In university I had a teacher specialist on industry production factories.
He said something I grabbed: "When I go to a company, in five minutes I can see if the owners work hard or work well. When you go to a well managed company is very boring, all things are made routine and made without effort"
If you work 20 hrs day STOP!! Your work quality/hr is very low, you make your life hell, and your products reflect that. Start learning how to make effective use of your time. There are specialist on that, read books, see videos(eg Even Pagan) learn to avoid distractions, focus like a laser on what brings value to your company(marketing:learn about people necessities ).
I keep seeing these types of articles and it's the same story over and over again, "one must work 20 hours a day 7 days a week in order to be successful with your startup." Is this always the case? I can't imagine it is. Surely there are people out there who ran their startup successfully on a part-time basis while working a full time job and enjoying quality family time.
(b) That is what is reinforced by those who have been successful
How many stories have you heard that were basically, "Yeah, I started this company part-time, never worked on it more than a few hours a day because I had this other job, and it was bought for 20 million bucks!" Personally, I've heard none.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I still work 20 hours a day, because I don't. Last summer I was close, though. I stopped sacrificing my health at the beginning of this year when I began going to the gym every day again and stopped smoking a pack a day. Now that spring is upon us, I'm even beginning to remember a time when "woman" was a word in my vernacular.
The reason you see these types of articles and the reason you will continue to is because for those of us who have no other jobs, our startups are our lives. I could work for Big Co. and go home at the end of the day not at all worrying about whether or not they will be there tomorrow. The company would pay me X to perform Y and that would be exactly what I'd perform (if I wanted a promotion, maybe Y+1).
At TicketStumbler, I am not merely a cog. If I don't write code for that new feature or fix that bug or setup that new server, nobody else is going to. This means that not only do I constantly have a lot to do, but it all has pretty much the same priority: done yesterday. And if I decide to take a few days off instead of doing one of those things? I get the pleasure of feeling guilty about it the entire time.
So it basically boils down to: at an early-stage startup you have the pleasure of controlling your destiny and being your own boss; for those of us who cannot stomach traditional employment, we feel as if we actually have a soul. The downside? Well, you live in a constant and unrelenting state of stress and obligation. The effects of that state differ from person to person, but alienations/estrangement from family and friends and unwillingness to prioritize anything other than the company are common ones.
(b) I've heard of many Internet companies like this.
In fact, most of the stories I've heard of companies doing the 20-hour day thing end in failure. I think more people try it that way.
Actually, I should rephrase that---companies that START OUT with 20 hour days more often than not end in failure.
The reason why is simple: there's no reason why you need to work that hard until you've found a "magic model" and are scaling it.
In other words, here is my blueprint for maximizing your odds of starting a successful Internet company:
a) have stable income.
b) start side projects part time, don't work on them for more than a few hours a day.
c) once one of the side projects is generating significant revenue more than income source A, or is growing like a Twitter, then slowly ramp up to where you're working the 10+ hour day thing
While it might works for some, it definitely not working for me.
I am still a fond believer in going full-time if you're doing startup. The reason is because, 95% of the people that i know (include me), work much more effectively if you go full time. Your speed are just faster and you discover dead-end faster (and most of us definitely hit that wall). Beside those, i've seen again and again that if you don't jump on it full time, most people will have "excuse" to go back to their job / school. There is always excuse to drop the project especially when things get tough/rejected (your whole hypotheses about the business collape? rejection by Y Combinator?).
My experience is, when you put yourself on the line, you'll go extra mile to grab anything that are needed to be successful. Understandable though that this is more possible for person like me, single-and-no-family.
What you describe is the no-risk route. However, by going full time on a project you increase its chances of success significantly. I'd argue that it is very hard to determine that an idea (including successive iterations) will not lead to a successful internet company till you go full time on it.
> However, by going full time on a project you increase its chances of success significantly.
Yes, you do increase the project's chances of "success" significantly. You don't, however, increase your chances of success. Instead, you increase your chances of failure and decrease your chances of significant success.
The reason is because odds are, you've chosen the wrong project. Also, as things inevitably go wrong, if you don't have a cushion you're greatly increasing your chances of failure.
> What you describe is the no-risk route.
There is still risk in putting time and/or money into a project part time. Also, even if your project has traction there will still be a lot of risk in going at it full time.
I think the opposite of what I'm describing is not even the high risk route, it's the gambling route. You get more of a rush but it's not wise to do and generally ends badly.
> I'd argue that it is very hard to determine that an idea (including successive iterations) will not lead to a successful internet company till you go full time on it.
I disagree. I think you should assume odds are very high that the idea will not lead to a successful internet company, UNLESS you have good traction when you go full time on it.
It's not only not the case that you must do it, it's usually suboptimal, it's just hard to tell that from the inside. He even mentions himself that he's working at a greatly reduced capacity. If he spent less time at work and more time on himself, he'd probably get more done.
From what I've observed, when people say they spend "X hours a day working" (for some outrageously high X) what they're really talking about is how much time they spend at work, which is not the same thing. These quantitative games are a bit silly. It reminds me of when people brag about how many lines of code they churn out, as if that were a good thing.
There is a real issue, though. Most startups demand an intensity of commitment that is difficult to reconcile with part-time engagement or even, it seems, with so-called work-life balance.
'Hard work' is a relative term. In the end, it's all about competition. If you're building anything worthwhile, you will have competitors - if not in the beginning, after you launch. In order to be better than the competition, working smart is not enough, because you're not the only smart person around. The only option is to work smarter and harder than the competition. Now you could be in an industry where everyone works 8 hours a day, so working harder wouldn't give you too much incremental advantage. Unfortunately (or fortunately for those who can work 'hard'), tech startups are not that industry.
By losing that much weight that quickly he is actually overcompensating for one unhealthy behavior with another. He'd be much better off trying to sustainably eat better over a long period of time.
At our first month of start up (not that it's been long anw), we used to work like 17 - 18 hours a day. It doesn't take long for us to realize that this whole thing is more of a marathon than sprint. Since then, i have been trying to adjust my life more.
It's still not balance though. I can relate to that constant thinking and working condition. Often, i got a friend ask me, "so, tomorrow is weekend, what are you going to do?" and my typical answer is "work". Because, when you're doing startup, there is no more weekdays or weekend. For me, everyday is just the same. If i don't sleep due to biological needs, then i work.
Having said all that, now i try to balance the equation a little bit with exercise, socialize with family and friends. After all, most of the time, the "quantum leap" in our business concept are discovered during that "downtime".
Beside, why are we working so hard anyway in the first place? I don't want to lose all my family and friends or key moments in my child's life, while my startup make it. I think this fallacy is well described by Marshall Goldsmith in his book "What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful" about goal obsession. I read it years ago and think it's a great book for most of us here in HN, dare to say, A personality.
My experience in talking with people who have successfully grown startups to medium to large sizes is that they almost universally regret their former belief that the degree to which they worked hard was necessary to get the company to that stage. From my own experience growing a firm from nothing to a profitable low seven figures sales a year, I would agree.
I know that at the beginning I felt that my talent and experience was absolutely vital to the firm's growth. That if I did not put in that extra hour, I was robbing the company of its potential future.
The reality is that I am not that smart and not that talented. Much more important than running around personally implementing everything is growing a group of effective managers who take pride in their work and whom you can trust in running your business.
I think a weakness in many internet businesses (certainly not all of them though) is that because they are so little focused on revenue, it becomes necessary to either (a) try to implement everything yourself, thereby saving labor costs, or (b) spend tons of time raising money (and destroying your ownership in the process), which deducts from time you can spend selecting and growing your managers.
The first time I felt I realized I could leave my company for a week with no cell phone, no BlackBerry, no Internet access, and not be terrified of what would happen -- it was a huge relief, and that was when I began seeing the folly of my ways. It's not about me, it's about my wonderful managers. Working obscene hours is not the way to do that.
Of course, you shouldn't be a slacker either -- people do take cues from you -- but as others have suggested it is far more important to develop your firm's talent than to try to do everything yourself.
As Mikhail Gorvachev wrote in his book "Perestroika" the big problem with the Soviet Union was its mentality:
"More work=better"
"More materials used=better"
"More time spent=better"
"More effort applied=better"
People cared more about "looking" hard working, that about the actual product itself.
He learned looking at capitalist that naturals were rewarded (people that make some things "effortless"). In communism talented were bad seen.
"Less work doing the same= better"
If something did what it had to do with half the work it was considered twice better, not twice bad.
Look at this, I was in a big company that valued programming work per lines of code written!!. This is like valuing the worth of a plane by weight in direct proportion.If my code works with ten time less code,its really much better.
this is the same mentality i had while working on my first startup and it's a fallacy. the most productive startup founders i know have activities/interest outside of work and aren't anywhere close to this extreme.
neglecting your health is not a badge of how hard you work. one of my startup investors, chris sacca, recently told me he's weary of founders who don't exercise regularly. exercise is a net gain.
He said something I grabbed: "When I go to a company, in five minutes I can see if the owners work hard or work well. When you go to a well managed company is very boring, all things are made routine and made without effort"
If you work 20 hrs day STOP!! Your work quality/hr is very low, you make your life hell, and your products reflect that. Start learning how to make effective use of your time. There are specialist on that, read books, see videos(eg Even Pagan) learn to avoid distractions, focus like a laser on what brings value to your company(marketing:learn about people necessities ).