The origins of startup operating norms

Everything starts somewhere — and with the right momentum behind it, it could just end up everywhere. Such is true for many of the modes of working, building, and thinking that, over time, have evolved from novel idea and cycled their way into mainstream startup culture™. Here, we ruminate on the humble beginnings of a few favorites.

20% time - Google

Sparks of genius rarely strike in a vacuum, but according to the co-founders of Google, it’s a lot likelier to come across them during a designated window of innovation time. This philosophy is what gave rise to “20% time”— an innovation management strategy that recommends employees at companies spend 80 percent of their time on business as usual while reserving 20 percent for exploratory side projects.

“We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20 percent of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google,” co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote in 2004 in a letter to potential Google shareholders.“ This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner.”

And it’s true — Google News and AdSense are just a few of the iconic Google features and products that have come out of 20% time. (Gmail is often referenced as another innovation to be born out of 20 percent time, but creator Paul Buchheit has set the record straight on this in the past.)

Design thinking - IDEO

Design thinking wasn’t new when IDEO started using the term in the early 90s, but this was the inflection point that would reroute the course of the concept for decades to come — thrusting it into the epicenter of startup standard operating procedure.

Prior to this point, design thinking existed as a nameless concept, with some of the first movements to make design more scientific popping up in the 60s, and the earliest principles of design thinking starting to take hold in the 70s.

But once IDEO layered structure onto the concept — establishing the terminology, step-by-step process, and toolkits around it — design thinking hit the mainstream, becoming an accessible approach for both designers and non-designers to solve unknown or overly complex problems with empathy, creativity, and strategy. As Tim Brown, chair of IDEO, once defined it: “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Hackathons - Yahoo!

Today, hackathons are a cross-functional effort, connecting coders with designers, marketers, product managers, and virtually anyone from across an organization to pool their collective brainpower to create a product or feature in record time — anywhere from 24 hours to a few days. But in their early days, these events were largely limited to coders.

While Yahoo! wasn’t the first company to hold a hackathon — the widely accepted true origin was a 10-developer OpenBSD community event in 1999 — the brand’s 2005 hack day and subsequent hackathons have earned it the reputation that it largely shaped hackathon culture and formats as they exist in tech today.

In a personal blog post from December 2005, former Yahoo! Engineer Jeremy Zawodny wrote about his experience during the company’s first hack day, closing his post with:“The folks who hacked got the feeling that only comes from racing against the clock to get a prototype built and then showing it to a room crowded full of [your] peers — the same ones who applaud and cheer when you finish the demo. Those who dropped in to see what we'd done with our Friday easily got swept up in the fun and excitement of seeing all these great ideas up on the big screen.”

Bunch of hacks

Rome might not have been built in a day, but these now well-known companies took about that long, give or take. Hackathons are a reminder that, while great things take time, they can also take less time.

Buffer -The social media scheduling tool was created by Joel Gascoigne during a hackathon in 2010.

Bitly - The URL shortening service was initially developed during an internal hackathon at the incubator Betaworks in 2008.

Coursera - The initial concept for the online education platform was developed by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller during an internal hackathon at Stanford University.

Instacart - The on-demand grocery delivery service was developed by Apoorva Mehta during a hackathon in 2012.

Zapier - The workflow automation tool was developed during a hackathon in 2011 by Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig, and Mike Knoop.

Cash App - The mobile payment service started out during a company hackathon at parent company Block (formerly Square) in 2013.

Building in public - Buffer

Startups will often build in one of two modes: in stealth or in public. Building in stealth is about keeping your plans and product private until you’re ready to unveil it at launch. Building in public is exactly what it sounds like — developing your product out in the open.

There are benefits to both of these. Building in stealth gives you a competitive advantage and allows you to control the narrative, while building in public helps build trust and allows you to fine-tune your product-market fit. Still, there was a point when stealth was the de facto mode of building — until Buffer became one of the early pioneers of baking transparency into the building process.

This went down in the 2010s, with companies like Product Hunt and Assembly also helping drive this wave of building in public at the time. In Buffer’s case, building in public aligned with one of the company’s core values around defaulting to transparency — something they practice by being publicly open about not just their roadmap, but also their revenue and user numbers, employee salaries, and employee equity options.
In 2016, when the company fully publicized its product roadmap, one of the then-product creators shared some of the thinking in a company blog post, writing: “It encourages us to think more long term and be more deliberate about what we build, hopefully resulting in us building more value for you.”