sofiechan home

Pitching a pro-family culture

anon_bofe said in #3067 3w ago:

I'm building a company, although I'm bootstrapped solo right now. I want it to be the most pro-family culture in the world.

I'm struggling over how to incorporate that idea into the pitch or brand. At the moment I'm just thinking of some company blog posts, and of course prominently featuring it on the Careers page.

The philosophy behind it is nothing unfamiliar here: any culture which doesn't lead to intergenerational health and happiness is a dead end, and economics and culture are interdependent. So a pro-family culture can't survive without a supporting economic way of life. Not only will we have the most pro-family policies that have ever been (night nurses! onsite daycare!), we will help our kids start their own companies. So it's like the Amish but with the tech valence reversed.

Basically repairing the damage to family culture the modern world has done, but in a pro-future way. I'm optimistic this will attract serious people ready to sacrifice for the future - in other words we won't be less productive than single autists living in SF. And we'll build a sensemaking tribe. Don't Learn Values From Society was a big factor in this thinking.

The only people I've mentioned this to in person have a "sure, that's a little weird but fine" face. So I am not sure it will be the selling point I want, even though it's one of my main motivations for building the company. Maybe I'll just worry about it when I actually hit revenue but I thought I'd float it for discussion.

referenced by: >>3069 >>3087

I'm building a compa

anon_qaly said in #3068 3w ago:

> we'll have the most pro-family policies that have ever been (night nurses! onsite daycare!)

Great experiment.

> we will help our kids start their own companies

I would cut this part. Muddles the pitch. Timeline's much too long.

I love the general concept and look forward to seeing more.

--

The maximal success case looks like an anti-Google, superseding that chapter of tech culture.

Google was hugely influential in the early 2000s replacing the cubicles-and-pocket-protectors era of technology with a millennial culture of quirk chungus delayed adulthood. Catered meals, onsite masseuses, ball pits, propeller hats and XKCD. I've seen things you wouldn't believe.

Clearly that culture is spent and due for replacement. But there is no new flagship cultural standard-bearer leading the way out.

We're winning on politics and workplace culture, more narrowly. Companies like Palantir, Anduril, Coinbase, Scale, and the Elon companies have successfully promoted merit and a results-oriented workplace. We owe them a lot, and we've turned the corner there.

However, I don't see a single tech company modeling an aspirational lifestyle more broadly--let alone a lifestyle compatible with the average mid-career employee having 3+ kids. It's a hard problem. Godspeed.

My one bit of normative advice: avoid partisan politics. "Show, don't tell." If you succeed at building an innovative, productive yet pronatal technology firm, that's inherently right wing and requires no further explanation.

referenced by: >>3087

Great experiment....

anon_fysy said in #3069 3w ago:

>>3067
> I want it to be the most pro-family culture in the world.

There's an ambiguity here. Is the core product/service of the company something about family? Or is it something else, and you just want the company culture *for employees* to be pro-family?

If it's the latter, I wouldn't overthink this. Yes, certainly have good employee policies, but you'll need to focus mostly on the product / service. Brian Armstrong's concept of "mission focused company" is good actually.

> night nurses! onsite daycare!

If you're encouraging mothers of small children to work for your company, isn't that already not pro-family? I'm not saying mothers should never work. I'm saying that facilitating work arrangements in which mothers would need such services is already optimizing for something other than family.

referenced by: >>3087

There's an ambiguity

anon_zeqa said in #3072 3w ago:

“Companies” are not corporate bodies that historically track with pro-natalist culture; their existence mostly tracks with decline of family life. You should consider the mafia or nomadic pastoralism instead.

“Companies” are not

anon_nuwy said in #3073 2w ago:

During the first 40 years of China, major state-owned factories have their own family-support eco-system, allocated apartment, free or low cost canteen, own education system from kindergarten to middle school, and own medical system, etc.

By including these functions into the system, the living cost of staff will be lowered, less distracted too, as other aspects of life have been taken care of. Birth rate was good back then, my wife's mother has 4 brother/sister.

That was a controversial period, west materials hardly say anything positive about it. Not interested in political argument, just let you know that there was something partly includes something like what you describe above.

But this is not good in terms of profits, as you will take on lot more administrative costs. If your product is not dominant, survival will be threatened.

During the first 40

anon_nuwy said in #3074 2w ago:

I remember reading a new report about a credit card company called "Gravity" or something, this company's staff birth rate is impressive, many employees have 2 to 3 kids and house and stuff, looks very pro-family.

According to the news, the CEO announced that the minimum income of that company will be 70k USD per year, in order to achieve this, the CEO reduced his own annual income to 70k USD.

It was controversial, when announced, people in the industry trashed his decision, predicting that his company will not live long. But it managed to survive at least to the point that news report. And, as mentioned in the beginning, the company's employees are quite passionate about having more kids lol.

The CEO said giving up lots of salary is worthwhile when he saw his folks getting along so well and look after each other.

Another story fyi

referenced by: >>3075

I remember reading a

anon_fysy said in #3075 2w ago:

>>3074
The company must be quite small if the CEO's salary alone was enough to significantly increase that of the employees. Even for a highly paid CEO, a company does not need to be all that large before this would not be the case.

We need to focus on realistic structural things that could work, not feel-good stories.

The company must be

anon_nuwy said in #3077 2w ago:

Yeah, as I recall, the company size is not large.

"realistic structural things" sounds fancy, like what? Any suggestion?

Yeah, as I recall, t

anon_vumy said in #3087 2w ago:

>>3067
I'm with the other anon >>3068 on advising against just training the kids into company-starting bourgeois mode of being. The interesting thing would be something closer to an Asian-style industrial conglomerate: take care of your people in their whole lives, make sure they do well biologically and not just financially. Bond your family to their family. Take it a step further and train the kids to continue in the same industry and even company. Think of it feudal style: long term alliance between families of varying rank. Or like one of those thousand year old japanese corporations associated with particular temples and families. It's probably illegal like everything interesting, though.

>So I am not sure it will be the selling point I want, even though it's one of my main motivations for building the company.
This is a red flag though. You should start a company out of ambition, love for the work, and specific opportunity. This kind of social thinking should mostly shape *how* you do your company or what kinds of opportunities you pursue, rather than doing it at all, which implies lack of other opportunity or reason.

Also, don't think of it as a way to attract people. It isn't. They don't want this. They are homo economicus sterilicus. This is why you get weird looks. You need to attract them on the basis of cool work, inspiring mission, good people, good opportunity for profit and learning, and then *persuade* them to take payment in your particular weird lifestyle forms.

As for good pro-family company culture, here's an obvious illegal thing that should be mandatory: don't give them the promotion/raise until they have the family to justify it. Generally speaking a lot of our cultural and fertility problems come from decoupling fertility from profit. Profit represents what our society values (for better or worse, productivity is a decent metric of civilization), but it's totally disconnected from actual breeding. This is insane. Obviously people should be having kids proportional to their salary. But of course this is illegal and not entirely within the power of a company to mandate. Better done with tax policy maybe. But the space could use more exploration.

>>3069
Imagine family childcare as a perk for male employees too. "total compensation" includes free school and daycare. I'd be so into that, as an employee, but the steriloids wouldn't care. Maybe it's a way to legally and practically implement my salary-indexed fertility idea above.

I'm with the other a

You must login to post.