iowai

I once was an intern in a VC funded company where we had a table tennis table in the hall. One of the rockstar programmers was so annoyed by the sound, that he brought his drummkit and declared "noisewar" on the table tennis posse.

The CEO was a 22 year old kid and instead of telling the team to work like normal citizens, he countered the situation by bringing a 200w ghettoblaster. Playing Slayer and Napalm Death while he worked.

Surprisingly, the company survived to this day. But we all would have benefited big time from something like AeroTennis, AeroDrums and AeroBlast at that time.

I once was an intern in a company that wanted to rewrite the whole Reddit code in .net. The founder was a charming person and managed to raise a huge pile of money. "We can redo this with current technology and elegant design! We will run circles around Reddit!".

We had a great time. Free snacks, lot's of parties, luxurious office furniture, skateboarding in the hall... In the end, the company ran out of money before the product reached a useful state.

Good times. It has been some time since then and I have a "normal" job now. Last thing I heard about the founder is that he started a new vc backed company destined to run circles around something.

What about prostitutes do you not believe? That they exist? That they get hired by companies to entertain the team? That this happens in startups?

I once was an intern in a startup where the founder one day decided we all shall stop using computers one day a week. I could tell a dozen funny stories that arose from it.

You know, it where the golden 90s. Startups did all kind of crazy stuff. Paint their walls pink and what not. We had the wildest parties. The CEO often brought in a bunch of prostitutes and hired well known DJs.

The days of the week with the "no computer" rule slowed down things unbelievably. And has been abandoned after the founder has been kicked out of his own company. To my surprise, it did not kill the company. The company strives on to this day.