Early-stage startups should think twice before offering benefits, that’s the counter-to-popular-wisdom advice from researchers who tracked about 5,000 companies for seven years.

Inc’s Kris Frieswick reports:

Turns out that timing really is everything, especially when it comes to some common employee benefit programs. Researchers led by David S. DeGeest of the University of Groningen recently parsed data from the Kauffman Firm Survey, which for seven years tracked about 5,000 companies launched in 2004, and discovered that benefits can either dramatically increase your startup’s chances of survival or sharply reduce them, depending on when they are provided in your business’s growth cycle. For viability-stage companies, which the new study defined as less than three years old, even a single benefit can decrease the likelihood of succeeding.

The benefits they studied were health insurance, bonuses, flextime, and stock options.

That may well be the research, but good luck finding top talent willing to work for low pay and long hours, without benefits or (more importantly) the real upside that startups offer in stock options?

Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, died last week. His book “High Output Management” is one of my favorites – and I was only introduced to it in 2014 (when I reviewed Ben Horowitz’s book for the WSJ – see here – and here for an introduction to the book by Ben.

Grove’s book is full of wisdom, some of my favorite pieces of advice are:

– It’s very important to send out a recap after a meeting afterwards on what needs to be done. If it’s important enough to hold the meeting, it’s important enough to write notes.

– By saying yes to something you are implicitly saying no to something else.

– Plan in the way a fire department does. You can’t anticipate when the next fire will be, so have a team capable of responding to an unanticipated event as well as an ordinary one.

– Delegation is key to management. But delegation without follow up is abdication.

– Before including people in meetings, ask are they necessary – otherwise you’re wasting the company’s money. (People are worth a certain amount per hour to a company. And just like any purchase, say above $1,000 needs to be justified, shouldn’t the use of someone’s time be treated the same?)

At least according to an academic paper (full paper here), abstract here:

In this study, we evaluate the association between wedding spending and marriage duration using data from a survey of more than 3,000 ever-married persons in the United States. Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony.

So not only doesn’t money guarantee happiness, with marriage bliss it’s the opposite?

My latest piece for the Daily Beast (full article here):

That is because Farhana is not the name she goes by; she goes by Nancy—a nickname her family gave her in 1990, a year after she was born, and the year her family moved to the U.S. from Bangladesh. It’s customary for Bengalis to give their children more English-sounding nicknames that family and friends will use throughout their lives.

Excited to announce that http://Cyecurebox.com  is officially available for public purchase today.

The Upshot in Yesterday’s New York Times asks: “Why aren’t wages rising more briskly when unemployment has fallen so much?”

The answer is because:

Wages aren’t rising because the labor market isn’t as tight as we thought; there are more people available to re-enter the work force as more jobs become available, and the unemployment rate can fall more before it becomes truly hard for firms to find workers.

More jobseekers out there is of course great news for companies for multiple reasons; the only question for companies then is how do you reach those so far passive jobseekers?

Because they’re not actively searching they’re not yet on traditional job boards and digital advertising is unlikely to reach them.

One way we’ve found to work very well for companies is through our public network of jobs kiosks. They catch the eye of people — in the case of this picture it captures the attention of would-be jobseekers strolling through a GGP shopping mall by Baltimore’s  Inner Harbor. Another way is for brands to offer recruiting opportunities at non-job fair events they hold.