However, at the software company I worked for, the attitude was "we love this company because they buy us beer!". This was cool in that they paid for theme park visits and big, free-beer parties as "morale" activities, some of which I enjoyed and some not so much, but I also felt a bit empty working there. I felt that this was because they were a services company - i.e. they were very very skeptical about "product" ideas, and where they did have a go at them they tended to dramatically underfund them (there was one notable exception to this, but the continuing revenue from the product was mostly in services-style support contracts, since it was a B2B product.) I would have preferred that they spent some of the beer money giving some of their more exciting ideas a better shot of working. (they also took on some services work that I didn't think was particularly ethical, although it was all legal.)
so, things I would delete:
- "beer is the best way to have fun" attitude.
- "9-to-5"-ism.
things I would add: - motivation about company mission (also, dependently, hiring
people who do care about the mission.)
This is perhaps why my ideas for start ups tend to be either social enterprises, or fighting some political mission (like PRISM-evasion) - because I want there to be a mission to care about. I hope that the two things I want to avoid would follow, at least in part, from the thing I would add (although my 2nd-hand experience of the charitable sector says that 9-to-5ism may be difficult to escape anywhere.)