Customers or Employees? Why “Focus” Means Picking One.

In That Will Never Work, I wrote about visiting Amazon in the early days. Every desk in the building was a repurposed door. The offices were ugly. Bezos was unapologetic about it — Amazon was focused on the customer, and a pretty office wasn’t going to help the customer.

This always sparks the same question: do you have to pick? Employees or customers? Can’t it be both?

Sure, it can be both. I’m not suggesting you treat your team like dirt. But the operative word in what Bezos was saying is focus. And focus, by definition, means an unequal allocation of time, money, and attention.

In a startup, you will always have more demands than resources. Always. You can spread everything evenly across every competing need — and end up doing nothing particularly well. Or you can pick the one thing that matters most and pour everything you have into making it great.

Pick the right thing, deliver on it, and it lifts all the other boats. The customer is almost always that thing.

Somewhere along the way, startups got it in their heads that the way to take care of employees is to throw amenities at them. Kombucha on tap. Nap pods. Fireman poles between floors. Cold brew, hot yoga, catered lunches Tuesday through Thursday.

It’s ridiculous. None of that is what your best people actually want.

What they want is agency — the freedom to make real decisions and own real outcomes. And they want to be surrounded by other people who are just as talented and just as committed as they are.

The free snacks aren’t retaining anyone worth retaining. The thing that keeps your best people around is the chance to do meaningful work alongside other people doing meaningful work. Everything else is decoration.

One of my reliable signs that an early-stage company is in trouble: I walk in a few weeks after their seed round closes, and every employee is sitting in a $1,000 Aeron chair behind an automatic standing desk.

Whatever they raised, they’re burning it on the wrong things. They’ve confused the trappings of a successful company with the actual work of becoming one. And worse — they’ve signaled to their team that the company’s priorities are inward, not outward.

Because culture is observational, not aspirational. Your team isn’t watching what you say. They’re watching what you spend money on. They’re watching where you spend your attention. When Bezos worked at a desk made of a door, he wasn’t being cheap — he was signaling, every single day, that this company existed for the customer.

Here’s the part that gets lost. Your ultimate job — the most important thing you can do for your employees — is to make the company successful.

A company that wins gives everyone in it something that no amount of free kombucha can. Equity that’s worth something. A track record they can build on. Stories they’ll tell for the next twenty years.

A company that rewards people lavishly at the beginning and then goes out of business has done nothing for anyone. Lavish in the early days is just a more comfortable way of losing.