Stop the Insanity!

When it comes to email, for example, some saner startups have adopted a few simple practices. They discourage people from sending email messages to generic lists that may include recipients who are not integral to the task at hand. Instead, it makes more sense to solicit input from as few people as possible; otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time. When Next Jump's chief information officer emailed a dozen employees asking for comments on the company's plan to move its server off-site, Kim suggested a different approach. "I trust your judgment," Kim told him. "Just talk to the CFO, and then make the decision."

Email also has a way of multiplying like cancer cells, defeating the purpose of sending an electronic message in the first place: fast, effective, well-targeted communication. At seeUthere.com, says CEO Chang, the unofficial policy is this: "If you go back and forth on an email more than three times, then you need to go ahead and have an actual conversation."

Saner startups take an equally ruthless approach to meetings. Smaller companies are limiting the ubiquitous all-hands meetings to once a week, while larger companies are scheduling them once a month, at most. Other meetings are called only when there is a specific problem to resolve and involve as few employees as possible. "Before you attend a meeting, you need to ask yourself, 'Will this keep me from doing something more important?' " says John D. Wagner, 42, executive director of corporate communications at BuildNet. "Am I needed to make this decision, or could I just get a recap after the meeting?"

Indeed, at saner startups, meeting machismo is perceived as a negative, not as an indication of status or value at the company. Slayton, for instance, often drops in on meetings at ClickAction, and if he sees too many people in attendance -- "too much intellectual firepower in the room for the question being addressed" -- he immediately voices his disapproval.

One final guiding principle: If a meeting drags on for hours and still doesn't seem to be long enough, it probably means that you're just sharing information (read: talking too much), without making any decisions. That's a lesson that BuildNet learned last year. The company's bimonthly sales-and-marketing meetings were already running two hours long when someone proposed extending them to four hours -- and bringing in lunch. "Everyone just said, 'No!' There was this recognition that we were having meeting inflation," Wagner recalls. The result: The meeting was canceled -- permanently. And no one is lobbying for its return. "It turned out we were already sharing so much information during the day that we didn't need the meeting at all," says Wagner.

What's the Point of the Exercise?

We've saved the most basic point for last. There's a dirty little secret behind the madness at many dotcom companies. Why are so many people in so many companies running so fast, for so long, with such reckless abandon? Because they don't really know where they're going -- or they're not going anywhere special. If your destination is the same as everyone else's, the only way to get there first is to run faster.

As Dion Lim notes, "If you're competing against 5 or 10 other startups, all of which are working incredibly hard, then you have to work just as hard in order to keep up."

That's why, when Lim and his wife started their Internet incubator, they decided they would only develop businesses that allowed them to run on what Lim calls a "5-60 schedule" -- a 5-day, 60-hour workweek. And since what appealed to them most was not so much running a company as developing an idea for a company and then bringing that idea to life, their initial goal wasn't to create a giant company with a huge market cap but a product that they could launch and then sell to someone else.

Their first project was Wantifieds.com, a request-for-quote technology that enables consumers to solicit vendor quotes on whatever product they might want to buy. With a team of six engineers and one product manager, the Lims built the technology in just six months (and, at press time, were in negotiations to sell it). The Wantifieds.com team worked with blazing speed. But by staying small, it was able to maintain a 5-60 work schedule throughout the whole process. "We didn't have to raise millions of dollars from a name-brand VC," Lim says, "and we didn't have to staff up and hire every single quality person we knew."

The Lims were able to keep their wits about them as they developed their new product because they stayed focused on success -- and because they had a definition of success that made sense to them. The problem with many startups is, they're so focused on their IPOs that they lose sight of their real values. Or worse, they never really figure out what their values are in the first place.