Thanks, Capitalism

What I Learned When Our Start-up Tried Amazon’s New Peeing-in-Jars System

You have to hand it to Amazon. It makes powerful trends look easy.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

“…The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.”

— Excerpt from Jeff Bezos’s “Day 1” Letter

As the founder of Gerbyl — a start-up that’s often described as “Hello Fresh, for gerbils” — I make sure to encourage my team to never stop learning and innovating. That’s why 2 of our 29 company values are “Learn!” and “Innovate!” And that’s also why I’ve challenged my team to embrace powerful trends quickly.

A recent example of this came when our COO shared an article with me on Slack, along with the message, “Can you believe this?” The article was about how Amazon has become so efficient, its employees are peeing in bottles.

“This is brilliant,” I wrote back. “We have to embrace this so we have a tailwind!”

In case you weren’t aware, Amazon’s revenue now exceeds $100 billion dollars a quarter, which is proof that everything they do is worth trying. And this seemed like just the kind of thing we could use to continue disrupting the gerbil-supplies industry.

Early the next morning, we held a kickoff meeting to decide the scope of the project.

“Well, guys,” Taylor, our brand strategist, said. “I’m really excited about this because it’s not every day you get to ask the question ‘If our company were a jar of urine, what kind of jar would it be?’ ”

She led us through a deck with 437 slides, many of which were just lists of adjectives. And then she said, “A great way to approach this is to think about a new employee’s first day.”

“You mean Day 1?” I said.

“Uh…yeah.”

“Love it!” I said.

“They get to their desk,” Taylor said, “and there’s their welcome kit: their new MacBook, their company T-shirt, their bumper sticker, and their pee jar. What does that look like? What kind of pee jar says, Gerbyl?”

That’s when TJ, the guy who always asks “How will this scale?” said, “Before anyone suggests YETIs, I don’t think that will scale.”

Then the room was silent for a pretty long time.

Finally, Kaitlyn, our head of software passwords, suggested mason jars. Then Sarah, our associate creative director was like, “Is this a wedding in 2012?” And even though we have a sign in the brainstorming room that says “There are no bad ideas,” we all laughed and could tell Kaitlyn was mentally updating her résumé to start sending to other companies.

Things got silent again, so Tom, who always brings up next steps, said, “In terms of next steps, maybe we should all brainstorm on our own and meet again in a week.”

We started a Slack channel, mood boards, Pinterest boards, and sent out a company survey. This led to a few days of furious Googling in which we tried to discover what kind of jar Amazon employees use, but all we found were pictures of Powerade bottles.

In our next meeting, Thad, the guy who always says “Let’s go back to first principles,” said, “Maybe we should go back to first principles here. Why are we creating the constraint of a jar?”

This kind of blew everyone’s mind, because no one had thought of a jar as an artificial constraint.

That’s when Teddy, the guy who always quotes famous people, went, “Eames said, ‘Design depends largely on constraints.’ ”

Thad said, “Our essential goal is to increase efficiency by removing trips to the bathroom, like Amazon.” Couldn’t we accomplish that by constructing a trough?”

Everyone thought about that for a moment, and then I said what we were all thinking: “Some members of our team might have issues with a communal whiz pit.”

“Maybe some copy could help with that,” suggested our copywriter, Casey. “Maybe a sign near the trough that said, ‘We’re all in this together.’ And then, below that, a description of how using the pit ties in with our company values of “Collaboration!” and “Transparency!”

“I hope there’s transparency,” Matt said. “We don’t want anyone shitting in there, do we?”

Our brand strategist said transparency was important, and reminded everyone it was one of the words in her slide deck.

Then Rory, the guy who always asks “How can we future-proof this?” Asked, “How do you think we can future-proof this?”

“Future-proofing” always kind of leaves us stumped, so Jon, our assistant project manager said, “Great exploration, guys. But a lot of this is out of the scope for our MVP version.”

We decided to pivot to our values of “Speed!” “Iteration!” and “Empowerment!” and launch a pilot program in which our team could pee into whatever they wanted to.

As a data-driven company, we felt this would enable us to collect more insights.

After the first two weeks, we learned that if you deny people the chance to leave their desks, they’ll pee into just about anything — bottles, coffee cups, even the drawers of their own desks if nothing else is available. So many data points!

But now we had a new problem: Emptying the jars without slowing the team down.

Todd, our chief product officer, asked, “Can we automate this?”

“And maybe future-proof it?” said Rory.

We Googled “Jar-peeing best practices” but only got links to backpacking websites.

After a few weeks of white-boarding the problem, we decided to conduct a formal search for a thought leader on the subject.

We called together our head of people, our head of happiness, our head of PR, our head of communications, our copywriter, our freelance recruiter, our COO, our director of inclusion, our director of seating arrangements, and our board of directors.

It took some work, but we created the role of Chief Relief Officer.

Again, kudos to our copywriter, Casey, for making the job post really pop: “Oversee the efficiency of the staff by streamlining the production flow and ensuring the team remains engaged, focused, and comfortable.”

Requirements included a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and at least 7 years’ related experience. All candidates would also have to take our standard personality assessment to make sure their subconscious aligned with our company values.

Then…no one responded. Not a single person. Several weeks passed.

Now, after eleven retrospectives, we’ve had to accept that most of the architects of this groundbreaking model are probably employed at Amazon, and there’s no way we have the resources to lure any of them away.

I have huge admiration for my colleagues, many of whom pulled 80-hour weeks devoted to this project. But, for the time being, we have to admit that we just don’t have the bandwidth for such a significant operational shift.

The project is really out of scope for the project.

Teddy, the guy who always quotes things, put it best when he said, “It makes me think of Roosevelt’s ‘Man in the Arena’ speech:

‘It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how problematic it is to make people so insecure about their jobs that they have to pee into bottles. The credit belongs to the man with a trillion dollars, who is in the arena, or who maybe just owns the arena.”

After much soul-searching, I believe that someday peeing in bottles will be right for us. But Gerbyl isn’t a trillion-dollar company yet. We don’t have the leverage to make this happen overnight. We’re just a group of regular people who have a passion for gerbils and delivering great experiences. So until we complete our Series H round of funding, we’ll just have to keep using modern plumbing like everyone else.

The only practice we will not give up is Uber’s model of losing money indefinitely. Because if we abandoned that, would we even be a start-up anymore?