Janitor in Chief
Earlier this week we hosted our monthly Gramercy Labs speaker event, and Jason Finger, Founder of SeamlessWeb was our speaker. We saw a record turn out with ~130 people show up, and despite Jason talking for 100 minutes straight, the crowd was mesmerized by Jason's story and his humility. Its a great tale, and if you have the chance to hear him talk about the perils of "3 concurrent users", you should seek it out.
One thing that Jason said that struck a chord for many of us at the Gramercy Labs Collective was his mandate that to be a successful leader you had to lead by example. Jason's example was that a decent founder should pick up a stray piece of trash in the office if they were to walk past it.
I remember reading a post on a similar vein, this one by Joel Spolsky, where he says that:
"In our company, management's job is to get things out of the way so that all the great people we've hired can get work done" and "Getting glare off the computer monitors so that people can write code actually is my highest priority." So, the post is about Joel acting as Servant to his team.
I practice that here too. I often refer to myself as either the Stablehand (where my job is to keep the thoroughbreds fed, watered and comfortable) or as the Janitor-in-Chief (the meaning being obvious here). Everyone's an owner of any of the companies I'm involved in, and we all treat each other like adults, but the examples have to come from me. I spent a little part of each day washing dishes in the sink, tidying the conference rooms and, my personal favorite, changing the toilet roll - and I'm happy to do so.
Its why I'm jealous of these quad-rollers that I saw recently, and why when you come stop by at Popdust, Fameball, Snooth or Lot18 you can expect to find paper at hand...