How I lost 160lbs after selling my company to Atlassian | Hacker News Reader

How I lost 160lbs after selling my company to Atlassian

matterapp.com

25 pointskeremkazan20 comments

Using an anonymous account intentionally. Working normal business hours sounds nice but NOT REMOTELY a possibility where I work. Being intentionally secretive, I work at one of the desired hot/unicorn startups in SF. Employees are non-verbally expected to live/eat/work at the office (9-8). If a new hire were to start clocking out at 5, they would not last long.

What I and many of my peers do is split up the day with a long break in the middle. We'll commonly go for a 1-1.5hr run in the middle of the day along Embarcadero to try to obtain the best of both worlds, not losing our equity and staying healthy.

Presumably there is some point to your behavior. If you are doing this to secure some future standard of living, it might be worth noting that more people than work in SV tech work in tech outside of SV and work regular business hours. Many, many, many of us already have the standard of living you might hope to achieve some day. And we do it on salaries that are a fraction of yours.

We must all make our own choices. But for many your choices look reckless. You are sacrificing much in pursuit of something you will probably never capture because by the time you are in a position to capture it you will have turned yourself into a person unable to benefit from the thing you pursue.

For many in your position, your current lifestyle is fun and exciting. It's a ride. If that is true for you, so be it. But if you have outgrown that, don't chain yourself to the hope of some false future. Figure out how to achieve happiness today while securing financial stability for the future.

Consider moving to Alabama and working a 9-5 job. Mowing your lawn every Saturday and playing frisbee with your kids isn't everybody's ideal, but it might be a lot more satisfying than you expect.

>"Employees are non-verbally expected to live/eat/work at the office (9-8). If a new hire were to start clocking out at 5, they would not last long."

An 11 hour work day as a matter of course? I'm sorry but this truly sounds miserable. If all you have time for outside of work is sleep, whats the point?

>"We'll commonly go for a 1-1.5hr run in the middle of the day along Embarcadero to try to obtain the best of both worlds, not losing our equity and staying healthy."

So even your "break" from the office involves being around the same work people? That activity may be physically healthy but maybe not the best mentally. This sounds like an incredibly unbalanced life style.

So, what are you hoping to get out of this? I ask not in a condescending way, but with hope that you've thoroughly thought this through and understand the tradeoffs you're making. Certainly you could make a good living elsewhere. Is it for resume building? Are you getting insane stock options? How long are you planning to continue at that pace?

Two things, an impressive resume and nice sum of money. As a recent grad it would look awful if I left this "hot startup" a few months after graduating. Secondly, I would be walking away for several hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity.

IDK if this is considered insane, but $100-$250 grand is a really big deal for someone with student debt.

How many years of 12-hour days will it take to realize your $250K?

If you were working 9-5 and I offered you a night job for 4 hours a day, would you take it? If I promised you $200K if you did the night job for two years, would you take it? If you got $0 if you quit before the two years was up, would you take it? I can pull out of the deal at any time in the next two years.

I know a guy who scrubs toilets from 4am-8am M-F for $10/hr. He expects that to turn into $100K in about 5 years with careful investment. If he just stuck it in a 0% savings account, it will be $50K in 5 years. Financially, this seems to be a smarter plan than yours. But if you really enjoy what you do in your four extra hours per day, and you really hate scrubbing toilets... maybe your way is better. The point is, there is lots of room to question your choice.

Your second paragraph is one of the sharpest and most original insights I've read on HN in the ten years I've been here. That is a fantastic analogy for vesting cliffs.

> I would be walking away for several hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity.

You'd be walking away with several hundreds of thousands of dollars of promise. Unless they IPO that's effectively worthless.

Would you say Glassdoor reviews are accurate about that work life balance? Just want to know so I can continue avoiding these types of places.

no, that site is a corporate trick

there are nuggets of truth on glassdoor; sort in reverse and read the 2-3 star comments.

It's very hard to find an honest 4-5 star review and the 1-star reviews are usually from people with very personal/specific issues with the company

i wouldn't trust the salary bands, however

Every decision requires tradeoffs. Which company to work at. How to commute. Whether to work at home. What to eat. Etc. The question is whether you can fully understand the tradeoffs you're making.

Tradeoffs are great when you have all the information before making a decision. The life I'm living now is not at all what a campus recruiter sold us.

If I read this correctly, it's your first full-time software job? Be careful about your assumptions. Just because your competitive new hire peers are hanging around until 9pm doesn't mean you have to. Every software company hires so many duds, if you come in and do your job well, and be willing to burn the midnight oil (not literally) for crunches, you will almost certainly not be fired. Focus on working effectively, signal that you're more efficient than your peers. Making it look like it takes 12 hours to get a day's work done does not reflect well on them.

Ultimately CICO is a great model that will help guide healthy eating and weight loss. IMO working "normal" hours is not critical, but may be a valuable method to help buoy spirits and thus avoid unhealthy meal/snack choices.

Aside: going for a mid-day walk has benefits beyond health -- it also helps creativity [1].

[1] http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf

thanks, never heard of it.

This sounds unbearable. Why not work for a less whip-happy company? Surely the compensation's not 10x.

That sounds like hell.

Is there actually a good reason to put yourself in such conditions?

> At Matter, I’m building a team that shares the same work and lifestyle ethics that I do. This means that we begin our day at 9am, work normal business hours (with a break for a walk when we need it!), then head home between 5pm and 6pm to recharge.

I know not hiring night owls was mentioned, but I feel like this isn't the way to go. Even in startups one can make a ton of the communication async.

I know that my mind doesn't work 9-5, it's much more chunked and a good bit of that late. If I try to force it, I end up working in the evening to make up for low productivity.

Beautiful, really appreciate the data-driven approach vs the short-term fad diets.

You should really have recommended your nutritionist if they were so instrumental.

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