Hello, and welcome to our startup. We hope you’re enjoying your complimentary snifter of vaporized coconut water. Once you’re done, please place the glass into one of the blue receptacles around the office, which will send the glass to be washed and dried. Do not place it into one of the red receptacles. The red receptacles take whatever you put inside of them and launch it into space.
If you look to your left, you’ll see one of our employees using a state-of-the-art ergonomic sleeping desk. Most startups have standing desks, but we have sleeping desks, dancing desks, and even skateboarding desks. The skateboarding desks are just large skateboards you can use to skate around the office. Be careful while skating, though, because we don’t offer any sort of medical insurance, since our benefits budget all goes toward cool desks.
As you can probably tell by looking around, every employee at our startup is 23 years old. On the morning of your 24th birthday, the barcode on your employee ID stops working, and you can no longer enter our building. We do this to ensure our company has a ceaseless, youthful energy. We believe old people are displeasing to look at and also, bad at ideas.
We do things a little differently here at our startup. First of all, we have a completely horizontal, non-hierarchical organizational structure. There are no bosses, no subordinates, and no mugs with jokes about people’s job titles written on them. Nobody has a job title here. All of our employees put “Thinkologist” as their occupation on their résumés. We show our commitment to a completely flat hierarchy by not giving anyone a salary. No one at our company earns a single dollar because everyone is equally important here.
One of the perks of working here is that our workspace offers a dizzying array of complimentary dining options. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are free for all employees. Sometimes we wonder why our employees would ever want to eat anywhere else! To that end, we outfit each new employee with a tiny device inside his or her mouth that makes any food purchased or cooked outside of our office taste like sewage. Everyone tends to eat all of their meals at the office because of the sewage mouth device and because there’s nothing like getting to know your coworkers over some delicious poke bowls. If you try to eat a single meal elsewhere, you will throw up because the food will taste like wet garbage.
We want everyone who works here to show a lot of company pride, so several times per year, we print and distribute free apparel for all of our employees. Whether it’s a hoodie, a T-shirt, or a snapback hat, we want our employees to rep our startup. This summer, just in time for beach season, we’re going to be distributing company flip-flops! If our employees are ever caught wearing anything other than official branded clothing with our startup’s logo on it, they get zapped by a drone.
When our employees have some downtime or want a morale boost, they are encouraged to pop into our rec room for some fun and relaxation. We have ping-pong tables, massage chairs, pinball machines, work tasks disguised as video games, big screen televisions, a printer that can print actual living safari animals, board games, talking robots that ask you when you’re going to get back to work, poker tables, cotton candy machines, cameras that watch you at all times, and a glowing orb that you should never touch. We believe when you work hard, you should also get to play hard! We also believe nobody should touch the glowing orb because its powers cannot be wielded by any mortal.
Care for a nap? Well, you are more than welcome to take a quick, refreshing nap in one of our many nap pods. You will be lulled to sleep by the soothing sound of our 23-year-old founder softly whispering startupy things such as, “Disruption,” and “Like Uber, but for horses.”
Oh, you have to meet our office dog! His name is Series B, and he is a labradoodle. Our office is extremely pet-friendly, so employees are encouraged to bring in their pets. However, this policy comes with the understanding that those pets will be put to work if they’re here. We’re in an all-hands-on-deck mode right now, so no one gets to just sit around. Series B is currently working on a pitch deck for a few of our international investors.
Did we mention we’re not like all the other startups? At our startup, employees are encouraged to fail. Failure is good. Failure represents progress toward success. We don’t focus on things like profit, or overhead, or returns on investment. Those things are boring and stupid, like old people.
As soon as a company starts caring about the bottom line more than an awesome time, workplace culture dies. Our employees never have to worry about the bottom line. We continuously shred all of our financial documents and refuse to comply with the IRS. We rent our building from the Armenian Mafia and receive all of our electricity from private generators. We are completely off the grid. Anytime an auditor comes to our office to solicit financial information, we wipe their memory by making them touch the glowing orb from the rec room. One auditor held on to the orb for too long and now he’s trapped in another dimension.
You noted on your application that you’ll be turning 24 in two months. As much as we’re impressed with your background and previous experience, we can only offer you a contract for two months. Once those two months are up, you will become nothing more than an old bag of bones with a rapidly decaying brain. So, can you start this weekend?