The power of giving a shit

You can’t just buy a company

I get it, buying software companies is a nice way to get more market share and it gives you access to all sorts of juicy new customers you can “cross sell” to. Makes perfect sense, great.

But it doesn’t really work like that.

See, the company you bought are usually smaller, more efficient, more productive and know their customers better than you.

But what happens is you come in, buy them and swing management round like it’s a silver bullet to all your problems. Engagement surveys here, training there, processes everywhere.

And that’s…well, not fine, but expected. You’re a big company - you’ve got to act like a big company. The team are less productive now and the product suffers a bit from it, but underneath it’s still the same product.

But underneath, the small, efficient team that made the company worth buying in the first place are lead by people who don’t care about the product and more importantly can’t get excited about it. The founders have left on their golden handshakes but losing your founders isn’t just losing some management. Founders set the tone for the whole ethos of the company - they get excited by solving the problems your software solves - not the money solving that problem generates. They do it for the love of the craft and for the challenge.

The excitement is what matters. Good founders can get people enthused by a todo list app and make them want to work on it. Once you lose that, most of your staff stop caring in about 12 months and realise their once treasured little app they poured their entire lives into is just another ink cartridge in your private equity money printer.

Enthusiastic founders make for enthusiastic employees and successful products - it’s why Basecamp gets so many applications for work from what is essentially a pretty vanilla app (and one I love). Nobody finishes a CS degree and says “oooh I can’t wait to work on project management software” - it’s decidedly unsexy and yet people apply in their droves. That’s the power of giving a shit. That’s all it needs, you can have the biggest, best teams in the world but unless you give a shit, the output will be terrible.

Founders have to move on, that’s a fact of life. But to keep the magic alive you’ve got to replace them with people who are equally enthusiastic about solving the same problems in the same way.

And you can’t

Because those people are all out solving those problems with their own teams, in their own way.

Don’t underestimate the power of giving a shit and the value it brings.