If I Had a Million Dollars
If I had enough money, I would start a software incubator.
I would hire based on characteristics like ambition, confidence, direction, a good work ethic and some coding background. I would create a compensation plan starting with a relatively high salary + low commission and then gradually flip that around. I would provide all of the business and sales infrastructure. I would provide significant business, economic and entrepreneurial training. My goal would be to find potential and cultivate that potential to think in ways that engender good ideas - and then I would help them learn how to realize those ideas and bring them to market. I would pay them well to allow them to focus on simply building software. I would facilitate their max rate of production. Such an opportunity would largely shape their futures and even lifestyles. With good initial compensation rolling off, I'm essentially providing a path for someone to come into their own. In fact, their long term future rests on it. For this very reason, I wouldn't have to baby or police them. My hope is that they would work themselves into a living …
My hiring policy would be more lenient than most. I would provide a huge space in which to work, a large industrial warehouse or something. I would likely build a complimentary design team for exclusive use by all the developers. I would allow them to customize their workspace however they seemed fit. My goal would be to create comfort zones for ideas to flourish. I would provide various forms of indirect pressure but would give them space to grow. I would regularly invite business and economics mentors to give presentations or speak one-on-one with folks - and not to judge but to provide resource. I would look deeply understand each developer and then tailor efforts to cultivate and balance them. For instance, I want them to have faced questions like: "Do I focus on one great product?" or "Do I focus on lots of little apps?"
I've not thought this through rigorously but an example compensation plan might resemble:
- Year 1: $100,000 + 10% commission
- Year 2: $120,000 + 20% commission
- Year 3: $70,000 + 30% commission
- Year 4: $50,000 + 40% commission
- Year 5: $25,000 + 60% commission
- Year 6: $10,000 + 90% commission
Long term, the company would maintain a 10% vested interest in whatever the developers write. Hopefully, that is small enough that they don't mind and it is fair since I'd have taken the initial risk. And speaking of risk, it would certainly be a very low pressure job - at least, pressure from me would be trivial. Their numbers would speak for themselves. With disciplined application, my guess it that the average developer will likely grow into something around year 3.
Management's responsibility in all of this would be to manage administration and business overhead as well as maintain a constant barrage of inspirational as well as practical guests around. We'd pay for guest speakers to come onsite and talk about various facets the developer's are or will face as well as provide practical inspiration. No fluff so much as discussions on practical, economic business models. The idea here is to really cultivate the talent on the team.
To help cut my obvious losses I'd likely put everyone on a 6 month probationary period - not so much to judge their production but to get a real sense of their business acumen, work ethic and development process. 1 week of interviews is just not enough time to deeply understand how successful these folks can be so I'd build the potential of early dismissal into the system.
I'm sure that once I got knee deep in this stuff, certain practical changes would have to happen but conceptually, you haven't got it yet, the idea here is not to get rich or necessarily push folks to their limits. Instead, it is to create an extremely relaxed environment that is conducive to software ideas. Protects individual ideas, cultivates and facilitates deep focus on such ideas. Heck, developers could even hire yearlings to help them kick out the code. My focus would be on incubating People and not software.
Now, as a side effect, I think a few people wouldn't want to leave. I think it'd be a stellar gig for productive developers with 1 or 2 good ideas under their belt. In my eyes, the trick is to do all of this in a way that actually sustains itself. Considering the 80/20 rule, I realize that the fate of this type of business would like rely on coming across a few great folks with great ideas - but I think that's the case with almost any great idea.
I don't think the next great products are necessarily going to come from minds that are the fastest, wittiest, best coders. Good ideas can be had by anyone. Indeed, the idea of this incubator is to find those people and let that talent bubble up.