thereby moving into the vertical job search and consumer side of recruiting, was a major shift. Other adjustments like creating the consumer-centric social networking site at jobster.com and adding tools to aid employer sourcing are major moves away from the initial focus. So, obstinacy hasn’t been a problem. Rather, the opposite problem of expanding scope and blurring our focus is arguably a bigger problem.
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
I don’t claim to not be biased. I think we have a very solid dev team. If nothing else, we are good at ping pong.
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
Writing the employer tool on J2EE (Spring + Oracle + Hibernate) was the right choice at the time. If Ruby on Rails was more mature at the time it would have been an interesting alternative, but it wasn’t. Our newer most recent projects tend to be written in Rails which we have been very happy with. Time will tell with these.
8. Slowness in Launching
I am most proud of our product team’s track record of shipping quickly and (mostly) on time. Definitely not a problem.
9. Launching Too Early
We have errored by having sales and marketing ahead of the product. “Feature X is available now! Oh, Scott, when will X be done?” And we have errored with feature creep before understanding our customers and our focus.
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
Guilty. There are many possibly Jobster users: line recruiters, sourcers, recruiter managers, hiring managers, passive job candidates, active job candidates, etc. We have errored in trying to be all things to all people. We are fixing this.
11. Raising Too Little Money
Um, no.
12. Spending Too Much
Well, we just laid off 60+ employees. As Graham notes, “Hiring a lot of people … bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows you down—so money that’s getting consumed faster has to last longer.”
13. Raising Too Much Money
I don’t know enough about venture capital or the business side of Jobster to answer this, but it is likely that the large investments spurred us to hire and expand too fast.
14. Poor Investor Management
I don’t know.
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
We have always tried to make the best product for our users. The execution needs improvement, but we haven’t thrown our users under the bus for a quick buck.
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
Jobster has always been actively engaged (maybe too much) with our users, but our developers need to better understand our customers and their needs. And before we get there, we need to do a better job of defining exactly who is our targeted customer.
17. Fights Between Founders
I don’t know. We have had significant churn at the top ranks, but I’ll wait until I read their memoirs before ruling on this one.
18. A Half-Hearted Effort
We have made mistakes at Jobster, but I don’t think doing things half way is one of them. As mentioned above, we have probably tried to do too much at the expense of focus. Jason instilled a sense of passion into our culture from the beginning, something that still remains. I hope we keep it beyond the difficult layoffs we just endured.
That was fun. I could be way off, but it was an enjoyable exercise.
What do others think? Which of these mistakes has Jobster made?
