jackaltman

That's a valid point, that it could potentially be more expensive than it's worth. In other words, it is possible to spend too much on trying to make your employees happier.

I wasn't trying to argue that the optimal amount to spend on employee turnover is infinite, but I do think most companies dedicate less than the rational/optimal amount of effort on it.

I agree completely with this. I was writing about turnover of high performing employees, which is crazy expensive. Turning over low performers is valuable and important for companies to do.

Exactly. In this article I was focused on regrettable turnover (when you wish the employee didn't leave), as opposed to non-regrettable turnover, which is very healthy.

This is a great point. I've seen companies that are great and companies that are horrible about substantially increasing the compensation of their top performers. It makes a huge difference and should be an easy decision to make if companies take the time to think about it.

I agree with you -- I wrote this with regrettable turnover in mind. Parting ways with a low performer is definitely a valuable thing to do!

Great point, we're definitely aware of one more tool issue, so we have to make sure we're sufficiently valuable and lightweight to use.

It's not meant to be task management, but rather a shared repository for longer term goals with period status updates. Most companies today keep these goals in google docs and they don't get much interaction as a result, so we're hoping to address that.

I thought about this more and I think you're right. Some companies do become very short term focused when they go public, but when you not longer have to worry about short term survival you can plan much farther out in the future.

I love that these guys think of 4 years as short term and 20 years as long term. Young companies often set up this dichotomy as a couple months vs. a couple years, which just isn't enough. Long term thinking is a big potential advantage startups have over public incumbents that have quarterly expectations, but it's usually not taken advantage of. Not just on founders obviously, whole startup ecosystem fuels this.

Non-CS people doing CS will give a worse experience in a single specific case, but will improve the overall customer experience in the long run.

I'm not arguing that companies should get rid of departments, just that they should take CS seriously. I think having all members of the team talk to customers is the best way to give the whole company an orientation toward customer service. 37signals, Stripe, and others do this too, not just Amazon.

CIL is a public company in the ran-by-a-government sense, so it's a little different. BTU is the largest private sector coal company.

I think you should be able to compare the value of any two companies, no matter how different their distribution of possible outcomes or how differently they fit into an investor's portfolio.

I understand that startups are about promise and potential, and that a company with no revenue might be fairly valued at billions of dollars.

A startup (or any company) is worth something like the integral of of the graph of probability vs. outcome. The problem I see right now is that people are overvaluing the positive outcomes and discounting the low end.

"Because a small float was offered, and demand was prescriptive by the bankers, it's impossible to say that because of how it ended, trying to raise the price to $40 would have resulted in the same outcome."

I'm not completely sure what you mean by this, but I spent time on an ECM desk one summer and I they aren't aiming for a 75% first day pop. The bankers get paid less, the company raises less. You want a pop to satisfy buy-side clients and to keep a positive public perception, but 75% is too much.