> My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:
* Founder's parents' income
* Founder's parents' education level
* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to
I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.
Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.
Oh, so the secret to success is hard work?! Damn it! I've been such an imbecile over the past 6 years - If I had worked 8 days per week (instead of my usual 7 days), I would have succeeded for sure by now! I guess I'm too lazy.
I really need to get myself a mentor like Marissa Mayer so I can learn about work ethics.
Woof. Surely there is some in between here. I'm not sure if this was intentional but I don't see why hard work on the part of early startup employees needs to be diminished.
“Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week
Really? I always thought that pulling all-nighters hurts more than it helps. Optimizing your bathroom breaks seems really silly to me.
It absolutely is unhelpful in anything more than short bursts. It is very odd how obsessed she seems with hours-worked.
Mayer is someone who proclaims to believe in the power of data. I'm curious then what data she has to back her views on crunch==maximization of value creation. Most of the data I've seen says the opposite. It seems Mayer may be letting her anecdotal experience in the early days of Google trump data here. (A it's also possible that anyone, including Mayer, can have misperceived or misattributed the importance of sustained crunch in those days or its causative effect on success.)
My intuition is that for the typical person, it hurts more than it helps.
But life is unfair, and there probably are some people legitimately can put in 130 hours of net-positive work for extended periods of time. And presumably, these people will be disproportionately represented among the "successful".
Another issue is it seems like it'd be hard to tell while you're pulling those ridiculous hours whether or not you're part of the "lucky" subset that actually continues to be productive.
The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation—and the vacations were few and far between.
My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
This was actually the part I found most surprising and interesting. One the one hand, it's scary that you have to put in insanely long hours like that to succeed. But on the other hand, it's liberating knowing that one of the keys to success, is something everyone has access to.
If some random person had made the above comments, I would have laughed them off as an insane workaholic. But knowing that this advice is coming from someone's who's seen it first hand at early-stage-Google, and many other startups... it's hard to ignore it, no matter how much I may want to.
Nonsense. This directly contradicts over 150 years of research that says working over 40 hours a week doesn't lead to increased productivity (and actually hurts it). [0]
In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive. [1]
Watch out for survivorship bias[1]. Business books are full of it: Look only at companies that achieved A, and then find the B they did in common. B must cause A. Ignore the companies that did B and did not achieve A. Ignore the companies that achieved A without doing B.
The amount you work is one of the few variables in your control. I'm still a believer that luck plays a bigger role than most will give credit.
Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.
The "how often you go to the bathroom" line is a pretty big hint that there's some amount of bombast in here. How long does it take to go to the bathroom?
I am very suspect of 130 hours/week being sustainable at a level of quality anyone would appreciate. I do think it's easier to achieve in a management position. I don't see how a developer can be productive working those hours regularly. But the article seems to imply you should be ready to work that many hours all the time, not during crunch times to get things launched. The latter is definitely possible.
But maybe this is just one of those legendary questions people ask to weed out those who would immediately balk because they want to have a life outside of work.
It's hilarious is that Marissa Mayer has this "work all the time and you'll succeed ethos."
Meanwhile Yahoo's office are still empty from people that work from home and most people on cruise control. I've never met a workaholic from Yahoo. Any person worth their salt was gone long ago. The rest are there because why quit a plum cruise control gig.
The bit she has in here about knowing which companies will succeed based on who's there on the weekends is such a crock of shit. It's like she's saying all the ones that failed it's because the people involved didn't work hard enough. That is so condescending and insulting.
Start ups fail for all kinds of reasons, sure sometimes it's because people didn't work hard enough. But not remotely always. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out. Sometimes people get screwed by a bad choice, sometimes that bad choice was made because they were working so hard they weren't thinking straight.
Any kind of statement like saying that you can tell which start ups will succeed or fail based on a single criteria is just hubris and obviously wrong.
I agree. The difference between 40-80 a week isn't that much when you can consider some places you can get by doing just a few hours of work. If you create an atmosphere where people are excited to work then you are perhaps 20x more productive than some other companies.
> If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan
> when I was 18, I would have missed every
> great thing that ever happened to me.
I'm not a fan of five-year plans, or any x-year plans, but this sounds very passive - in the sense of 'happened to me'.
Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.
There are some mothers who want to work; there are some mothers who need to work; there are some mothers who want to stay home; there are some mothers who need to stay home
Interesting quote from the boss that banned working from home!
> The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.
You could add to that "and care not a jot about the quality of the decisions you're making."
> But I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
_____
As someone who just created the general outline of a five-year plan (my first one), I'm wondering what other HNers have to say about the subject.
I'm currently watching a Stanford class online called blitz scaling and recently saw the class in which they brought in Marissa Mayer. I enjoyed it but it bothers me that a lot of what she says in this interview is word for word the same things she said in the video. Must have a memorized speech for this type of thing.
marissa mayer values hours at work; she'd better because she's logged a lot and accomplished basically nothing as yahoo's "boss". below the article, stan lee talks about bosses:
"What’s the worst advice you ever got?
Listen to what your boss tells you. My boss never liked the idea of Spider-Man. He didn’t want to do it. I had to sneak Spider-Man into another book, over my boss’s head. Experts really know nothing."
> In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
I have nothing against Marissa Mayer and some respects really appreciate having a prominent female CEO but did anyone else find that shocking that she would say that? I mean she is a CEO. Wouldn't she want to avoid talking about US political figures. Also I'm not really sure if it is a dig or a compliment. It could be a compliment. Lots of busy people can have the facade of looking like they have relaxing lives which takes even more work.
There is also an intensity factor of work. Some work is insanely intense both physically and mentally and you just can't do 130 hours. I did consulting for 40 hours a month for a brief period. Those 40 hours felt like 40 hours a week. Meanwhile I worked on my own startup and early in its fledgling years my wife complained about how many hours I worked (she claims more than 90 hours) but to me it felt like 40 hour work week.
>> And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
I don't think this has anything to do with working harder. The startups are working on the weekend because they are succeeding, they aren't succeeding because they are working on the weekends.
When you are in a startup that has found a market, and all you have to do is ship the next MVP and you can start printing money, you're pretty motivated to work weekends to make that happen faster, even if it's a bad idea.
I would guess that these successful startups could stop working weekends, change their culture to focus on measuring value and deliverables, and still be successful.
Amount of value being created and number of hours being put in is not neccessarily proportional, even if the people in question have similar skill level (or are actually the same guy/girl). What you do, what you don't do, where you decide to cut corners, and where you decide to go full in, counts as much as raw effort and skill.
Now, if everyone would make ideal strategic choices and the whole thing would be a zero-sum game, then I'd agree with you, the ones that put in more time would reap more benefit. But looking around me (admittedly, far away from SV, in a backwater Eastern European country), that doesn't look to be the case.
Quick count, how many of you (us) are reading HN and counting that in work time?
1) They are passionate about their product.
2) They have an 'oh shit' deadline due soon.
3) They had nothing else better to do and enjoy their coworkers.
I've been in the all 3 situations before. To believe being there on a weekend for one reason, and one reason only, shows her myopia. If her indicator of success is the # of hours you put in, it explains why her turnaround failed...
"True" startups (let's say, founders and maybe one other employee) have a lot of work to do that doesn't take your full mental firepower. Paperwork, polishing, selling, attending various things and marketing, etc. A "true" startup doesn't have everybody spending their 80 hours heads-down on technical coding.
I do agree that you can't code for 80 hours straight for weeks on end, but "80 hours of work" isn't necessarily that. I also agree that it's still stressful even so, and I wouldn't recommend living that way for years on end, but younger folk can afford it for a while.
Yeah because the guy who is putting in 80 hours per week will have issues in physical and mental health, marriage, sleep, social life, etc. Better work sustainable and look further than next week.
I'd retort: do people still think that working 80 hour weeks makes you more productive than working 50 hour weeks? [1] [2] [3]
In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:
- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration);
- personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise);
- blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying);
- the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).
Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...
And how long will that guy last before he totally burns out and starts producing shitty, unreliable code? Not to mention being tired and pissed all the time and impossible to work with...
Success isn't static, 'indicator' doesn't mean 'definition', and correlation is not causation.
In other words, success for one startup doesn't mean success for another (let alone personal success). Working weekends doesn't mean you'll succeed, and vice versa. And working crazy hours doesn't mean that's why you succeeded.
> Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
The 80-hour guy's personal ROI is half that of the 40-hour guy. Meaning the return has to be twice as good to justify his additional time investment. This is great for the company, but terrible for the individual.
Boy, I disagree with Mayer's take on sustained crunch => success. But she seems to repeat it.
> When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom
This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is bad for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.
> I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success
No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.
And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:
> There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is negative.
This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.
Moving onto totally different topics...
> > Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?
> In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...
Here, here! Totally agree.
> I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.
> We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.
That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.
It seems the company (and Mayer) could have landed in a much better spot if they'd been proactive in selling off or restructuring assets. If they ended up in a spot where they're splitting up assets amyway, it might have been better to do that from the get go and use it as a way to clean up the shareholder base at the same time. Plenty of PE and IB firms would have been interested in helping to do a structured deal around Yahoo's investment assets and this might have positioned Yahoo much, much better to execute the turnaround Mayer seems to have clearly wanted to focus on (stronger balance sheet, less ammo for activist investors, opportunity to clear out unhelpful shareholders, perhaps even an opportunity to go private, if that would have been helpful).
the funny thing is that, imagine business is a car and CEO is the driver. if you step on gas (working harder) but heading toward the wrong direction, you would end up further away from the destination.
to me Mayer is saying Yahoo did not get over the hump cause they dont have enough determination, while failed to acknowledge that she drove them the wrong direction past few years.
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:
* Founder's parents' income
* Founder's parents' education level
* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to
[+] [-] matwood|9 years ago|reply
I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.
Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
I really need to get myself a mentor like Marissa Mayer so I can learn about work ethics.
[+] [-] sp527|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waylandsmithers|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ma2rten|9 years ago|reply
Really? I always thought that pulling all-nighters hurts more than it helps. Optimizing your bathroom breaks seems really silly to me.
[+] [-] erdevs|9 years ago|reply
Mayer is someone who proclaims to believe in the power of data. I'm curious then what data she has to back her views on crunch==maximization of value creation. Most of the data I've seen says the opposite. It seems Mayer may be letting her anecdotal experience in the early days of Google trump data here. (A it's also possible that anyone, including Mayer, can have misperceived or misattributed the importance of sustained crunch in those days or its causative effect on success.)
[+] [-] akavi|9 years ago|reply
But life is unfair, and there probably are some people legitimately can put in 130 hours of net-positive work for extended periods of time. And presumably, these people will be disproportionately represented among the "successful".
Another issue is it seems like it'd be hard to tell while you're pulling those ridiculous hours whether or not you're part of the "lucky" subset that actually continues to be productive.
[+] [-] weka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whack|9 years ago|reply
My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
This was actually the part I found most surprising and interesting. One the one hand, it's scary that you have to put in insanely long hours like that to succeed. But on the other hand, it's liberating knowing that one of the keys to success, is something everyone has access to.
If some random person had made the above comments, I would have laughed them off as an insane workaholic. But knowing that this advice is coming from someone's who's seen it first hand at early-stage-Google, and many other startups... it's hard to ignore it, no matter how much I may want to.
[+] [-] asdfologist|9 years ago|reply
In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive. [1]
[0] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac...
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
[+] [-] econner|9 years ago|reply
Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.
[+] [-] dionidium|9 years ago|reply
Nobody's ever failed because they pee too often.
[+] [-] beachstartup|9 years ago|reply
not to mention all the people who worked even harder, and failed anyway. or worse.
i think when you make your money $100M at a time, you just tend to think you're right about everything. can't say i blame her, i probably would too.
maybe i should look into marrying a VC also.
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|9 years ago|reply
But maybe this is just one of those legendary questions people ask to weed out those who would immediately balk because they want to have a life outside of work.
[+] [-] random_coder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mentos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thieving_magpie|9 years ago|reply
I'm sure she has a whole staff of weekend workers that spend quite a lot of time making sure you know just how much they're working.
[+] [-] spaceflunky|9 years ago|reply
Meanwhile Yahoo's office are still empty from people that work from home and most people on cruise control. I've never met a workaholic from Yahoo. Any person worth their salt was gone long ago. The rest are there because why quit a plum cruise control gig.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zaphar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebbv|9 years ago|reply
Start ups fail for all kinds of reasons, sure sometimes it's because people didn't work hard enough. But not remotely always. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out. Sometimes people get screwed by a bad choice, sometimes that bad choice was made because they were working so hard they weren't thinking straight.
Any kind of statement like saying that you can tell which start ups will succeed or fail based on a single criteria is just hubris and obviously wrong.
[+] [-] mrits|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedd|9 years ago|reply
Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.
Clearly we live in different worlds.
[+] [-] gaius|9 years ago|reply
Interesting quote from the boss that banned working from home!
[+] [-] kristianc|9 years ago|reply
You could add to that "and care not a jot about the quality of the decisions you're making."
[+] [-] personlurking|9 years ago|reply
_____
As someone who just created the general outline of a five-year plan (my first one), I'm wondering what other HNers have to say about the subject.
[+] [-] thesimpsons1022|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lintiness|9 years ago|reply
"What’s the worst advice you ever got? Listen to what your boss tells you. My boss never liked the idea of Spider-Man. He didn’t want to do it. I had to sneak Spider-Man into another book, over my boss’s head. Experts really know nothing."
[+] [-] agentgt|9 years ago|reply
I have nothing against Marissa Mayer and some respects really appreciate having a prominent female CEO but did anyone else find that shocking that she would say that? I mean she is a CEO. Wouldn't she want to avoid talking about US political figures. Also I'm not really sure if it is a dig or a compliment. It could be a compliment. Lots of busy people can have the facade of looking like they have relaxing lives which takes even more work.
There is also an intensity factor of work. Some work is insanely intense both physically and mentally and you just can't do 130 hours. I did consulting for 40 hours a month for a brief period. Those 40 hours felt like 40 hours a week. Meanwhile I worked on my own startup and early in its fledgling years my wife complained about how many hours I worked (she claims more than 90 hours) but to me it felt like 40 hour work week.
[+] [-] uptown|9 years ago|reply
Anyone want to take that bet?
[+] [-] bluedino|9 years ago|reply
Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
[+] [-] embwbam|9 years ago|reply
When you are in a startup that has found a market, and all you have to do is ship the next MVP and you can start printing money, you're pretty motivated to work weekends to make that happen faster, even if it's a bad idea.
I would guess that these successful startups could stop working weekends, change their culture to focus on measuring value and deliverables, and still be successful.
[+] [-] allendoerfer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senko|9 years ago|reply
Now, if everyone would make ideal strategic choices and the whole thing would be a zero-sum game, then I'd agree with you, the ones that put in more time would reap more benefit. But looking around me (admittedly, far away from SV, in a backwater Eastern European country), that doesn't look to be the case.
Quick count, how many of you (us) are reading HN and counting that in work time?
[+] [-] fma|9 years ago|reply
They are there for 3 reasons.
1) They are passionate about their product. 2) They have an 'oh shit' deadline due soon. 3) They had nothing else better to do and enjoy their coworkers.
I've been in the all 3 situations before. To believe being there on a weekend for one reason, and one reason only, shows her myopia. If her indicator of success is the # of hours you put in, it explains why her turnaround failed...
[+] [-] jerf|9 years ago|reply
I do agree that you can't code for 80 hours straight for weeks on end, but "80 hours of work" isn't necessarily that. I also agree that it's still stressful even so, and I wouldn't recommend living that way for years on end, but younger folk can afford it for a while.
[+] [-] Kenji|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candu|9 years ago|reply
In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:
- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration); - personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise); - blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying); - the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).
Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-... [2] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc... [3] http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
[+] [-] ivanhoe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basseq|9 years ago|reply
In other words, success for one startup doesn't mean success for another (let alone personal success). Working weekends doesn't mean you'll succeed, and vice versa. And working crazy hours doesn't mean that's why you succeeded.
> Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
The 80-hour guy's personal ROI is half that of the 40-hour guy. Meaning the return has to be twice as good to justify his additional time investment. This is great for the company, but terrible for the individual.
[+] [-] TylerE|9 years ago|reply
Dieing of a stress-induced heart attack at 35 isn't winning at life.
[+] [-] liveoneggs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrits|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erdevs|9 years ago|reply
> When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom
This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is bad for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.
> I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success
No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.
And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:
> There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is negative.
This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.
Moving onto totally different topics...
> > Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?
> In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...
Here, here! Totally agree.
> I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.
> We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.
That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.
It seems the company (and Mayer) could have landed in a much better spot if they'd been proactive in selling off or restructuring assets. If they ended up in a spot where they're splitting up assets amyway, it might have been better to do that from the get go and use it as a way to clean up the shareholder base at the same time. Plenty of PE and IB firms would have been interested in helping to do a structured deal around Yahoo's investment assets and this might have positioned Yahoo much, much better to execute the turnaround Mayer seems to have clearly wanted to focus on (stronger balance sheet, less ammo for activist investors, opportunity to clear out unhelpful shareholders, perhaps even an opportunity to go private, if that would have been helpful).
Shame this didn't happen.
[+] [-] whoops1122|9 years ago|reply
to me Mayer is saying Yahoo did not get over the hump cause they dont have enough determination, while failed to acknowledge that she drove them the wrong direction past few years.
[+] [-] untilHellbanned|9 years ago|reply
Seems like she a walking business cliche. Can anyone counter this with evidence of her creativity?
[+] [-] sideproject|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinko|9 years ago|reply