wo years ago, just before Thanksgiving, one of the 100-year-old sewer pipes in my yard collapsed. I thought I could hack a solution at a reasonable cost, so I hired two men to dig up the broken pipe.<\/p>\n
It was brutal work in the cold. About halfway through the first day of the project, while the diggers took a break, I noticed there was now a third man in the hole.\u00a0 It was my neighbor, Chuck, who was asking the workers about the dense soil at the bottom of the pit. Chuck had the pickaxe in his hands and was preparing to take a swing.<\/p>\n
I put a stop to the whole thing and helped Chuck, who was wearing the clothes of a laborer, out of the hole. Chuck is 86 years old and he will crawl up your roof to find a leak in a snowstorm if you let him.\u00a0 He can also tell you everything you need to know about hiring people, pitching big companies for sales, and creating a healthy culture at your startup.\u00a0 As it turns out, the things we value at contemporary tech startups\u2014values that many of us assume sprouted with the tech boom 15 years ago\u2014are the same things that helped companies thrive thirty, forty or fifty years ago.<\/p>\n
Creating a culture<\/strong><\/p>\n The first thing Chuck told me when he heard about our startup,\u00a0Aisle50, was, \u201cTreat your employees how you\u2019d want to be treated.\u201d<\/p>\n When he told me that, his eyes gauged my reaction. He knew it sounded trite.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean it\u2019s the simplest thing in the world, but that\u2019s why it\u2019s so great\u201d he explained. \u201cThat\u2019s really all you have to do\u2014and it\u2019s what you owe your employees.\u201d<\/p>\n Do that, Chuck said, and much of your company culture will take care of itself.<\/p>\n Startups\u00a0hold working environments dear. Free lunches, beer fridges and nonexistent dress codes help put a demonstrative line between startup culture and that of big companies. At the heart of this culture there\u2019s the essence of a cubicle-dweller saying to himself : \u201cIf I had a company, here\u2019s how\u00a0I<\/em>would do things.\u201d<\/p>\n The man in the trenches would treat others how he wants to be treated. It really is that simple. But this isn\u2019t about not working hard or piles of free sandwiches. The right people want to work hard, they just want opportunities to go along with that. \u00a0This is about giving people the things you want out of your own career: true responsibility and the opportunity to grow. Giving people these chances results in a better company, a better product and better and happier employees.\u00a0 Since we hired our first employee about a year ago, Chuck reiterates this point every time I see him: \u201cTreat people like you want to be treated.\u201d<\/p>\n Chuck graduated from the\u00a0Illinois Institute of Technology\u00a0with a degree in mechanical engineering 60 years ago and went to work for a large manufacturer designing hydraulic valves. Full of ideas, Chuck regularly brought new designs to upper management, thinking he could greatly improve the company\u2019s devices. The problem, though, was that nobody cared. Just as Clayton Christensen would inform us of 50 years later, Chuck found for himself how hard it is to innovate at big companies. So he left.<\/p>\n Building on his designs, Chuck eventually secured 12 U.S. patents and began manufacturing his own hydraulic valves.\u00a0 By the time he was 40, his company was 75 people. At the age of 41, Chuck sold toUnited Technologies\u00a0and hasn\u2019t needed to work since. That was in 1969.<\/p>\n Chuck still lives in the same modest brick house he bought 40 years ago with a yard so small there isn\u2019t room for a garage. One recent fall day, as I walked home from the train, I ran into Chuck as he was finishing the job of applying a second coat of stain to his fence, which has several layers of cedar slats all the way around. It\u2019s an impressive task to see to completion for an 86-year-old.<\/p>\n More impressive, though, was the 600-square-foot concrete parking slab Chuck poured for a neighbor the summer before. He excavated the area by hand with a spade, built the forms, spread out gravel and laid steel reinforcing bars. When the concrete truck showed up, he stood in the gray muck, raking it into place and then, on his knees, smoothing its surface with a trowel in 95-degree heat. He charged the neighbor nothing, not even for materials.\u00a0 After another neighbor complimented his work, Chuck then replaced part of the second neighbor\u2019s sidewalk the following week. This is a man who still brims with the energy of a 25-year-old startup founder.<\/p>\n Make that last call<\/strong><\/p>\n When my cofounder and I quit our jobs and made our startup \u201cofficial,\u201d some of our friends and relatives were skeptical, some were inspired, and some were incredibly happy for us because, over the years, we had fooled them into having more confidence in us than we had in ourselves.<\/p>\n This article can be found here on Forbes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" wo years ago, just before Thanksgiving, one of the 100-year-old sewer pipes in my yard collapsed. I thought I could hack a solution at a reasonable cost, so I hired two men to dig up the broken pipe. It was brutal work in the cold. 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