So I absolutely agree that it's easier to start a company when you're single and have no obligations because you can tolerate much more risk.
Update: Seems that the original argument changed from "if kids are so great, why aren't more founders parents when they start their business" to "kids might make you more productive during regular working hours, but you need more than just regular working hours to start a business".
I'm happy to offer my thoughts on the second argument as well. I think people working on startups generally work way too much and the ones that succeed don't do so because they put in 14-hour days.
At 37signals, our "startup" (Basecamp) got off the ground on a 10 hour/week programming budget and designers who were busy doing client projects. For the first year, it wasn't the sole focus for the company.
We believe those constraints were instrumental in their way they shaped Basecamp and thus part of the success of the company.
Doesn't mean that there might not be other businesses out there where working lots and lots of hours can be beneficial somehow, but I think that it's a fallacy that you need to work crazy hours to succeed. I do believe that others believe this, though, I just don't think it's healthy or beneficial.
All of this is somewhat tangential to the original argument, though, which is that you shouldn't be afraid of hiring family people. Who should start a company is a great debate as well, though.
But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem to be a lot more startups that did than didn't.
Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time on something makes the result come out worse. Probably this also varies with the type of work. So it could be that when person = dhh and work = product design, 10 hours per week is a reasonable limit, and when it's someone else and the work = writing database software, the limit might be 70 hours per week.
In the absence of any other evidence, you have to assume that successful startup founders knew what they were doing, and that if they worked long hours it was because it paid off for them.
And we're saying here's an example of a web startup that didn't follow the traditional wisdom of "long hours necessary for business success", which is offered as one data point that perhaps "long hours" isn't the success requirement as some might think it is.
Similar to the talk from SUS on Gmail's invitation system. Just because Gmail used an invitation system and had success doesn't mean that using an invitation system will give you success.
(BTW, as meta comment, I'm incredibly impressed with the level of discussion here. It's so un-web like ;). Where are all the personal insults, the trolling, and all that which we've otherwise come to accept must be part of a open-for-all comment box. Very nice job!)
I suppose you've both seen the writings of Alan Carter (http://the-programmers-stone.com/about/) and it seems to me that it just might be a way of getting these two seemingly differing viewpoints aligned.
If stress is the biggest factor then age or marital status might have very little to do with it. At least directly. Married people might have learned to handle stress well and younger people might be less affected by it.
That is to say, you both might have seen the "less stress affected" crowd and drawn conclusions about it.
It's just that it's possible to overconstrain the solution as much as underconstrain it. In the early stages, there's so much work to do that if you try to add kids to the mix, you don't even attempt it. As the startup gets more developed (or if you start with a simple enough problem), the amount of work needed becomes manageable enough to juggle with family life.
Same goes for having a day job. It worked for Joshua Schacter, Pierre Omidyar, and Steve Wozniak, because the focus of having only so many hours available disciplined them to work on products they could do in those hours. And the economy was such that not many other people were working on those products, so they ended up dominating their niches. But it fails for many, many other entrepreneurs, because the problems they could solve within those constraints had already been solved by hundreds of other people.
That doesn't mean that they make you net better, though. If they did, you could prove by induction that the ideal strategy in a startup would be to work an arbitrarily small amount of time per day.
For a given startup, a particular limit on startup time might actually be optimal. But I think it's pretty likely that different startups are going to find different sets of constraints (regarding time, budget, or other areas) optimal.
This sentence resonated with me as a father of two. But on second thought, I realize, the root reason I do not attempt it (again, for now) is a lack of finances and stability, not a lack of time. I lack time because I have a day job, and I have a day job because I don't have the money to pursue my own business without incurring lots of debt.
The optimal solution, for me, would be to have 12 months salary saved up, and burn through that while starting my own business. And it wouldn't be a 'startup' by PG's definition--I've learned that control is more important to me than growing fast.
I actually thought that people at Google were pretty reasonable. They weren't exactly 9-5, but most people weren't working 80 hours/week either (I certainly didn't).
What else is there to being successful other than productivity?
I'd suggest this: DHH mentions "an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear", but in a startup, often there is no "objective" - reasonably clear or not. Instead, there is something more like a search heuristic based on "the view form here". With time, the heuristic changes, and the objective changes, and the strategy changes, and the product changes. If I remember correctly, Flickr started as a Flash-based chat website. To get from there to what Flickr was acquired as required the notorious "startup hours". Basecamp went through no such life-changing make-overs, and so didn't require those kinds of hours.
To many people, being in a startup is about selling the same thing to the same people - eyeballs to VCs or Google. That's it. There frequently isn't a lot of concern over what exactly it is that draws them there. In these situations, long hours are required (or at least mandated) because the target moves so frequently because someone has a "better idea" or needs to implement "just this one thing" to appease some VC who ends up not funding you anyway. This lack of focus and constraints leads to middle of the road products that can only be worked on by people working 14 hour days to adapt to the ongoing changes.
It's sort of like when Hollywood is out to make a "blockbuster." They buy a popular comic book character, get a dozen hack writers to work on it - even while the scenes are being shot - and they put in a bunch of crap special effects. Sure, sometimes it works, but most of the time it's a bunch of dreck that will never make back its $200 million budget. Contrast that to the lifestyle business - er, independent film - being written and directed by the guy who LOVES what he's doing and making it for himself and you get Pulp Fiction.
Me, I'd much rather make "Pulp Fiction" than "Daredevil."