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Employees Suck

In December 2008, Loïc Le Meur invited me to speak at LeWeb in Paris. I'd spent a dozen years running a 50-person company that made good money and made me miserable, and then built Magnatune and BookMooch — real businesses, break-even and profitable, with essentially no employees. So I gave a deliberately provocative talk called "Employees Suck" about a completely different model for running a company, and running your life.

Here it is, with the original slides synced back in. The talk runs about seventeen minutes.

The slides are licensed Creative Commons BY-SA — download, remix and reuse them however you like.

The argument, in short

Managing people is no fun: it's getting people who don't really want to do their job to do it anyway. What is fun is coordinating a handful of talented people who don't need to be motivated. Firing is worse, and in most of the world it's hard to do at all. So keep a small, culturally-homogeneous core — three people, sometimes one, rarely more than ten — to make the actual product, and work with freelancers for everything else. The model is Hollywood: assemble the exact team a film needs, make it, disperse.

Bosses suck even more, if you're the employee. Nobody can actually work eight hours straight. If you're genuinely talented you're probably worth 10× more than anyone else on the team, but you'll be paid at most 3× — usually 20% — more, and always less than your boss. You're paid by the hour, not for your contribution, so there's no incentive to be clever or do great work. The way out: stop selling your time, which is cheap and hard to value, and instead make intellectual goods and sell them for what they're actually worth — something the internet has finally made possible for one person to do.

And then a set of harder questions. Do you enjoy your life? Your work? Do you want kids — and the schedule freedom to actually raise them? Do you like learning new things? Employers don't pay you to learn; they pay you to put the hours in.

The steps to self-employment
  • Think of lots of ideas. Write them down. Read science fiction and futurism, watch TED talks, keep a list.
  • Then do nothing — for a while. Most of those ideas will look like garbage in three months, and it takes six-to-nine months for the good ones to cohere. People who jump on their first idea stop thinking of better ones.
  • The pub test. Explain your best idea, in fifteen seconds, to a cynical friend in a noisy English pub while they're drinking. If they don't put the beer down and pay attention, the idea isn't good enough. A noisy pub full of distractions is what the internet is like.
  • Then build the pitch, not the product. Write the elevator pitch, then the first line of your press release, then the first paragraph of your home page, then the home page itself — before you build anything. Companies that write the press release last discover their product is boring when it's already too late to change it.
  • Do it absurdly cheaply. Don't borrow money — so cheaply you don't need anybody else's money. Make a mockup, show it to people who might buy it, and launch long before you're ready. Pitch bloggers. If nobody cares, you've only lost a few months and you've learned why: kill it and start again.
  • Don't quit your day job. Work evenings and weekends, gradually lower your day-job commitment, and only quit once the project pays more than the job does.

    • Getting press, and salespeople

    Salespeople are a bad idea: they cost capital, and needing them usually means your idea isn't good enough to sell itself. "We just need more PR and marketing" is the same fallacy. Great products build word of mouth — if the product were great, your early users would already be blogging about it.

    The secret to massive press (and I've gotten a lot of it): be really, really interesting — Guy Kawasaki's version is "if you're not getting press, get better reality" — and then convince just two influential bloggers. Media cascades: each outlet watches the next. For print, focus on freelancers rather than staff writers, because freelancers have to find and pitch their own stories, so become a cause a freelancer would personally care about.

    For Magnatune, the cascade ran Creative Commons and Boing Boing → The Inquirer → Fark → Slashdot → USA Today / NPR → the New York Times → the BBC, Le Monde, Die Zeit and Nikkei. My elevator pitch was simply "We are not evil." BookMooch's was "Give a book away for free, and you can ask someone to send you a book for free."

    The whole point: don't borrow money — because if you fail, you can just start again next week.

    This talk is from LeWeb 2008. The slides are Creative Commons BY-SA; the video has been re-edited to correct its aspect ratio and to re-sync the original slides.

    #johnbuckman #entrepreneurship #startups #employees #freelancers #leweb #magnatune #bookmooch




    john created 2026/08/25.