Running an always-on company isn’t enlightened—it’s toxic

An always-on workplace isn’t enlightened—it’s toxic. And it’s up to you to shut it off

COMPANIES LOVE TO protect. They protect their brand with trademarks, their data and trade secrets with rules and policies, and their money with budgets, CFOs, and investments.

Companies protect a lot of things, yet many of them are guilty of one glaring omission. Too often, there’s something they leave wide open and vulnerable: their employees’ time.

Companies spend their employees’ time and attention as if there were an infinite supply of both. As if they cost nothing. Yet workers’ time and attention are the most precious resources we have.

Employees are under siege for their time and attention. They are sliced up by an overabundance of meetings, physical distractions in open workspaces, virtual distractions on their phones, and the expectation they’re available to anyone, anytime, for anything that’s needed.

If companies spent money as recklessly as they spend time, they’d be going out of business. And you can bet they’d find a way to put an end to that. But where’s their responsibility when it comes to the clock?

Time and attention are best spent in large blocks—large bills, if you will, not spare coins and small change. Yet what filters down to staff are just scraps of time in which they’re expected to do a wonderful, thorough job. No wonder people are working longer hours, late nights, and weekends. Where else can they find the uninterrupted time? Think about it: When was the last time you had four straight hours to yourself at work, four hours not chopped up by meetings or discussion or conversation? You probably can’t remember. Or, if you can, it was probably on a plane or that one time you accidentally left your phone on your nightstand. Many CEOs think being an enlightened, competitive company means you’re always on. Available all the time, for anyone. I believe that’s a dangerous, frivolous mindset. It causes people to burn out and resent work. It can even lead to their leaving.

As a business owner, I’ve come to realize that protecting my employees’ time and attention is one of the most important things I can do.

For example, we don’t have status meetings at Basecamp. We all know these meetings— one person talks for a bit and shares some plans, and then the next person does the same thing. They’re a waste of time. Why? While it seems efficient to get everyone together at the same time, it isn’t: Eight people in a room for an hour doesn’t cost one hour; it costs eight hours. Instead, we ask people to write updates daily or weekly on Basecamp for others to read when they have a free moment. This saves dozens of hours a week, and affords people larger blocks of uninterrupted time. Meetings tend to break time into “before” and “after.” Get rid of those meetings and people suddenly have a good stretch of time to immerse themselves in their work.

I believe 40 hours a week is plenty to get great work done if you actually give people 40 hours a week to do it. Having them come in for 40 but giving them only 12 to themselves is like stealing 28 hours a week from someone. At Basecamp, we’ve made significant strides toward making sure 40 hours means 40 hours.

Remember, when you hire someone, you don’t own that person. When you think about a workweek as “company time,” you’re turning it into something the company owns. But really, it’s not company time—it’s the employee’s, to do work for the company. The company is paying people for their time, not to borrow the company’s time. It may sound like semantics, but it actually requires a pretty radical shift in thinking.

with an ad on Craigslist.

Beyond that, Pedego advises dealers to get a three-year lease with a one-year opt-out. “That way, if everything goes to hell in a handbasket or you don’t like it, then your risk is one year’s rent,” says DiCostanzo. To date, only one of the nearly 60 Pedego stores has failed.

Despite Pedego’s efforts to keep costs low, “it was still expensive to me,” says Muscato, the former cop. “If this doesn’t make it, I am not going to starve. But things will be a lot more difficult.” FOR ENTREPRENEURS, Boomers are a tempting market: a rich, juicy elephant passing through the demographic python. There will be 119 million Americans over 50 by 2020, according to AARP, one-third of the total population. Spending by that age group will increase 58 percent over the next 20 years, compared with a 24 percent hike among Americans aged 25 to 50, says data from Morgan Stanley. And who is best positioned to serve that market? It takes gray to know gray.

DiCostanzo and Sherry could design the right product because they saw their end users in the mirror. Pedego dealers can sell that product for the same reason. Beth Black and her life partner, Brian Ballard, opened their Seal Beach, California, store in 2012 when she was 56 and he was 51.

“You get on the bike for the first time and twist that throttle,” says Black, “and suddenly you’re yelling, ‘ Woohooo!’ It’s like you’re recapturing something.” She and Ballard named their first Pedegos Gidget and Moondoggie, “and you have to be a certain age to understand the joke. I tell customers Gidget is a classic, just like me, and they get it. When they see she’s still going strong and I am still going strong and we are out there riding and enjoying life, there is this sense of hope.”

Older customers trust someone who looks like them more than they’ll trust the Lycra-clad specimens who haunt traditional bike shops, say many dealers. Pedego store owners are a healthy bunch—after all, they discovered the company while biking. But even regular exercise can’t forestall all the ravages of time. “I can say to a customer, ‘Look, I had my knee replaced.’ And the guy says, ‘Oh, I had my hip replaced,’ ” says John Soave, who opened his Blue Ridge, Georgia, store at age 61. “We talk about aches and pains, hills and headwinds.”

While some retirees find their worlds shrinking as work relationships trail off, Pedego dealers develop new friendships with the customers who join them on guided tours or group rides. Aaron Maynard estimates that 90 percent of his local friends are people he met through his Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, store, which he opened at age 50. Maynard offers group rides three times a week.

“The group rides translate into sales,” says Maynard. “But this is also how we’re getting to know one another.” TWO PRODUCTS INTRODUCED at December’s dealers meeting, an adult tricycle and a vehicle for people with disabilities, will appeal to Pedego’s least physically abled customers. The owner of the Irvine, California, store offers to bring the latter to senior centers on either side of the mall where he is located, so the residents can try it out.

A couple of earlier models—notably a mountain bike and a stretch bike with room on the back for children—targeted younger riders. Some Pedego employees have urged the founders to go younger with their marketing as well, by including images of 30-somethings in their collateral. “We tried, and nobody liked that, including us,” says DiCostanzo. “So we went back to using healthy-looking people closer to our age group.”

A handful of dealers in their 30s and 40s have opened Pedego stores—some working in tandem with their parents. Conversely, a growing number of parents have brought on board their adult children. That simultaneously solves the problem of limitations on their own professional runways and creates opportunities for offspring frustrated by a slippery job market.

Meanwhile, as more stores open and the product gains visibility, the number of applications to launch stores is rising. DiCostanzo and Sherry are proceeding cautiously, seeking to add 25 new locations a year. “As you get older you get very good at evaluating risk,” says Sherry.

“We are in the first inning of a nineinning game,” says DiCostanzo. “The Boomers see the opportunity and that it is happening right now. They want to be part of that.”

As for his and Sherry’s retirement plans, DiCostanzo shrugs. “Maybe someday.”

“I can say to a customer, ‘Look, I had my knee replaced.’ And the guy says, ‘Oh, I had my hip replaced.’ We talk about aches and pains, hills and headwinds.”

build it, it would be so slow as to be useless, taking at least 25 seconds of processing time to return a result. What Blippar needed instead, Wang said, was a so-called deep-learning system. It would mimic the human brain, which processes images by understanding their shared attributes: Humans don’t have to learn to recognize every type of chair that exists; they need to understand only what makes something a chair.

Wang eventually agreed to join Blippar as vice president of infrastructure. For the past 18 months, the company’s engineers have been working to help the app understand what it sees by creating “stencils,” which allow its machine-learning algorithms to group things into categories. Through this approach, Mitra claims, Blippar now recognizes almost 75 percent of the objects in the physical world, and more for certain categories, including dog breeds and cars. “Even the human eye cannot distinguish between the 2016 and 2017 Prius,” Mitra brags, “but Blippar can.”

After my first meeting with Mitra, I took Blippar for a spin around San Francisco. That quickly highlighted both the product’s strengths and its shortcomings, which have earned it an average rating of 2½ stars in Apple’s App Store. Blippar was quick to recognize a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, but it failed to identify a grapefruit or a pair of scissors. When I pointed the camera at an object it couldn’t identify, the screen filled up with word associations, like “produce” and “healthful.”

In our next interview, I told Mitra Blippar wasn’t as smart as I’d expected. Yes, he said, but that’s because it’s working to become even smarter. The word cloud is there to show that the app is guessing and learning in the same way humans do. “If I bring you into an unfamiliar church and ask you where we are, you won’t be able to name the church— but you’ll be able to describe it,” he says.

By the time we were done, Mitra had me doing exactly what he does: seeing Blippar for what it could be, not just what it is now.

THERE’S A LOT that Blippar still needs to learn, though. Last year, it sought some buzz with a new product, one that would instantly recognize faces. Blippar signed deals with 25 celebrities, and booked a day of television interviews and events around the world to publicize the app’s new facial-recognition feature. The idea was to encourage users to upload their own faces and create profiles for themselves, giving Blippar a social layer that would make it more attractive to advertisers. It was the first time the company was spending significant dollars on consumer marketing, and it was going to be huge.

And then, one night in December, just hours before the new version of the app was to be published, Mitra called off the launch. The update was glitchy, with frequent crashes and a just-noticeable delay in response time. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would impress new users.

“It was a hard call,” Mitra says two days later. “But we did the right thing.”

Blippar won’t be able to afford many such stumbles—especially given the scope and breadth of its competition. Google is on its second iteration of a similar product, now called Tango, that lets Android users do things like take augmented museum tours and view the night sky with the names of the planets superimposed on their screens. And Google is strong exactly where Blippar is vulnerable: on engineering.

“It’s a lot for a startup to do,” says Qi Lu, a mentor to Mitra who headed up search at Microsoft and is now COO of the Chinese search giant Baidu. Lu says Mitra and Tayeb have hit on a big idea with a large potential market and a strong business model—but he’s not sure they can compete with firms that have thousands of engineers working on machine learning and image recognition.

Competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing. With a private valuation of $1 billion, Blippar makes what Lu calls an attractive and affordable target for companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. In fact, the founders say acquisition offers have already been on the table, including one worth $1.5 billion.

For a startup that’s still a long way from turning a profit—Blippar reported a $31.3 million loss for the 16 months ending March 31, 2016—that’s a lot of money to walk away from. But Mitra says he’s not interested in a soft landing. And Tayeb points out that Blippar’s singular focus on one type of technology may help it break through as huge Silicon Valley firms get distracted. “There’s a reason Google didn’t come out with Facebook and Facebook didn’t come out with Snapchat,” he says. “This can’t be just a side project in a bigger company.”

Those companies also all grew up in an era when text, not images, was the dominant form of information. That leaves an opportunity to be the first successful image-native tech company, Mitra says, pointing out that threesevenths of the world’s population is either illiterate or minimally literate. Who’s going to be their Google?

“We are heading toward a world, inside five years, where computer vision, A.I., and natural-language translation will make everyday information about the stuff in front of you absolutely seamless,” Mitra says. “We want to play a big role in shaping that world.”

“We’ve taken the majority of human knowledge and created a visual DNA for it,” Mitra says.