How to balance a startup, family and a full time job | Hacker News Reader

How to balance a startup, family and a full time job

endorseyou.wordpress.com

13 pointsiamyoohoo23 comments

I too have a startup, family, and a full time job. I found limiting the job to 8 hours 5 days a week has been the most important thing.

I make enough money to make sure my wife does not work so she can take the kids to school, pick them up, and help them with there homework. One important thing I do is to make sure our kids are in activities Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, piano, guitar, church group, and a few other things. I believe these things help make a person capable of fitting in (unlike myself!). I spend time with the kids before they go to school, before they go to bed, and I put them to bed every night talking over there day and motivating them for tomorrow.

I skipped the partners part but at the sake of speed of development. If I had a partner I would be making money now. I am winding down how much I am working at the job I have and focusing on making money from my startup.

Unfortunately, the phrase "startup" has two meanings. Generally, it means the big, world-changing, swing for the fences type of startups that consume all of your time (and then some). Fail fast or prove your idea so you can get investment to grow it rapidly. It would not be a good idea to try and do one of these while you have a full time job and family.

The other meaning is sometimes called a "lifestyle business" (I dislike this term). The scope is something you can handle in nights and weekends which limits your ceiling somewhat. There's a full-time job providing income which takes away some of the hunger for success that comes with working for free. But the time constraint and income requirement means that you will probably seek profitability sooner and have that in mind from the outset. If it can be comfortably run on the side, then a home run isn't necessary (an extra 40K/yr would be a welcome success for this type of startup). This kind can be done with a family and day job, and I think this is the type of startup he is talking about.

I want to ask a slightly separate question along these lines.

/rant

As a hacker/startup junkie, do you find yourself becoming judgmental of others and their work habits? A friend of mine was talking about their 'long workday' since they had to stay half an hour late, and I ended up ranting about how thats not a long work day. I felt a bit like a jerk after, since I hardly want to tell people how to live their lives, but it seemed like this talented individual is wasting their skills and lacks motivation.

I suppose what I am asking is does anyone else find that most people they know seem relatively unmotivated? Another situation I find common is a friend and my brother both talk about quitting work and starting their own thing, but when I actually worked briefly with both they seemed to average only a few hours of work a week into the project. How do you politely suggest that with that level of effort that they may not be suited to a startup?

I like to think of myself as open minded and non-judgmental, but for people I care for that seems to get thrown out the window.

/end rant

Most people haven't bothered to find a job that's really fulfilling for them; many people don't even think it's possible. It's just a necessary evil to pay for the rest of the things in your life. How motivated are you to tackle your "necessary evils?"

Find someone else to politely deliver your message. That way the messenger they shoot won't be you.

My girlfriend works 90+ hour weeks in the hospital, when she's limited by law to 80 per week.

I don't get to complain.

I suppose there is another side of the coin where people work a lot and then you want to complain they work too much too :)

I don't have kids, but I do have a fiancee.

The trick has been that she goes to bed early. So I work 9-7, hang out with her 7-10, hack 10-2, rinse and repeat.

It's definitely forced me to improve my work habits. I say as I'm procrastinating on it.

Many people are encouraged to just "go for it" because if they fail they can always go back to an ordinary job and try again. However the risk equation changes when you have young children you care about since (in most cases) you're the only parents they have and they are only young once. Even if your startup is successful you'll never be able to get back the time you miss with them.

True - but what I'm saying is that there is still time to balance it. Only if you try hard enough ....

I think what you outline is the steps that would maximize one's chances of continuing to be in the situation that you're in. Your actual "success" would depend on how fast you get out of this situation. It seems in general it would be really heavy on one to deal with all three at at time and would prevent him from focusing on any of them.

As soon as I read the word "cannot", I stopped reading. I get that word from everyone else. I don't need it here.

In a nutshell, don't.

In fact, exactly the opposite. Do it - just be aware of how to handle it.

Don't be afraid. Go for it. I did.

It can work. But it's way less likely.

Way less likely than what? If quitting your job without funding isn't an option because you've got a family and no savings, it would seem that you are way more likely to succeed working on your startup after hours than simply doing nothing, at least to me.

Yes, it's an unfortunate position to be in. You are at a huge disadvantage. But the answer isn't 'don't do it' - which, without other options, roughly equates to 'give up'.

Only if your definition of success is extremely one-dimensional. It isn't "giving up" to acknowledge the implications of the choices that you've made in life, and to learn to define success within the constraints defined by those choices. It's part of being an adult.

Actually, I agree with you - in many circumstances the cost of doing a startup (mostly paid by your family) makes attempting it a bad idea (or even irresponsible).

But what I'm saying is that once an adult has defined success for themselves and decided that they want to start a startup, and are willing to pay the price for it, it's not our place to judge the risk as not worth it.

Matt wasn't judging the risk as "worth it". He said that a startup founded under those circumstances is less likely to succeed, which is entirely true. He also clearly believes that it's a bad idea. As do I.

That said, I think it's totally appropriate to judge someone who makes such a foolish decision (i.e. pursuing a startup when you have no savings and little time) when children are involved.

Makes sense to me. Know what you're getting into, discuss it and get the approval of your partner, but if it's what you're set on doing, you can probably find a way. Tim O'Reilly started his company after the birth of his first child, if I'm not mistaken. I don't suppose it qualifies as a "startup" in the sense of Google but he seems quite successful to me.

Did Tim O'Reilly also have a full time job? And even if so, does one data point show anything?

I've nothing against startup + family. It's startup + full time job that I think is a bad idea, and adding a family makes it worse.

I would agree that startup, family and full time job is untenable in the long term, but everyone's situation is different. I think it's pretty evident to most people that it's not an easy road, but what I disagree with is your blanket "don't". I'd simply say "it's rough, and you're not going to be able to do it for long without cutting corners somewhere".

Here's the article about O'Reilly:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/oreilly.html

It's fuzzy on the timing, and I guess my memory is off, but it seems as if his company was his job at that point, but it still hadn't hit the big time.

I tend to think in terms of EV. Your hours would probably be better spent working at Wal-Mart. And there are much better ways to attack the problem, such as saving enough to not have to work, then starting up.

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