A contractor for Atlas reported Sydney Von Arex (one of the co-founders) saying, “I do not believe in budgets”. Is this true?
I don’t know the exact source of this quote, but I can offer a related quote from myself during a bunch of recent renovation work I’ve been coordinating.
When we first started working on renovating the hotel property Lightcone is currently working on, the contractors we had hired would generally make extremely budget-conscious decisions, calling us about a large number of individual decisions, checking in with us far too frequently, and when given a budget, acted with great risk-aversion on trying to desperately avoid going over the budget even a tiny bit. This ended up costing our core team a bunch of time, time that we valued at substantially above the savings that would usually result from this kind of checking in.
We tried for a while to figure out what the best way to communicate what we want is, and at least with some new contractors, the instruction that we have given a few times is “for this project you are working with an unlimited budget. We are primarily concerned with speed and quality, not how much money we spend. If you are considering making a purchase or a financial decision above $15k that we haven’t previously discussed, please briefly check in with me, though it will probably be fine, I generally trust you to make reasonable tradeoffs here.”
I was definitely quite concerned that this would cause us to drastically overspend, and it has caused some issues in one or two places, but I think overall the time savings of our core staff time, as well as the quality improvements and the speed improvements of the overall projects have been worth it (though we have gone somewhat over our intended overall budget for our renovation plans, and we’ve been doing more detailed budget-setting and accounting since the FTX collapse, so I also don’t think this kind of policy is obviously great).
I don’t have a ton of privileged information about how Atlas makes decisions here, but I at least could see someone walking away from Lightcone with the impression that we don’t believe in budgets, and I would be happy to defend our current policy.
I don’t know the exact source of this quote, but I can offer a related quote from myself during a bunch of recent renovation work I’ve been coordinating.
When we first started working on renovating the hotel property Lightcone is currently working on, the contractors we had hired would generally make extremely budget-conscious decisions, calling us about a large number of individual decisions, checking in with us far too frequently, and when given a budget, acted with great risk-aversion on trying to desperately avoid going over the budget even a tiny bit. This ended up costing our core team a bunch of time, time that we valued at substantially above the savings that would usually result from this kind of checking in.
We tried for a while to figure out what the best way to communicate what we want is, and at least with some new contractors, the instruction that we have given a few times is “for this project you are working with an unlimited budget. We are primarily concerned with speed and quality, not how much money we spend. If you are considering making a purchase or a financial decision above $15k that we haven’t previously discussed, please briefly check in with me, though it will probably be fine, I generally trust you to make reasonable tradeoffs here.”
I was definitely quite concerned that this would cause us to drastically overspend, and it has caused some issues in one or two places, but I think overall the time savings of our core staff time, as well as the quality improvements and the speed improvements of the overall projects have been worth it (though we have gone somewhat over our intended overall budget for our renovation plans, and we’ve been doing more detailed budget-setting and accounting since the FTX collapse, so I also don’t think this kind of policy is obviously great).
I don’t have a ton of privileged information about how Atlas makes decisions here, but I at least could see someone walking away from Lightcone with the impression that we don’t believe in budgets, and I would be happy to defend our current policy.