SaaS Blogs

A couple of years ago, I read an article about the origins of Yahoo! The article described the infamous Yahoo! trailer and the scene where Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital first walked in and encountering a mess, complete with drawn shades and pizza boxes strewn across the room. The dwelling seemed fit for dogs, or people who had enough on their plate to worry about silly things such as cleanliness. Although Jerry Yang and Dave Filo popularized this notion of what an entreprenuers den looks like, they definitely are not alone. Many people I’ve talked to either told me “My office is a wreck” or “I know this gal who’s an entrepreneur, and her office is a mess!” At first, one might confuse this with being unorganized, but for a good entrepreneur, quite the contrary is true.

I recently had a friend come to my office, and the first thing he exclaimed was “Holy s***, this place is disgusting, and that’s coming from a messy guy!” I looked around and saw <gasp> …a pizza box! In the struck me; we really are knee deep. I’m normally quite clean, but once I’m in our office, my priorities change. I don’t really care about the junk that is around the room. What I care about is a.) am I on schedule, b.) am I on budget c.) are the tools and data I need organized and d.) do I have food delivery numbers nearby. So next time you walk in to an entrepreneurs office, count how many pizza/chinese food/subwrapper/bottle containers you find, and you’ll be able to gauge with atomic accuracy how busy, enthused, and involved they really are.

FYI: This friend made me help him clean the offfice, so I’m kind of starting from scratch. I’m now behind, making his move the equivalent of sending me directly to jail in Monopoly. Where’s my phone and Domino’s number…