Hacking Business Models
This weekend, Monty and I got together for a different kind of hacking session.
Instead of developing software, we were working on developing a set of rough principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. We both have a good amount of experience working with various FLOSS projects (like Mozilla, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and FLOSS companies (like eZ Systems, Mozilla, MySQL, Zend, etc.) and hope that we can put this experience to good use.
For me, this was a tremendous help - I've been putting off working on this for Foo Associates for some months now. It is much easier to work on meeting the needs of customers than it is to work on planning for the future.
The notes are still extremely rough, but both Monty and I want to post them so that people can discuss. Also, while we don't quite agree on how to do things, we are much closer to agreeing on what we want to do and why we want to do it.
Over the coming weeks, we'll both be going through the core of the principles to develop them further. I plan to blog about my thoughts so that it is easier for other people to participate.
Purpose
- Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
- Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
- Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.
Principles
- Egalitarian: The belief that all people should be treated equally. This includes equality, non-discrimination and inclusivity.
- Sustainable: We have a long-term view on our business. We watch our profits & spend wisely, we take care of each other, we support the things we depend on.
- Transparent: We communicate in an honest and genuine way. Any information or process that can be made open, will be made open.
- Fun: Create a workplace where people can have fun and want to work.
- Agile: Be flexible, receptive & adaptive, especially when dealing with staff and customers.
Methods
Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:
- Consensus-based decision making.
- Corporate transparency - any information or process that can be made open, should be made open.
- Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our partners and society at large.
- Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
- Don't try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
- Prefer to work with people who share our values.
- Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.
Monty's amendments
* Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy and support the Open Source community.
* Be a virtual company, networking with others.
* The company or its individual business units should not grow until they are
unmanagable by the chosen methods. If this happens, then the company needs to
be split up or re-organized into largely independent business units.
Default Employee Rules
Some employee roles may have different requirements - for example, someone
working on customer support may need to have regular hours. Of course, any
differences need to be noted explicitly in the employees contract in a section
that clearly details any differences from the standard agreement.
- The Employee works in distributed company and may work from anywhere.
- 75 working hours per two weeks. Ideally, employees should work schedules that
are kind to them and to others.
- Equal free (vacation) time; Everyone has 35 free days a year + Saturday &
Sundays. (This is basicly Finnish 5 week vacation + 10 (avg) weekday
holidays). Note that this means that one should use a free day if one
wants not work any Monday-Friday even if it's a public holiday in
your country!
Up to 25 free days will roll over to next year (ie, the vacation part not
the public holiday part); If the employee quits or is let go all saved
vacation money will be paid out.
One earns 25/47 vacation days / week of active work (This is used for
the first and last year of employment).
- Vacation money ("Lomalta paluu raha"). When you go on vacation that is more
than 3 weeks (or have used more than 3 weeks of your vacation for the year)
you get an extra 1/2 month of salary. If you don't keep your vacation
the vacation money is payed at the end of the year under 'get a life'
bonus plan.
- The employee will get a shared copyright to all code and documentation
he/she produces according to the spirit of the Sun's JCA license agreement.
- 80 / 20 rule
80 % of the time the employee should work on scheduled task, 20 % he/she
can work on any task of his/her choice, as long a it's will generate revenue
makes employees more efficent or enhances company recognition in a 2 year window.
The 20% tasks needs to be approved to ensure it follows the above
guidelines.
- 2000 Euro hardware allowance at start of position (for laptop, desktop etc).
- 1000 Euro/year hardware allowance for everyone that require new hardware
to be be able to do their work.
- The equipment bought with the hardware allowances (and any other
negotiated equipment) will be transfered to the employee after
5 years.
- The salary should be competitive in the area where the employee is
located. The bonus plan is not depending on where employee is living.
- If an employee has been of significant help in getting and delivering
in a customer order he is entitled to a bonus for this work. Everyone
in doing the sales will share 5% in the 'price - cost of sales'
part of the sale (in proportion of their involvement) and everyone part
of the delivery will share another 5%. This payed bonus will however
be deducted from their part of the end of year bonus (if the company
was profitable).
- Each employee will be assigned a VIP number of 1-5 (5 highest) to
describe his importance for the company. This number is used to
calculate the end of year bonuses and 'sell-shares'. The VIP number
will be adjusted each year as part of a employee review.
? Who sets the VIP number?
? How does the VIP number change over time?
? How do we stop people from feeling bad about their VIP number?
- The employee must be able to communicate fluently in English (at least
in written form). If necessary company will sponsor English classes
for employees that wants to learn speak better English.
- The employee is assumed to be cost efficient. This means he/she
should prefer to use:
- Cost efficient communication tools like Skype and VOIP.
- Economy travelling tickets.
- Medium priced hotels, rented cars and restaurants.
- When travelling he should strive to stay over at his fellow employees
places and/or share rooms with his fellow employees.
(This item can be override with a 'good cause' by his manager)
- If the employee wants better hotel, food, travelling arrangements,
working equipment etc this can be arranged, but the difference should
be reduced from his salary, contract money or bonus.
- When hired, the employee will during the 3 first months be 'on trial' basis.
After the trial period the Company and the employee will decide if things
seams to work out and either hire the employee or contract him under
similar terms as if he would be employed.
- If people are not working up to expectations they will first get warned
about this. If they don't correct this within one Month they will be
moved to 'on trial basis'. After 3 months the Company and the Employee
will have a discussion of how things are going and decide if it's
better that the Employee leaves the company with immediate effect.
- When employee is leaving he can buy out any Company equipment bought
under the hardware allowance. The price is
min(market-price, 'initial-price' * max(5 - years_old,0)/5)
(Ie, the price of the equipment is reduced by 1/5 each year)
—————
The Rules of the company:
- The Company is created to generate bonus for the employees (not to get sold).
- The Company should make it as fun as possible to work for the Company.
- The Company will be a distributed entity and strive to be small and
efficient. If growing too big it will split into several business units
or companies.
- Strive for long relationships with employees and customers.
(The Company is a family)
- The Company needs to respect the individuality of it's employees.
If the employee has reasonable 'extra' demands they need to be seriously
considered. (For example when it comes to work on weekends, room sharing,
not want to travel etc).
- The Company will employee people based on their merits. They will not
be discriminated based on their gender, race, religion, location,
married status or who they have married.
- The Company will not require people to work on weekends.
Company has the right to ask the employee for working on weekends, but the
employee has the right to refuse without any consequences.
- For time critical, high paid, high protifable projects that require double working
hours, the Company will pay tree times the salary and/or offer paid vacation days.
- The Company will actively encourage it's employees to take out their
vacation and not save it for later. This is especially imporant for employees that
are "burning out".
- Company needs to be long term cost efficient in it's daily operation.
This should be considered when choosing software, phone usage, equipment etc.
- The Company should budget for at least 3 travelling meetings for every
employee to ensure that people can work efficiently and get to know
each other. One of the meetings should be an all company meeting.
- The Company will recognise the importance of spouses/family members in a
distributed environment and have the following spouse policy:
- The spouse is encouraged to attend the all company meeting. The Company
will pay half of the spouses travelling tickets and allow the spouses
to share a hotel room (at no extra cost for the Employee).
- The spouse is invited to up to 4 dinners/years (if employees are gathered
over dinner).
- In the above rules another family member can be substituted instead
of the spouse.
- Company will actively help and sponsor open source projects (see bonus plan).
- The Company will strive for having as much of it's plans and
information publicly available. All rules of the Company will be
made public on it's web site.
- All software produced by the company will be open/free source (with the
exception to classified customer projects). At equal profit
company will prefer to do open/free software projects.
- At end of year the profit will be distributed as follows:
- 45 % will be saved for expansion
- 5 % will be donated to open source projects.
The project ('s) will be chosen by the employees of the company by voting.
- 5 % will be used to support charities
The projects will be chosen by the employees of the company by voting.
- 20 % will be used to pay off existing debts.
- 20-45 % (depending of payed debts) will be given out
(as bonus, dividend or some other form) to employees and investors
based on their VIP number and the number of working hours.
The bonus for each employee is calculated as follows:
employee_profit_hours = employee_working_hours*VIP.
bonus= profit/(SUM(all employee_profit_hours))*employee_profit_hours
An investor that as invested 100,000 Euro is treated as an employee
of VIP level 3 that has 37.5 hours a week for 47 weeks.
- At end of year company will distribute 100,000 'semi-shares' to it's
employees and active investors, in proportion to ones
'employee_profit_hour'. This share does not have any other rights
than if the company would get sold then the money paid for the company
(minus all costs, investments, loans etc) will be distributed among
all semi-share holders.
- At end of year the company should strive to pay of (part of) it's investors
if it doesn't expect to need the money within 2 years time frame.
Rules of the Company can only be changed if at least 75 % of the
company employees doesn't oppose to the changes.
——————–
Decision-making processes
(Note that these are only guidelines and may be changed. However the
changes MUST follow the spirit of the original guidelines).
The Company is lead by a CEO. His actions are governed by:
- The advisory board that is a team of external chosen experts.
- An governance team, which is chosen among the employees of the
Company and people from the advisory board.
The purpose of the advisory board is to give good advice to the CEO and the
employees of the company.
The purpose of the governance team is to give directives (that must be
followed) to the CEO and suggest changes to the rules and decisions
processes. The governance team have the right to fire and reinstate
people (including the CEO).
- Company will be lead in an open and democratic fashion:
- All (not customer classified information) information will be public
inside of the company. This includes salaries, bonuses, shares, birthdays
etc.
- Decisions will be done in a democratic fashion and all employees
should have a chance to have their say in things that matters to them.
- In case of disagreement things should be resolved by voting with
the 3 vote rule; 'Yes, No and Never'. A decision should normally not
be taken if there is a single 'Never' vote.
In exceptional 'life and death' cases, after through discussions have
been had and after all other options are exhausted, a decisions can
be taken even if there is 'a few' 'Never' votes, if 50 % of the company
will vote yes to the proposal.
- Company should work according to the moto: "Do good decisions fast
but be prepared to quickly change course if there is a way to do it"
This implies that the following should holds for 'controversial decision':
- If requested, the decision makers needs to clearly define the bases
for a decisions and give means for proving/disapproving that the
decision is in the Company best interest. If a decisions is proved
to be wrong, it needs to be reverted and the decision makers need
to analyse why it went wrong and put up measures that it shouldn't
happen again.
- Company should learn from it's mistakes and it's successes. It should
strive to repeat it's success and avoid it's mistakes in the future.
Final note:
The owners of 50 % of the voting shares in the Company (initially only
the founders) have the definite power to say 'NO' to any made decision
that doesn't have 75 % of the employees behind it. They can also
propose new decisions that will be be taken if 75 % of the employees
stands behind it. This rule can only be changed with 85 % of the
voting shares.
October 11 2007 Update:
Monty suggestions this addition:
Tags: Code, community, Copyright, eZ, FLOSS, Foo Associates, Free Software, Governance, License, Licensing, Media, monty, Mozilla, MySQL, Open Source, OSI, Patent, PHP, travel, Uncategorized, USA, wiki, Wikipedia, ZendThe Company will not censor employees opinions or try to hinder them from expressing their opinions. The Company should provide appropriate forums for the employees to discuss anything work related.
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Posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 4:27
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June 18th, 2007 at 5:52
Great stuff, Zak :) I recognize many of the above concepts from the MySQL employee manual ;) And, perhaps more importantly, I recognize those things that aren't.
Cheers!
jay
June 18th, 2007 at 6:06
Zak, this is really exciting and important stuff. Hope we can chat about it in person soon (at OSCON perhaps?). I have some suggestions as well, if you are interested in feedback.
June 18th, 2007 at 6:24
Sadly, some number of the company's employees might be in the US. In the US, healthcare is much more affordable if the company sponsors a plan, for various weird reasons. FSF was paying less in Boston for my healthcare than I would have had to pay in New York, even though I am in a demographic (young, male) which uses way less healthcare than the average. So, the company should offer US healthcare if at all possible, with employees paying 100% of costs (since people in the rest of the civilized world pay for it already via taxes).
June 18th, 2007 at 6:59
[...] Zak Greant's Polymorph Blog has an amazing, and thought provoking post about his plans to help organize an Open Business Model. [...]
June 18th, 2007 at 7:35
Hey Jay,
Good to hear from you!
In part, the MySQL employee manual is an earlier version of Monty's thoughts on these issues.
More of the practical matters are his (rules on how profit is shared), while I focused more on the abstract matters (principles, goals, methods)
We'd be happy to have more specific comments from you.
Cheers!
–zak
June 18th, 2007 at 7:36
Hey Laura!
It is great to hear from you.
I'll be at OSCON and I'd love to chat about this.
Also, this makes me think that maybe I should try to snag a BoF session.
Cheers!
–zak
June 18th, 2007 at 7:39
Aloha Novalis!
It is nice to have three people that I like to hear from write in the same day.
Good point - those of us Canada and Scandinavia tend to forget about who bears the costs of healthcare in the US.
Cheers!
–zak
June 18th, 2007 at 7:48
Sam Rose over at Social Synergy blogged about this post quite quickly.
Reading his post led me over to http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/OpenBusinessModel, which I will have to study.
Thanks Sam!
June 18th, 2007 at 7:57
Hi Zak,
well that sounds very "un-american" ;-) And like a great company to work in.
You say you do not want to change people but instead work around your weaknesses. An employment process for this company especially in the management area must be a challenge then. Do you really find enough people who share your ideas here?
June 18th, 2007 at 8:03
I like 95% of what you wrote. Some of the things you wrote are probably difficult to strike a balance on, like the VIP number.
My employer practices some of these principles and it's great. Right now I'm reading "Let my people go surfing" by the founder and owner of Patagonia. Have you read it? I've like the first 2/3 of the book very much, and look forward to the rest.
June 18th, 2007 at 8:09
Hey Gaylord!
The surprises (like seeing an @zend.com at the end of your email address) keep coming.
I think that we have borrowed some of the very best of the ancient and modern world - including some things that grew up in America of yesteryear.
As for focusing on people's strengths and working around their weaknesses: I haven't found any other way to manage people (including myself) that works as well. :)
Cheers!
–zak
ps. See you in some months when I get to Germany. :)
June 18th, 2007 at 8:14
Hi X,
Thanks for the note!
95% is pretty good. We must have more stuff wrong than this. :)
I'll have to read the “Let my people go surfing”
From this, it sounds like you might enjoy these books:
* Maverick: The Success Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace
* First, Break All The Rules
Cheers!
–zak
June 18th, 2007 at 8:39
I really like this. I like the social considerations especially. I mentioned in my post to Open Business Models wiki about http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/ConsensusPolling ("Consensus Polling") and thought you might be interested in that process as a way to help really incorporate collective intelligence into consensus-driven decision making.
Also, in research I've done with the http://cooperationcommons.com project, we've found that providing multiple avenues for intellectual processes will help different people, who solve problems in different ways, to contribute their knowledge to the pool. More on this can be found at http://www.rheingold.com/cooperation/decisionmaking.pdf
For instance, there are times when deliberation and discussion can lead to:
* AmplificationOfErrors?
* People being influenced by information (InformationalInfluences?)
* SocialPressures?
* Group polarization and InformationCascade? effects on group polarization
* Egocentric, “Hindsight”, Familiarity, Saliency, Cultural, and other biases
* CommonKnowledgeEffect, which refers to the observations that information held by most or all group members has far more influence than HiddenProfiles? of information held by only a few members.
The above six points are aggregated from CassSunstein’s book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge.(copied here from a post I left at http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/CollectiveProblemSolving/2006-11-06)
And, companies are starting to employ prediction markets as an insight-generating tool, and as another intellectual process in addition to discussion, deliberation, "ConsensusPolling" and other methods.
Just some ideas I thought you might be interested in.
I'll be sure to follow you progress here, and thanks for sharing this with the world!
June 18th, 2007 at 8:47
PS. All of the book recommendations are great! Thanks everyone.
June 19th, 2007 at 0:57
[...] Zak Greant's Polymorph Blog has an amazing, and thought provoking post about his plans to help organize an Open Business Model. [...]
June 19th, 2007 at 2:51
About healtcare in USA (to novalis)
This kind of company needs to be flexible; This means that if there are things that the company can do to help it's employee without increasing cost, like reducing the employee's salary and use this to pay for (an extended?) healthcare plan, it should do so.
Here is some basic assumptions that I have about costs:
To be sustainable, the company should pay a local competitive salary, with common local benefits. Extra benefits can always be negotiated, but should be considered to be part of the 'pay check'.
From the company's point of view, it's the 'total cost' of an employee that is relevant in deciding if it can afford to hire him/her. (How the cost is distributed is not that important).
From the employee's point of view, it's the salary, all benefits and work itself and working environment that decides if the company is right for him.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:40
Great job Zak! That's a great documentation to start for an Open Business Model.
My feeling is this will be the main focus on eLiberatica 2008 conference too; everybody is interested in this aspect. FLOSS technologies and principles demonstrated that entrepreneurs can build strong businesses which can strongly compete and even replace the proprietary model.
June 20th, 2007 at 13:37
Hi!
I need to think about the VIP bit… have you ever read about the company how makes Gortex? Their approach to employee positions is unique and may be something you will want to consider. On the same note, I don't see how to address yearly budgets, and I don't see a method for determining how the charter can be changed by future generations.
Looking forward to seeing you at OSCON.
Cheers,
-Brian
June 20th, 2007 at 15:08
Hey Brian,
Good to hear from you!
I'll have to do some reading about the Goretex folks - thanks for the tip!
> On the same note, I don't see how to address yearly budgets,
I haven't thought about it.
> and I don't see a method for determining how the charter can be changed by future generations.
Monty wants a model where - as long as there is a majority of staff in favor - the charter can be changed at any time.
See you at OSCON :)
–zak
July 27th, 2007 at 5:15
Just at a first-blush reading, it puts me in mind of a genetic search over a complex problem topology. Say that the error curve represents profitability, and then companies are like genomes. The topology, and the companies, change and mutate over time, but always seek to maximize the profit function. The reason this analogy strikes me as apt, is because I wonder if this environment wouldn't produce an echo-chamber effect.
So, I might suggest some kind of sabbatical program. Maybe just for VIP{1,2}? My thinking is that if a person has been with the company for a long time (say 5 years?) and is widely considered to be important to the company, and if they are widely considered to be a 'long-timer', then it's actually in the company's best interest to send that person away for a while. Time spent writing a book, ski bumming, or working for another company is certain to change that employee and to make them somewhat different from what they were. This can increase diversity, among the employees most likely to be mostly similar to one another.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:44
I fear that in my haste to push out my idea, I didn't make clear enough the link between genetic search and the echo-chamber effect.
When exploring a large problem space by stochastic process, there's no way to avoid local maxima - and in fact, no way to know that you've reached a local maximum, rather than the global optimum. In particular, if you have a relatively isolated peak, it's common for many of your strings to asymptotically approach one another at that peak, and population diversity is lost. This is the reason that many such search processes include a mutation operator - so that diversity can be added back into the population at a relatively steady rate.
So here, I'm assuming that a local maxima in the search space would be a company that's sustainable, but not (for want of creativity, or opportunity, or tolerance of chaos) doing its best. Presumably, the company's had to be in the market for a while to get to this point, and the company rules have done their job well, and employee retention is high. At this point, it's reasonable to assume that the company has reached a relatively stable state - unless something externally influences its genome (ie, staffing) or its niche (making the previous maximum less profitable), it's easy for the company to coast.
The sabbatical suggestion is an idea for introducing a self-selecting mutation operator - those conditions most indicative of financial stability are prerequisites for its exercise, and while the majority of the time it won't have an effect on company profitability, it will always have some small chance of seeding dramatic change.
August 14th, 2007 at 6:29
Very interesting…
A lot of Monty's ideas seems to match the rules used for MySQL years ago… or the ones which Monty tried to use. It would be interesting to count how many are still used in the MySQL at this date.
The interesting challange is being small and efficient but at the same time being able to serve large markets, some of which may have difficulty dealing with small companies.
In my opinion these rules also mean the company should not go public (at least not to have significant portion of shares traded on stock exchange and held by institutional investors) as if it does contolling investors will care about their return rather than anything else.
I do not generally agree with cost of living thing. In my opinion the choice of country where you live is same choice as neighrboohood just on the larger scale. If american wants to move to china and get massive savings it should be his choice. Same other way around. Company may be only afford US level salaries for few positions - than so be it.
What should define salary is value person brings to the company, which can be geo based. For example consultant working in US and doing onsite jobs typically brings a lot of value due to his locality in this case salary should be adjusted.
I also think percentage numbers need to be adjusted in many cases but I simply treat these as samples
for many markets for example 5% whould not be enough to make any real Sales guy to work :)
September 2nd, 2007 at 12:46
Hey Zak,
Nice post. My company practices many of the principles you mention, so positive reinforcement is satisfying. There are a few other questions to be discussed for entrepreneurs wanting to take this route, including:
* What are software business models that are compatible with these principles? The two broad categories are services and products. The first is process-intensive and for large projects, customers usually require guarantees such as (gasp) CMMi or (double-gasp) PMP certification, which lead to a set of values that are not traditionally linked with openness. The second, product-based, approach requires investing in building a piece of technology and competing against established, probably proprietary-software vendors who are making higher margins selling licenses, leading to a high risk of early death. MySQL is obviously a success story in the second category, but how many of those can make it to sustainability?
* Should venture capital be sought? What would be the convincing value proposition in the face of competing business plans with similar ideas but simpler (read: to make money faster and more reliably) software and intellectual property models?
* What is the ethical behaviour when 2 or more FOSS-based software companies work in the same area, and provide similar services? What does coopetition practically mean?
We've been live for 3 years but we don't have easy answers to those questions. In any case, it's more fun than being a Microsoft Gold partner!
October 8th, 2007 at 10:05
[...] MySQL's internal model with eBox. Most of the things he said can be found in an entry of Zak's blog (who was also at the event, by the way) but I would like to summarize the general [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 12:01
[...] Monty, MySQL co-founder and excellent cook - we disussed more ideas about open business models and open operations models [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 9:36
[...] and Zak formulated a set of principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. One rule they proclaim is: The Employee works in distributed company and may work from [...]
February 27th, 2008 at 7:24
A lot of great ideas, however I wonder about these issues:
- I strongly disagree with making democratic decisions with respect to
technical issues. This will prevent innovation. With respect to innovation,
through the whole history of mankind the majority has been mostly wrong,
and the minority of brave innovators were right. Technical decisions should
be based on technical (both scientific and aesthetic) arguments, thus it
should be possible that one person has the strongest arguments, and the company
follows his/her suggestion.
- If we agree on a VIP (I really dislike the term), the VIP level should not
be related to the position in the company (e.g. developer, manager, etc).
It should be possible to remain "just a developer" and still be VIP,
and it should be possible that operational managers have lower VIP
than the people they manage. This will (partly) solve the issue with personal
growth inside the company. On the other hand people with leadership
positions must have a high VIP (e.g. architects).
- Have you considered how many customers (or what revenue) you would need in
order to allow for e.g. a team of 20-30 employees live well? When you look at
such numbers, Do you have product ideas that potentially can generate such
revenue? In my rough estimates, such a team can cost somewhere between
1.5M - 2.5M EUR. Do you have an idea how to make this much profit? (I don't want
you to tell us the idea), just an honest answer if you believe it can be done.
- When considering salary levels in various countries, take into account that
the lower the standard of living in a country, the more expensive it is to
live in a similar comfort than in more organized countries with higher standard
of living. Therefore employees that live in "cheaper" places, should be payed
compared to the local standard much more than employees in richer countries
where the state takes care of many more things. If employees cannot afford to
live in equal comfort, they will naturally tend to emigrate (and thus possibly
leave the company).
February 27th, 2008 at 13:08
Whuile I don't think this is totally perfecto, have you considered exposing the vip level, salary and other items to all employees of the firm? It seems that if you are going to go for the gusto on changing how companies work, you should go all the way to full disclosure.
February 27th, 2008 at 14:21
So if you do the math:
.8 (20% time)
*
37.5 ( 75 hours per 2 weeks /2)
=
30 hours/week
* 1/12 (rough vacation)
=
27.5 hours/week.
Which isn't a lot of time to dedicate to projects, honestly. You should look into how cygnus did things back in the day, they had a very interesting bonus/payments structure. In fact, I'll email Gumby and point him at this.
Chris