It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I intend for SANPRAM to be like Sony or Nintendo: product and R&D-oriented companies that keep innovating over decades.
Fun fact: Nintendo has released not one, but multiple gaming consoles that each became the best-selling consoles in the world. Famicom / NES, then the Game Boy series (which had an 11 year reign, dethroned eventually by the PlayStation), and then a comeback with the Nintendo DS, the Wii, and recently the Switch. The company has a legacy of outdoing itself again and again.
I want to build a real, lasting company, where generations of people can build their whole careers and eventually be proud to retire from. That seems to go counter to the prevalent approach in the early 21st century startup industry, where every founder is building a “one-time business” that they can “exit” with 7 figures in the bank in as short a time as possible.
I’ve observed that more and more companies are being built around a culture of plugging holes — i.e. the idea that every person on the team is a meatbag you found to do a particular task / fulfil a role that came up.
They’re built on freelance developers from Upwork, and/or remote employees strewn across the world whose loyalty to the company is as feeble as the company’s to them.
The problem with this mindset is that the company stays static.
But for a company that can adapt and evolve with time, its people need to adapt and evolve too. This means you can don’t have exclusively job-based hiring, but rather membership-based hiring — you look for individuals who show the right attributes and are capable of constantly learning and adapting and reinventing themselves, and then have them grow into different roles and tasks throughout their career.
At first thought, it reminds me of the traditional Japanese way, where you would join a company as a fresh new graduate “salaryman” and then be assigned to different departments based on your aptitude during the training phase. It’s also similar to how a lot of IT services firms in India operate.
But the challenge of the membership-based approach is that in a tech-heavy company, most new hires would be too unskilled to produce any results early on! You can’t expect to train someone to be an engineer from scratch while they’re doing nothing on payroll. In a job-based environment, this is not a problem because you already know that the person can deliver results.
So what’s the right approach? As it usually happens, whenever you face a human problem, someone has already found the solution — and in this case, guess what, it is Nintendo. :)
The Nintendo Tweak
Nintendo follows a hybrid approach. They are a hardcore tech company that demands exceptionally high levels of skill (in fact, their business depends on their ability to keep developing proprietary technology), but they’re also Japanese — and their new employee retention rate is a staggering 98.8%. Out of every 100 or so people who join the company, barely one or two decide to leave.
How do they do it? The answer is simple: specialized career tracks.
- Engineering/technology
- Design
- Sound
- Production planning
- Sales/administrative
Everyone applying to the company has to pick ONE track that they would like to join, and that’s it.
The cool thing is that you now have enough of a structure that you can find people with a proven level of skills to begin with (i.e. they will be productive from day 1), but also enough flexibility that you can pick people based on way more holistic criteria beyond “can you do this particular job or not?”
This is not a new thing. The company’s biggest “star,” Shigeru Miyamoto (the creator of Donkey Kong, Mario, and Zelda — each of which were massive goldmines) was hired in the same way. As a young kid, he came to Hiroshi Yamauchi with just a portfolio of drawings and endless creative energy — and was put in the architecture / planning division solely based on that. One day, Yamauchi needed a new game for the US market, but found that every game developer was busy with other projects. So he called Miyamoto to his office, took a brief interview, and gave him the job of developing the game. The result was Donkey Kong, which is single-handedly responsible for Nintendo of America’s existence as a company today.
The SANPRAM Way
This ties beautifully to how I too want to do things at SANPRAM:
No titles.
Every person in the company is identified simply by their name and the track they are in:
- Makers (engineering / tech / R&D all in one)
- Designers (aesthetics and media)
- Admin and sales
For now, that’s more or less it.
When hiring “makers,” I’m not just looking for “software engineers,” though it’s very helpful to have that. I’m much more interested in people with a strong attitude and aptitude towards problem-solving, craftsmanship, and invention / innovation. The exact skills we’ll have in the company will always be a melting pot as time goes by. Good makers prepared to pick up new tools and knowledge over the decades.
For a maker, the kid who has been dabbling with programming since 5, but also building remote-controlled submarines and fiddling with game development, is a better fit than the “React developer” who went to a front-end bootcamp and got into the profession because it pays well.
After all, if we just want a React expert, there’s always Upwork for that.
This article is from my codex.
初めまして。 I’m Aman, a founder based in Tokyo, Japan. We’re building a 1,000 year company.
