An Unusual Growth Metric
Like most startups, Wildcard furnishes our team with the finest desks Ikea has to offer. It might seem stupid…but some of my favorite days I have ever had building companies have been assembling desks with my teammates. When you are building software, you tend to interact with your growth and progress in completely virtual mediums. Whether it be graphs and analytics, or simply visualization at the UI layer of your product, when things are going forward you feel them on a screen or in your head…but rarely does your progress exist in a way you can touch and feel…rarely does the interface to your growth carry matter…
Every time I have screwed a screw into a washer into a shitty metal leg with a 2 cent allen wrench things have been going well. And the process of assembling that piece of shit furniture takes just long enough…is just inefficient enough…that you have no choice but to slow down and reflect on the fact that you are entering a new phase…that things are changing…and that growth is in the air. A cold hard calculation…playing it just by the numbers…would tell you that it’s worth getting two dudes off craigslist to come assemble all the crap a startup buys at ikea instead of taking highly paid engineers, and designers, and founders away from what their work to sit and tinker with the heap of disconnected parts that will one day become office furniture…but that calculation misses… because it does not factor in the opportunity for a team to interact with their growth in a much more tangible…much more undeniable way than they are typically used to.
You can tell a lot about a new hire by his instinct on the day he walks into a room of pedigreed software engineers clumsily fumbling with “step 4: connecting the back of the chair to it’s stem”…either he sits at his desk and walks through the setup of his new machine as he’s been invited to do…or he pulls up next to you and grabs an allen wrench…understanding that the team is not building our product at that moment because we needed to make space for you who just arrived…because as you come in and we grow…our physical infrastructure needs to keep pace with our software development. Even on his first day, the new hire, at least our most recent hire, instinctually chooses to participate in our growth..because in the physical form it is truly undeniable. To me assembling crappy swedish furniture is a right of passage…some of my fondest memories of the last 6 or 7 years have been listening to tunes with my teammates…living in that very real physical metaphor of our progress toward a shared mission and vision.
Wildcard ran out of desks a few weeks ago…and for the first time as a company, we felt what it was like to blow past the infrastructure that at the time of it’s creation was enough “for the foreseeable future.” We moved beyond what was foreseeable, and are now settling into the new reality of today…Thanks Ikea…for giving us the opportunity to nick our hands and bleed on the unsmoothed edges of growth.
Jordan Cooper's Blog: startups, venture capital, etc... 
A few details worth mentioning here:
1. Thanks for Keith Major for his power drill. Coolest neighbor ever. (https://www.facebook.com/KeithMajorPhotography)
2. We automatically created an assembly line, in true engineering fashion.
3. All of the desk legs have the serial number of “1337”, which makes us the leet-est team ever. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet)
ericxtang
February 3, 2014
This is too funny… another Skaled team member and I were just discussing how much satisfaction we get from assembling Ikea furniture. There’s something strangely fulfilling about turning that flat box into a usable piece of furniture and wiping your dusty hands off on your work clothes once it’s all complete and standing. That sort of tangible progress is really refreshing when you spend most of your hours, staring at a computer screen.
Britany
February 4, 2014
Like this one.
Glenn M. Cooper, Esquire Paley, Rothman, Goldstein, Rosenberg, Eig & Cooper, Chartered 4800 Hampden Lane, 7th Floor Bethesda, Maryland 20814 Direct Dial: (301) 951-9322 Main Office: (301) 656-7603 Fax: (301) 654-7354
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From: Jordan Cooper’s Blog: startups, venture capital, Wildcard [mailto:comment-reply@wordpress.com] Sent: Monday, February 03, 2014 12:15 PM To: Glenn Cooper Subject: [New post] An Unusual Growth Metric
jordancooper posted: “Like most startups, Wildcard furnishes our team with the finest desks Ikea has to offer. It might seem stupid…but some of my favorite days I have ever had building companies have been assembling desks with my teammates. When you are building software, y”
Glenn Cooper
February 11, 2014