The saddest thing about this post to me is the fact that he could only write it because his startup is apparently doing great.
Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
Rather tangentially - I have a one and a half year old daughter who recently turned a question we posed her ("Woah, kiddo. Are you freaking out!?") on it's head. Now sometimes when she gets wound up she goes full-meta and runs back and forth in the kitchen waving her hands in the air yelling "freaking out!", in self-parody.
That reminds me, a little bit, of our startup-culture's relationship to overwork... and don't get me wrong, I don't think articles like this are the ridiculous self-parody, I think they're the really troubling and all-too-real consequence.
Put simply I think we need to do a little more wiggling our toes in the carpet and chilling the fuck out. The world's not suffering from a shortage of first-world martyrs.
Take a breath, go home, do great work tomorrow, and for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.
The really bothersome thing is that this isn't a revelation. Posts about burnout--and the subsequent replies commiserating and declaring how important of an issue this is and how the replier has been through their own version and how it isn't right and change is needed and-really-just-read-the-rest-of-this-thread--are a weekly occurrence on this message board alone. Who knows how many people are not commenting (remember the 90/9/1 rule of internet engagement), say nothing about the people who are just plane not here!
I started having the notion of starting my own company specifically because I was sick of being treated like nothing more than an input variable on some MBAs Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Does it make any sort of sense to work myself to death, in that same vein, in my own endeavours? I would have only traded one tyrant whom I could escape for one I'd be stuck with forever: myself.
> The saddest thing about this post to me is the fact that he could only write it because his startup is apparently doing great.
Agreed.
> Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
...and let's also not forget all the folks who are barely making ends meet at their existing jobs, putting in 60+ hour work weeks for a measly salary that's been stagnate for years or all the folks needing to work an extra job or two just to survive.
>for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.
This made me think: How would a similar blog post from one of the albañiles (construction worker) be? Earning 13 bucks a day doing hard physical work and then having to do another job to earn a little more.
When I was young I met a Spanish tennis player called Rafael Nadal when he was a kid.
He was managed and coached by his uncle who had experience in being a professional football player.
What shocked me is that he did not sacrifice Rafael's life like most of other kids that could be good(examples like Michael Jackson or in tennis the Wiilians' sisters or Arantxa Sanchez Vicario in Spain).
At the time everybody believed that if Rafael was not sent to Barcelona to a tennis Boarding school without seeing their family and giving it all to tennis, he couldn't make it.
Toni, his uncle, believed that if he were to be a good tennis player sacrificing everything else, it was not worth it.
Rafael got to be the best Spanish player of all time.
When I created my company I wanted to be rich, but rich meant not just money, but having time to make love to my wife, see my children grow or reading and writing in HN.
At the end, you discover you could delegate lots of work.
Just a small correction. Rafa Nadal trainer is not the former professional football player Miguel Angel Nadal (who is also Rafa's uncle) but Miguel Angel's brother, Toni Nadal.
While I think it's worth throwing oneself into a startup for a few years, because there are learnings you will get this way, that you will never get anywhere else, there should be a long term vision.
The story of Rafael Nadal is great and applies to startups 100%, because the best founder is the one who has a balanced life and can make use of all of his creativity. A startup founder who doesn't have a life besides the startup, simply won't create a huge startup. Yes, they might be able to make a few hundred million, but they won't be the ones creating a transformative startup.
At the time everybody believed that if Rafael was not sent to Barcelona to a tennis Boarding school without seeing their family and giving it all to tennis, he couldn't make it.
That's hustle. For those of us who are not gifted, we "make it" through hard work and sweat. Whether it's worth it or not is another question, but for most of us giving it your all is necessary to climb high.
If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to live your life the way you want. Typically it takes a lifetime to do that, so you must start early: you must start now if you wish to make it. Otherwise you‘ll end up with a lot of cash and no idea of what kind of life makes you fulfilled.
If you‘re doing something to make a difference – or to make the world a better place – then if you feel like you‘re running out of time then you‘re probably doing it wrong. That sort of goals are rarely if ever such undertakings that are constrained by time. Paradoxically, life is short yet there‘s always plenty of time so as to not have to hurry things. If you work madly for a few years what is it that you think you‘ll win from it if you compare doing that thing you can‘t not do for decades? Or maybe you weren‘t doing a thing you can‘t not do in the first place?
Rush is a sign that you have grown an inflated sense of importance. Nothing is that important, not even the important things.
If you‘re building a company, you have all the time to grow the business. Some families have been doing that for centuries, many individuals for decades. If you have a really great idea, take the time to work on it. If you‘re lucky, someone else does the same thing and finishes faster than you which means you don‘t have to do it at all! You can just enjoy the benefits of the addition of widget X or feature Y in the pool of things tangible in our lives. Maybe the idea wasn‘t that unique after all. But some ideas are and thosee you can work on for years. For many things in life, building them slower makes them last longer. Even a good relationship or a family tree.
For these reasons, I consider it a better approach to weave the things you can‘t not do and your life together. This removes a divide: life goes on at its own pace and along comes your calling but they‘re not in conflict. There‘s no contrast between work and family, or business and private life because everything is scattered around in the timeline of your life in small pieces. There‘s always some work but there‘s always home and family too. Neither is more important than the other and none of the areas can continuously hog a big chunk of your focus.
Daddy must work now, daddy has to write an important email because those people need daddy‘s opinion.
I can‘t have the meeting today, I need to cook dinner and water the garden with my daughter.
For most people a vanishingly small amount of life is now. Most of it has either already happened, or more importantly is still to come.
I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong.
But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.
Startups thinking they are "going to make peoples lives better" or "make the world a better place"... no you're really not. At least not very much. The vast vast majority of people in the world will never ever know about you. It's even quite easy to make the argument that services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter that people have heard of have create at least as many if not more problems than they've solved. Don't get too conceited.
This is the sort of sentimentality that has no place in modern capitalism.
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
This guy is the CEO. So, by definition, this is a management problem. Dwolla has some money now; they can hire people. This guy needs to learn how to build a staff and delegate. He's only done startups, and hasn't worked in a long-established company where they have this figured out.
Some founders have trouble letting go of control. They want to do it all themselves. That doesn't scale.
Exactly. My parents have been running a company since they were both in their twenties. Starting in a country where literally no one has heard of funding or investment(early years after communism fell), they have started with nearly nothing. For the past 20 years they have been spending every second of their time at work, well into their forties. They kept growing, hiring more people(now almost 200), opening more shops, and they just couldn't manage, there's only so many places you could be in at once. Until in the last few years they hired a couple managers to take the load off their backs. Now they only need to visit our offices a couple times a week, are a lot more relaxed than they were some time ago. But my point is - they didn't arrive at this conclusion that they need managers by themselves. They always thought that if they spent 5 minutes left at the office the whole thing would fall apart. Someone else told them that they will burn our completely if they don't start hiring other people to do their work - and it worked. There's no point in having money if you never have time to spend it.
Saying, "they can just hire people" is quite flippant. No matter how many people a CEO hires there is always more that they can do. Using a topic he discussed the f.ounders event... he cannot hire someone to go to it -- that event is exclusively for founders. By not attending he's missing out on a BD opportunity. Could he have hired someone to cover the BoFA or other meetings? Maybe? Maybe not -- would BoFA take the meeting with the brand new BD team member? Would that member be as effective? "Luck" is preparation meeting opportunity and as you're rapidly scaling any business scaling a team that is prepared and ready to take on the opportunities in front of you is as hard or harder than any technology scaling problem the business will face.
It shouldn't be the way. We met Brad Feld last year in Las Vegas (Up Summit) and he talked about his depression[1]. I suggest everyone to read the depression archives on Brad Feld blog [2]. Pretty insightful posts. I tend to be obsessive and I lost someone I really care about because of focus on money and too much work. At the end of the day, you have to focus on your priorities, your wife/family is one and should deserve a decent amount of attention. Brad said that when Amy call him whenever he's in a meeting he will still answer, because she's a priority.
Outworking yourself is not likely the way you will succeed in the long run. Work hard != work smart
George Bernard Shaw said: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
This may be veering off-topic, but reading the suggestions submitted by the reader in that post made me wonder some people (many, in fact) have to actively work so hard to hold off depression. Something is going wrong (organically, culturally, or both) that depression is the default state for so many.
Culturally, I think our relationship with work is certainly part of it. And, some personalities (e.g. driven or obsessive) may just be more susceptible.
Last year I worked for a startup and I allowed myself to be pushed past the breaking point. The founders tempted me with equity (which never actually materialized) and I ended up doing many all nighters and many 90-hour weeks prior to an early release (another company was doing the front-end while we did the server in-house).
I don't have a wife or a puppy, but I shouldn't have allowed this to happen. I was hired to work for a set salary under the assumption of a 40-hour work-week - although I am naturally obsessive so I knew that wouldn't actually last. But I didn't expect my boss to say things like, "If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired," (which turned out to be false, actually).
Pacing is important, and I think it would be interesting to do a startup where pacing is actively encouraged. I think this might be possible at a startup with strong IP protection, good funding, and leadership that sets realistic goals and trusts it's people to be motivated to get it done. It may mean that the public has to wait a bit longer before having a cool new thing available to them, but it also means that the thing will have been constructed by fresh, happy minds.
There is a moral imperative to not buy goods made in sweatshops. There is also a moral imperative to not use software produced under inhumane conditions. Congratulations on discovering this for yourself - and I hope you encourage your coworkers to be humane to each other and themselves as well.
If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired...
This is a bothersome and worrisome comment that probably has been repeated (in some variation) too often. How is this the fault of the developer(s)?
I appreciate that founders need to fulfill their promises, especially when having the backing of investors, but these type of statements seem to indicate a failure in communication and planning (more than execution).
> The founders tempted me with equity (which never actually materialized)
This happens frequently enough that by now it should be a thing that people are 'on to'. If you're being tempted with equity then insist on drawing it up in writing with a solid vesting schedule and don't work a day past the first vesting point without your stock.
I'm reading this while sitting in a restaurant in Nepal. My wife and I are here for around three weeks for hiking to Everest Base Camp. After this, we are headed to China for 11 days. In total, I'm going to be out from work for 5 weeks. Almost three years ago we quit our jobs, sold our house and travelled for 9 months through South America, Antarctica, and Europe.
I work at a startup. I'm the product manager and we are rebuilding the product from the ground up, in December we will have been working on the rebuild for a full year and our first beta customers will be starting on the new platform. The five weeks immediately previous to that, I'm out of the office for an extended period.
This is to say, you have to make the time for yourself. We both work hard, both of our new jobs (which are way better than our pre big trip jobs btw) allowed us to take this five weeks without much hassle. The team will survive and I'll come back refreshed and ready to tackle new problems.
Perhaps some think our startup will fail because someone took time off for this long, I'll tell you that I sure don't.
Hey, I'm on the eastern edge of the Himalayas near Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, China. While 11 days isn't much so I doubt it, if you guys are planning to visit Yunnan you are welcome to come sailing on our huge alpine lake. :)
The startup thing has been both amazing and incredibly devastating.
Haven't seen my folks in years. Spouse dumped me because I practically didn't exist outside of work. Absolutely no hobbies or traveling in years. No guarantee the company will be anything but a massive drop in my financial history. You're constantly running out of money, so you're cutting every unnecessary expense, and you're living on scraps for years, knowing that you could be making 10x that much in the workforce. You can't quit though because so many people look up to you for direction, they need you to be there and lead them, to be certain of where you're going. The stress can be so high you just want to roll up in fetal in a corner and disappear. You understand why so many founders end their lives.
The experiences however and the connections are priceless. The feeling of playing the game on your terms is liberating and the hope of the upside is exhilarating, but I still wish the price wasn't so high. The amount of personal growth is astounding: once you go through the above, everything else feels like easy mode. You have to develop resilience, charisma, diplomacy, discipline and so many other traits or you will sink fast.
In hindsight, I don't know if I'd do anything differently. When you're this deep, you try not to dwell on hypotheticals.
I remember many years ago when I was sold to the startup lifestyle by the sexiness of the message, but the dozens of PG essays and stories of success and freedom. Nowadays I caution people to truly dig deep and understand if this is worth it to them, ask them if they're ready to sacrifice everything for likely nothing at all. Ultimately we're slaves of power law and similar to Hollywood talent in our outcomes: a very small fraction of us is going to becomes gods through either luck or huge sacrifice, and 99.9% of us will be waiting tables for the rest of our lives, or decide to do something else.
This is not the reality of what is required to do great things [1]. This is one path, but there are many others. There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours a week and have incredibly successful startups/companies/whatever. There are people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is a complete piece of garbage.
Jamie Zawinski has a great great blog post about this [2], which I'll quote part of:
> He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.
I'm not saying the OP is trying to sell this lie too. He is posting about how he is tired and wants to go home and relax. However, the life he describes is very much in the vein of Jamie's blog post. This lifestyle is not required to succeed, and it may in fact be quite counter-productive (as this blog post is attesting to). If your life isn't like this and you aren't working this hard it really isn't saying anything about how likely to succeed you are.
1: Though I don't know exactly what "great things" is... Making a lot of money? Going to Mars? Getting on the cover of Forbes magazine? Some of these require more effort than others.
Great Things require dedication, passion, and vision. Working yourself to death is not on the list of requirements, and in fact can often be counter-productive.
If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things done.
Doing great things comes at a great cost. Some people are willing to pay the cost, some think it's too high. The realization that one is unwilling to pay the cost need not be a painful one.
"Great things" means very different things to different people. Working yourself to the point of breaking down just to make money is not a great thing.
This was a great read. Something to consider in that moment is scale. It is impossible to be an entire company and survive. A CEO I highly respect told me that you can move a truck with a go kart engine, a big transmission, and a lot of coolant, but adding more cylinders is what makes it a truck. He was explaining to me that 'scaling' people was about figuring out how to take what someone was doing really really well, and turning that into a process for doing that thing. Then handing over that thing to the process.
The first startup I joined was run by a guy who had not, to my knowledge, ever been more than a line manager (directly managing people who did things, versus managing people who managed people to did things) He had a really really hard time working with the indirection, unable to feel comfortable that things were "in control" unless he went and talked to the actual people doing the work himself. As the company got bigger that became a bigger and bigger issue for him. He didn't scale, and I could tell that there would come a time when he would be 110% subscribed with tasks that he couldn't figure out how to delegate.
The message about getting home though is really really important. Too many people are sleeping at work because they have no home to go home to any more. If you can set a goal for 'quality hours with the family per week' and when that is in jeopardy due to work commitments restructure work to reduce its impact.
2 big points I've learned & want to share on this topic:
1) In the smart long-term play, family & few close friends are most important. Everything else (including your startup) is trivial.
2) Even if you value your startup at 100% value (over family/friends/health/life), you're incredibly short-sited and killing your own startup baby if you don't have some balance in your life. Startup life is NOT a sprint. It's a marathon. To give the BEST to your startup, you need to bring your BEST every day.
Phrased another way, I often ask, "Let's say you're going to be interviewed on the Colbert Report, or other big-huge-friggin' deal tomorrow, what would you do today?" Often, people say, "I'll eat well, build something, hug my family, build something, help someone, build more, chat with a friend, take a walk, build more, play a game, go to bed early" So, if that's what you do to bring your BEST tomorrow, then what would you do if you wanted to bring your BEST EVERY day?
That tends to drive home the message that work-life balance isn't just helping your life, it's truly what matters to helping your work too.
Corollary: If you're overstressed, you aren't helping your work. Often, overstressed people at startups will add much more friction in the small team, hurting efficiency as arguments & disrespect poisons the day's actions. Not to mention the zombie-brain mistakes in execution when you're not taking proper care of yourself.
Totally agree, you have to keep some energy in reserve to handle the unexpected.
To go further, if you want to do more than just handle the unexpected (which is kind of like putting out a fire) you will need to bring wisdom to the situation.
Developing wisdom requires an even greater reserve of energy _and_ some downtime to reflect.
Perhaps there could be something in between a startup and a job as an employee.
Startups are rewarding because you are not simply an employee but also part owner and they are hard because you have to undertake a lot of extra work and responsibility and risk.
Maybe there could be a third way were you are part owner but undertake less risk and less responsibility and less work. Imagine a startup where instead of the typical 2/3 founders 3/15 employees you have a 15 employees who all share an equal amount of ownership and responsibility.
The point of such a startup would be to provide better working terms and better pay than one would get when working as an employee or contractor but at the same time lessen exposure to risk and responsibility.
I don't know how doable it is but I always thought that it was strange that most startups were trying to emulate the same corporate structure the, founders themselves probably wanted to avoid because it didn't suit them very well as employees.
Sorry for going of tangent but it's just random idea that crept into my head and wanted to share.
There is such a thing — a cooperative! One famous example is the Cheeseboard in Berkeley, a cheese shop and pizzeria that has been worker owned and operated since the 60's with wild success. Seeing how happy, creative, and productive the staff there is makes me wish that we had more organizations operating in this manner.
Kind of a tangent, but there's a lot to be said for cooperative living, too. One of my favorite experiences in college was living in a student cooperative. There were about 40 of us in a large, early 20th century Victorian house, each taking on a fair share of maintenance, cooking, and management. Every decision, including major ones like renovating parts of the house, was made democratically and collectively: there was no real centralized oversight. (There was a "central office" for the entire co-op system — itself largely made up of house representatives — but they mostly stayed out of individual house affairs.) Important positions such as president or workshift manager were voted in collectively and had certain benefits, like decreased rent or less hours required per week. It worked well for the most part, and many lifelong friendships were forged in the house.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to get a bunch of self-motivated creative folks together in such an environment and have them work on projects together. Perhaps the members would be selected by occupation, so that there's a solid pool of artists, programmers, designers, writers, etc. at all times. A majority of the money generated from these projects would go towards the members' collective benefit. Projects would be formed spontaneously, either by individuals working alone, or by people trying to "recruit" other members — kind of like how Valve does things.
A combination of cooperative living and cooperative working. I know it's not for everyone, and maybe it's a pipe dream, but the idea really appeals to me!
That's the inevitable consequence of being overambitious. This pattern is the same, regardless of the area within which these folks try to become more powerful, rich or famous than others.
At BMW a former director told some trainees that he's the most lonely person in the world. Lost his wife, kids and friends. Hobbies? None. Money? More than can be spend. Power? You bet. "Too soon old, too late wise" is true even for extraordinary achievers like this guy.
I always like to point out to those younger folks that they need to be aware of their true motivation. To 99 % in the startup scene or at the big companies it's not to make the world a better place. It's not to be creative and productive. The main drive is ambition. That's OK, it's human. But it needs to be controlled. When you are aware of your true selfish motivation, it's easier to stop when it's all too much. You do it for yourself, not your family (you would choose a solid 9 to 5 job) or the world.
To 99% in the startup scene or at the big companies it's not to make the world a better place. It's not to be creative and productive. The main drive is ambition.
I'm not so sure about that. I'm also not convinced "most founders are in it to get filthy rich," as lemming says elsewhere in this thread. I think there's a spectrum of motivations, including:
* Ambition
* Creative drive/wanting to build something
* Aversion to corporate culture/large organizations
* Opportunity to make a lot of money
* Social needs
* Other
It's possible to have multiple motivations. But the one that interests me is "social needs." This includes everything from wanting to work with a great team to doing something because it's the "hot thing" or the activity that gets the most respect in the community. The recent news about YC applications rising 40% YOY may reflect some of that, and also explains the huge turnout for pitch events, networking sessions, etc.
There are so many different angles to startup burnout, that sometimes it seems like we're playing a really rough game like American football, only instead of head and spine injuries we've got mental health problems and repetitive stress disorders.
Early in a startup the big enemy is yourself and poverty. Try to get yourself to finish that feature; to push the product over the line. To persevere after the launch basically goes unnoticed. The burnout is emotional because it's rooted in self doubt. Once a startup starts getting traction a different type of mental stress sets in: a fear of squandering an opportunity. All the late nights are rooted in the fear that your startup has had some luck and some traction, and maybe if you don't push so hard it will become another Excite. Used, but left to the wayside while a better contender came in.
It's just a startup-a type of work organization operating in the first world, staffed by people who can find another job in a few weeks if it should fail.
It's basically an exciting game for privileged people with too much time on their hands. The worst outcome is you have to go work at a regular job.
Relax, no one is being sent to the scaffold over this!
Wow, much respect for writing this. While my company isn't quite at Dwolla scale, I've had my own version of too-much-travel this fall, and I am over it. I realized I was making the most impact back home, helping the team create the foundation for us to do more with less.
All these conferences and these meetings are rarely world changing. They hold potential opportunities and the start of relationships, but we never know if those opportunities would have come to us through cheaper, more effective means.
Travel bothers me so much because it feels incredibly suboptimal, like I'm working harder not smarter.
One reaction: "grow up". Stop letting other people dictate how you live your life. That is what parents do for children. Becoming an adult means making your own decisions about how to spend your time, and when enough is enough. Grow up. Stop putting other people, ones not even that close to you, first. Grow up.
Aren't we done yet with the rhetoric of "making the world a better place"/"improving people's lives"? I can't help but think about HBO's Silicon Valley every time I read this kind of thing...
It's pretty standard to take a break after a long period of hard work. Especially if it starts to feel like burnout.
I'll probably write an enlightening blog post one day about how sometimes you have to take a nap during the day, especially if you feel sleepy. I'll encapsulate it into a life lesson: Don't lie to yourself, you are sleepy so just take that nap.
Almost 2 years ago, I had three major things going on in my life. I was working at another startup in San Francisco, finishing my Computer Science degree from SJSU, and being a boyfriend of a 4 year relationship with my then girlfriend. At the time, I was really worried about doing well in my career as well as making sure I don't fail my courses otherwise I would be held back and be even more miserable. I had to commute between San Jose and San Francisco every other day. I put much of my time into the startup, and naturally that took away my time from other things. In hindsight and after reading this blog post, I realised how much I overlooked and have developed further understanding on how things played out. But yeah, great blog post, it is important to learn to identify what is happening and realise the gradual damages taking place before its broken.
[+] [-] famousactress|11 years ago|reply
Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
Rather tangentially - I have a one and a half year old daughter who recently turned a question we posed her ("Woah, kiddo. Are you freaking out!?") on it's head. Now sometimes when she gets wound up she goes full-meta and runs back and forth in the kitchen waving her hands in the air yelling "freaking out!", in self-parody.
That reminds me, a little bit, of our startup-culture's relationship to overwork... and don't get me wrong, I don't think articles like this are the ridiculous self-parody, I think they're the really troubling and all-too-real consequence.
Put simply I think we need to do a little more wiggling our toes in the carpet and chilling the fuck out. The world's not suffering from a shortage of first-world martyrs.
Take a breath, go home, do great work tomorrow, and for God's sake appreciate the fact that you're in the hilariously small fraction of people who get to blog about the pains of working too hard by choice.
[+] [-] moron4hire|11 years ago|reply
I started having the notion of starting my own company specifically because I was sick of being treated like nothing more than an input variable on some MBAs Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Does it make any sort of sense to work myself to death, in that same vein, in my own endeavours? I would have only traded one tyrant whom I could escape for one I'd be stuck with forever: myself.
[+] [-] mtbcoder|11 years ago|reply
Agreed.
> Most startups aren't, despite the fact that lots of the folks there are in effectively the same personal position and feeling the exact same thing - in addition to the added pressure of not feeling like they measure up to stories like this one because their quarter didn't go nearly as well. I really feel for those people, and I wish they felt more freedom to be honest and public about these kinds of feelings.
...and let's also not forget all the folks who are barely making ends meet at their existing jobs, putting in 60+ hour work weeks for a measly salary that's been stagnate for years or all the folks needing to work an extra job or two just to survive.
[+] [-] xtracto|11 years ago|reply
This made me think: How would a similar blog post from one of the albañiles (construction worker) be? Earning 13 bucks a day doing hard physical work and then having to do another job to earn a little more.
[+] [-] dharmach|11 years ago|reply
Because if his startup was doing bad and he says what he said, he will be ridiculed and/or pitied for being a loser.
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
He was managed and coached by his uncle who had experience in being a professional football player.
What shocked me is that he did not sacrifice Rafael's life like most of other kids that could be good(examples like Michael Jackson or in tennis the Wiilians' sisters or Arantxa Sanchez Vicario in Spain).
At the time everybody believed that if Rafael was not sent to Barcelona to a tennis Boarding school without seeing their family and giving it all to tennis, he couldn't make it.
Toni, his uncle, believed that if he were to be a good tennis player sacrificing everything else, it was not worth it.
Rafael got to be the best Spanish player of all time.
When I created my company I wanted to be rich, but rich meant not just money, but having time to make love to my wife, see my children grow or reading and writing in HN.
At the end, you discover you could delegate lots of work.
[+] [-] antaviana|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyant|11 years ago|reply
Easily considered the world's 2nd best tennis player ever, with chances of being the best tennis player ever.
[+] [-] wellboy|11 years ago|reply
While I think it's worth throwing oneself into a startup for a few years, because there are learnings you will get this way, that you will never get anywhere else, there should be a long term vision.
The story of Rafael Nadal is great and applies to startups 100%, because the best founder is the one who has a balanced life and can make use of all of his creativity. A startup founder who doesn't have a life besides the startup, simply won't create a huge startup. Yes, they might be able to make a few hundred million, but they won't be the ones creating a transformative startup.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
That's hustle. For those of us who are not gifted, we "make it" through hard work and sweat. Whether it's worth it or not is another question, but for most of us giving it your all is necessary to climb high.
[+] [-] sweeney2066|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yason|11 years ago|reply
If you‘re doing something for money so that you can live your life the way you want later, that doesn‘t work because it takes time to learn to live your life the way you want. Typically it takes a lifetime to do that, so you must start early: you must start now if you wish to make it. Otherwise you‘ll end up with a lot of cash and no idea of what kind of life makes you fulfilled.
If you‘re doing something to make a difference – or to make the world a better place – then if you feel like you‘re running out of time then you‘re probably doing it wrong. That sort of goals are rarely if ever such undertakings that are constrained by time. Paradoxically, life is short yet there‘s always plenty of time so as to not have to hurry things. If you work madly for a few years what is it that you think you‘ll win from it if you compare doing that thing you can‘t not do for decades? Or maybe you weren‘t doing a thing you can‘t not do in the first place?
Rush is a sign that you have grown an inflated sense of importance. Nothing is that important, not even the important things.
If you‘re building a company, you have all the time to grow the business. Some families have been doing that for centuries, many individuals for decades. If you have a really great idea, take the time to work on it. If you‘re lucky, someone else does the same thing and finishes faster than you which means you don‘t have to do it at all! You can just enjoy the benefits of the addition of widget X or feature Y in the pool of things tangible in our lives. Maybe the idea wasn‘t that unique after all. But some ideas are and thosee you can work on for years. For many things in life, building them slower makes them last longer. Even a good relationship or a family tree.
For these reasons, I consider it a better approach to weave the things you can‘t not do and your life together. This removes a divide: life goes on at its own pace and along comes your calling but they‘re not in conflict. There‘s no contrast between work and family, or business and private life because everything is scattered around in the timeline of your life in small pieces. There‘s always some work but there‘s always home and family too. Neither is more important than the other and none of the areas can continuously hog a big chunk of your focus.
Daddy must work now, daddy has to write an important email because those people need daddy‘s opinion.
I can‘t have the meeting today, I need to cook dinner and water the garden with my daughter.
[+] [-] prof_hobart|11 years ago|reply
I agree that there's a need to balance the now and planning for the future, and an awful lot of start ups seem, at least to me, to get the balance badly wrong.
But there are often sacrifices you need to do now to gain far bigger rewards in the future. Whether that's resisting that dessert sat in front of you because you want to be 50lbs lighter, saving money now so that you don't starve in retirement, or sometimes trading off time with the family for time spent working so that you've still got a job or a company in 5 years time.
[+] [-] ams6110|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cagl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tedks|11 years ago|reply
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
Some founders have trouble letting go of control. They want to do it all themselves. That doesn't scale.
[+] [-] gambiting|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bretpiatt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abuteau|11 years ago|reply
George Bernard Shaw said: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
1. http://www.inc.com/magazine/201307/brad-feld/many-entreprene...
2. http://www.feld.com/archives/tag/depression
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|11 years ago|reply
http://www.feld.com/archives/2014/10/helps-depressed.html
This may be veering off-topic, but reading the suggestions submitted by the reader in that post made me wonder some people (many, in fact) have to actively work so hard to hold off depression. Something is going wrong (organically, culturally, or both) that depression is the default state for so many.
Culturally, I think our relationship with work is certainly part of it. And, some personalities (e.g. driven or obsessive) may just be more susceptible.
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
I don't have a wife or a puppy, but I shouldn't have allowed this to happen. I was hired to work for a set salary under the assumption of a 40-hour work-week - although I am naturally obsessive so I knew that wouldn't actually last. But I didn't expect my boss to say things like, "If we don't have a working build by 3pm tomorrow, we're all fired," (which turned out to be false, actually).
Pacing is important, and I think it would be interesting to do a startup where pacing is actively encouraged. I think this might be possible at a startup with strong IP protection, good funding, and leadership that sets realistic goals and trusts it's people to be motivated to get it done. It may mean that the public has to wait a bit longer before having a cool new thing available to them, but it also means that the thing will have been constructed by fresh, happy minds.
There is a moral imperative to not buy goods made in sweatshops. There is also a moral imperative to not use software produced under inhumane conditions. Congratulations on discovering this for yourself - and I hope you encourage your coworkers to be humane to each other and themselves as well.
[+] [-] 127001brewer|11 years ago|reply
This is a bothersome and worrisome comment that probably has been repeated (in some variation) too often. How is this the fault of the developer(s)?
I appreciate that founders need to fulfill their promises, especially when having the backing of investors, but these type of statements seem to indicate a failure in communication and planning (more than execution).
[+] [-] jacquesm|11 years ago|reply
This happens frequently enough that by now it should be a thing that people are 'on to'. If you're being tempted with equity then insist on drawing it up in writing with a solid vesting schedule and don't work a day past the first vesting point without your stock.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] orofino|11 years ago|reply
I work at a startup. I'm the product manager and we are rebuilding the product from the ground up, in December we will have been working on the rebuild for a full year and our first beta customers will be starting on the new platform. The five weeks immediately previous to that, I'm out of the office for an extended period.
This is to say, you have to make the time for yourself. We both work hard, both of our new jobs (which are way better than our pre big trip jobs btw) allowed us to take this five weeks without much hassle. The team will survive and I'll come back refreshed and ready to tackle new problems.
Perhaps some think our startup will fail because someone took time off for this long, I'll tell you that I sure don't.
[+] [-] contingencies|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacalata|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genwin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|11 years ago|reply
Haven't seen my folks in years. Spouse dumped me because I practically didn't exist outside of work. Absolutely no hobbies or traveling in years. No guarantee the company will be anything but a massive drop in my financial history. You're constantly running out of money, so you're cutting every unnecessary expense, and you're living on scraps for years, knowing that you could be making 10x that much in the workforce. You can't quit though because so many people look up to you for direction, they need you to be there and lead them, to be certain of where you're going. The stress can be so high you just want to roll up in fetal in a corner and disappear. You understand why so many founders end their lives.
The experiences however and the connections are priceless. The feeling of playing the game on your terms is liberating and the hope of the upside is exhilarating, but I still wish the price wasn't so high. The amount of personal growth is astounding: once you go through the above, everything else feels like easy mode. You have to develop resilience, charisma, diplomacy, discipline and so many other traits or you will sink fast.
In hindsight, I don't know if I'd do anything differently. When you're this deep, you try not to dwell on hypotheticals.
I remember many years ago when I was sold to the startup lifestyle by the sexiness of the message, but the dozens of PG essays and stories of success and freedom. Nowadays I caution people to truly dig deep and understand if this is worth it to them, ask them if they're ready to sacrifice everything for likely nothing at all. Ultimately we're slaves of power law and similar to Hollywood talent in our outcomes: a very small fraction of us is going to becomes gods through either luck or huge sacrifice, and 99.9% of us will be waiting tables for the rest of our lives, or decide to do something else.
[+] [-] trevmckendrick|11 years ago|reply
"I'm not working even close to that level."
In a way, it's a glimpse into the reality required to do Great Things. Followed by the painful self-awareness that you're nowhere close.
[+] [-] birken|11 years ago|reply
Jamie Zawinski has a great great blog post about this [2], which I'll quote part of:
> He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.
I'm not saying the OP is trying to sell this lie too. He is posting about how he is tired and wants to go home and relax. However, the life he describes is very much in the vein of Jamie's blog post. This lifestyle is not required to succeed, and it may in fact be quite counter-productive (as this blog post is attesting to). If your life isn't like this and you aren't working this hard it really isn't saying anything about how likely to succeed you are.
1: Though I don't know exactly what "great things" is... Making a lot of money? Going to Mars? Getting on the cover of Forbes magazine? Some of these require more effort than others.
2: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
[+] [-] snewman|11 years ago|reply
If you're passionate about your job, you're likely to work hard. But there's a line between "working hard", and overworking. Beyond a certain point, more hours may (or may not) mean more things done, but almost certainly doesn't mean more of the right things done.
[+] [-] serve_yay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyleblarson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
The first startup I joined was run by a guy who had not, to my knowledge, ever been more than a line manager (directly managing people who did things, versus managing people who managed people to did things) He had a really really hard time working with the indirection, unable to feel comfortable that things were "in control" unless he went and talked to the actual people doing the work himself. As the company got bigger that became a bigger and bigger issue for him. He didn't scale, and I could tell that there would come a time when he would be 110% subscribed with tasks that he couldn't figure out how to delegate.
The message about getting home though is really really important. Too many people are sleeping at work because they have no home to go home to any more. If you can set a goal for 'quality hours with the family per week' and when that is in jeopardy due to work commitments restructure work to reduce its impact.
[+] [-] johnvschmitt|11 years ago|reply
1) In the smart long-term play, family & few close friends are most important. Everything else (including your startup) is trivial.
2) Even if you value your startup at 100% value (over family/friends/health/life), you're incredibly short-sited and killing your own startup baby if you don't have some balance in your life. Startup life is NOT a sprint. It's a marathon. To give the BEST to your startup, you need to bring your BEST every day.
Phrased another way, I often ask, "Let's say you're going to be interviewed on the Colbert Report, or other big-huge-friggin' deal tomorrow, what would you do today?" Often, people say, "I'll eat well, build something, hug my family, build something, help someone, build more, chat with a friend, take a walk, build more, play a game, go to bed early" So, if that's what you do to bring your BEST tomorrow, then what would you do if you wanted to bring your BEST EVERY day?
That tends to drive home the message that work-life balance isn't just helping your life, it's truly what matters to helping your work too.
Corollary: If you're overstressed, you aren't helping your work. Often, overstressed people at startups will add much more friction in the small team, hurting efficiency as arguments & disrespect poisons the day's actions. Not to mention the zombie-brain mistakes in execution when you're not taking proper care of yourself.
[+] [-] gerbilly|11 years ago|reply
To go further, if you want to do more than just handle the unexpected (which is kind of like putting out a fire) you will need to bring wisdom to the situation.
Developing wisdom requires an even greater reserve of energy _and_ some downtime to reflect.
[+] [-] lumberjack|11 years ago|reply
Startups are rewarding because you are not simply an employee but also part owner and they are hard because you have to undertake a lot of extra work and responsibility and risk.
Maybe there could be a third way were you are part owner but undertake less risk and less responsibility and less work. Imagine a startup where instead of the typical 2/3 founders 3/15 employees you have a 15 employees who all share an equal amount of ownership and responsibility.
The point of such a startup would be to provide better working terms and better pay than one would get when working as an employee or contractor but at the same time lessen exposure to risk and responsibility.
I don't know how doable it is but I always thought that it was strange that most startups were trying to emulate the same corporate structure the, founders themselves probably wanted to avoid because it didn't suit them very well as employees.
Sorry for going of tangent but it's just random idea that crept into my head and wanted to share.
[+] [-] archagon|11 years ago|reply
Kind of a tangent, but there's a lot to be said for cooperative living, too. One of my favorite experiences in college was living in a student cooperative. There were about 40 of us in a large, early 20th century Victorian house, each taking on a fair share of maintenance, cooking, and management. Every decision, including major ones like renovating parts of the house, was made democratically and collectively: there was no real centralized oversight. (There was a "central office" for the entire co-op system — itself largely made up of house representatives — but they mostly stayed out of individual house affairs.) Important positions such as president or workshift manager were voted in collectively and had certain benefits, like decreased rent or less hours required per week. It worked well for the most part, and many lifelong friendships were forged in the house.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to get a bunch of self-motivated creative folks together in such an environment and have them work on projects together. Perhaps the members would be selected by occupation, so that there's a solid pool of artists, programmers, designers, writers, etc. at all times. A majority of the money generated from these projects would go towards the members' collective benefit. Projects would be formed spontaneously, either by individuals working alone, or by people trying to "recruit" other members — kind of like how Valve does things.
A combination of cooperative living and cooperative working. I know it's not for everyone, and maybe it's a pipe dream, but the idea really appeals to me!
[+] [-] KobaQ|11 years ago|reply
At BMW a former director told some trainees that he's the most lonely person in the world. Lost his wife, kids and friends. Hobbies? None. Money? More than can be spend. Power? You bet. "Too soon old, too late wise" is true even for extraordinary achievers like this guy.
I always like to point out to those younger folks that they need to be aware of their true motivation. To 99 % in the startup scene or at the big companies it's not to make the world a better place. It's not to be creative and productive. The main drive is ambition. That's OK, it's human. But it needs to be controlled. When you are aware of your true selfish motivation, it's easier to stop when it's all too much. You do it for yourself, not your family (you would choose a solid 9 to 5 job) or the world.
[+] [-] ilamont|11 years ago|reply
I'm not so sure about that. I'm also not convinced "most founders are in it to get filthy rich," as lemming says elsewhere in this thread. I think there's a spectrum of motivations, including:
* Ambition
* Creative drive/wanting to build something
* Aversion to corporate culture/large organizations
* Opportunity to make a lot of money
* Social needs
* Other
It's possible to have multiple motivations. But the one that interests me is "social needs." This includes everything from wanting to work with a great team to doing something because it's the "hot thing" or the activity that gets the most respect in the community. The recent news about YC applications rising 40% YOY may reflect some of that, and also explains the huge turnout for pitch events, networking sessions, etc.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|11 years ago|reply
There are so many different angles to startup burnout, that sometimes it seems like we're playing a really rough game like American football, only instead of head and spine injuries we've got mental health problems and repetitive stress disorders.
Early in a startup the big enemy is yourself and poverty. Try to get yourself to finish that feature; to push the product over the line. To persevere after the launch basically goes unnoticed. The burnout is emotional because it's rooted in self doubt. Once a startup starts getting traction a different type of mental stress sets in: a fear of squandering an opportunity. All the late nights are rooted in the fear that your startup has had some luck and some traction, and maybe if you don't push so hard it will become another Excite. Used, but left to the wayside while a better contender came in.
[+] [-] gerbilly|11 years ago|reply
It's basically an exciting game for privileged people with too much time on their hands. The worst outcome is you have to go work at a regular job.
Relax, no one is being sent to the scaffold over this!
[+] [-] yesimahuman|11 years ago|reply
All these conferences and these meetings are rarely world changing. They hold potential opportunities and the start of relationships, but we never know if those opportunities would have come to us through cheaper, more effective means.
Travel bothers me so much because it feels incredibly suboptimal, like I'm working harder not smarter.
[+] [-] moron4hire|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrea_s|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partisan|11 years ago|reply
I'll probably write an enlightening blog post one day about how sometimes you have to take a nap during the day, especially if you feel sleepy. I'll encapsulate it into a life lesson: Don't lie to yourself, you are sleepy so just take that nap.
[+] [-] dmak|11 years ago|reply