What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
redgirlsays.com
redgirlsays.com
I've had bugs popup on the weekend or during a vacation (and I do travel with my laptop everywhere I go). 99% of the time they fall into the 'we can live with that until Monday' category. My relationship with my wife and friends is simply too important to let something as trivial as a startup get in the way of it.
I just can't help but feel like we're continuing to romanticize this workaholic culture. That somehow to be a 'real' entrepreneur you have to turn your whole life over to it.
This is one place that I agree with the guys from 37 signals. You don't have to kill yourself to make a business go. You don't have to work 80 (or 120) hour weeks.
Starting a business is a marathon, and like all marathons it requires pacing. A large part of that is learning to separate the real emergencies from the perceived ones. Just because something isn't working, it doesn't mean that your business will fall over if it continues not to work for 48 hours. That sort of triage is really important if your going to maintain your sanity to get to the fourth year.
Just how I see it at least. My wife would certainly write a very different article than this one.
Thinking in terms of an ecommerce or affiliate site, you have no relationship with those visiting your page. They're likely to close the browser or it the back button for the most inane reasons, you also have large adwords spend driving them to your site. Especially around Christmas time any issues could be a large potential revenue loss so yes I certainly would be dropping everything to fix any issues that arise.
In point of fact, many people do this as part of living, and don't count it as work. Most children, when building novel( to them )structures with legos, lincoln logs, blocks, etc, are not "turning their whole lives over to it". They are living, and they are enjoying themselves.
I greatly enjoy creating and producing, so count me in your camp on that issue. And yet I can't see the appeal of diving so deep into the creative process that you lose touch with other important things in life. As time goes by I increasingly view the opportunity cost as too much to bear. Your friends and family grow and change over time; they may move or die or drift away. If you don't spend quality time with them now, it may be prohibitive or impossible to make it up later. The places you've always dreamed of visiting may be very different when you come up for air (consider how New Orleans has changed). The bands you always wanted to see live may have broken up; the bands you wanted to play in may never have formed. You won't have participated in that historic march or rally, you won't have seen that rare animal before it went extinct, you won't have climbed that mountain and seen that glorious landscape before it was marred with suburbs and smokestacks. The world we live in is ephemeral, always changing, and you can never go back.
That doesn't mean you can't create and produce and have a great time doing it, but it does mean that it's worthwhile to carve out enough time to experience as much as possible of the beauty this world has to offer. When I'm lying on my deathbed, I want to look back and remember a life lived to the fullest, full of experience and laughter and love. I do not want to look back at a lifetime spent staring at a laptop screen, regardless of how much I created or how much money I made.
I think a person's stance on this subject is probably determined by the kinds of experiences that they value. If there are only a few types of experiences that really excite you, it probably makes sense to traverse life depth-first, and get as much out of those kinds of experiences as you can. That might mean that long hours and single-minded focus over long periods are the best way to achieve your goals in life. If you are excited by a wide variety of experiences in many different areas, a breadth-first traversal of life is probably more suitable.
It's amazing to have a SO who understands and accommodates that, but the two shouldn't be confused - it's the difference between having to fix an emergency, and enjoying coding more than sharing a meal with your SO.
I'm sure that it would have been easier for him to just stay home and work, and go out "some other time" or something like that. I really like that it seems like they both compromised on brunch that day. He joined her for brunch, and she was alright with him doing work at brunch.
Seems like they have a really good relationship.
You've been with at least 5 startups in 9 years. That suggests to me that none of them were terribly successful, in which case I suppose just about any problem could wait til Monday.
My startup has almost 20,000 paying customers and if something goes wrong, you bet your ass I'm on it immediately, whether it's 3am and I had more than few drinks earlier that evening, or I'm in Hawaii on my birthday and 7 servers lose power and I have to spend the next 5 hours dealing with that mess. Did I mention it was my birthday and I was in Hawaii?
These scenarios are rare, but they do happen. I would never actually take my laptop to a restaurant, but if something bad happens it needs to be dealt with pronto. In the example from the story, I would have either delayed going out, or if it happened when I was already out, then I would leave as soon as possible. In general I don't put work before family or fun but every once in a while you have to if you want to run a successful business.
I can't help but feel like you didn't really read my comment. It's a matter of triage. It's knowing the difference between a true emergency (the site is down and we're spending money to drive traffic) vs something that can wait (feature X has stopped working). Far too often the workaholics in the startup world are panicking to fix issues that can truly wait. It may be ugly and it may slightly torque off your customers, but it's not the type of issue that needs my immediate attention. In those cases (which are far and away the majority cases) I'm not going to stop my life down to fix those.
He read the last part as the last 4 companies instead of years. FWIW that's also how I originally read it.
I've done a couple of startups, and went back to school a few years ago. My husband is a game developer. So I think it's not unreasonable to claim some familiarity with these issues. =)
The key is communication - especially for men, who are not always inclined to talk about relationships unless something is obviously wrong. Remember, women initiate most divorces and most men have no idea it's coming! You need to touch base regularly and make sure that problems aren't building up.
Engineers, think of the Rule of Tens: It's ten times harder to fix a problem after it's become a pattern than when it's fresh, and a hundred times harder to fix if your partner is prepared to break up over it.
Also, be sure to set aside regular times to spend together, and do everything in your power to avoid being sucked back into work. Occasional lapses are okay, but you can't expect to be someone's highest priority when you put them at the bottom of your priorities.
This is what I consider a working relationship. It’s kind of like being poly, each partner has to accommodate the other’s external love (for work, as it is). I’ve seen this between pairs of artists, athletes, artist+programmers and musician+designers. It’s never people who have “just a day job” but rather those who view their trade as a superset of their life. The accommodation for the partner is really just understanding and accepting the need to create in another as a legitimate part of the relationship.
Since the writer did the same to her husband, I’m assuming this isn’t a big issue...
Plus, it shouldn't happen that often. If you're canceling plans and ignoring your SO on a frequent basis, then you're doing it wrong or you simply shouldn't be in a relationship.
"One of the best ways to combat this is to get involved yourself. Teach yourself to code ..."
This is totally unappealing to me unless you're already dating/married to a hacker/founder. Creating "artificial common ground" just so you can have more time with someone reeks of trouble to me.
(FYI, founder for 8+ years, married for 6, 4 kids)
A well oiled relationship can accommodate disruptions and uncertainty, you just have to do the work necessary to make it "well oiled".
If your significant other won't tolerate these sort of things, then you should probably think hard about where your relationship stands.
My GF and I went to Vegas for halloween (we both used to live there, so we have many friends and family there) and on the day we were leaving we decided to have a Vietnamese lunch with her parents. I got "the call" from my co-founder that there was a bug and it was affecting many of the systems on both customer and employee facing functionality.
So I told my GF, "I'm going to have to fix this before we begin our four hour drive back to SD." She said, "Okay honey."
I sat there for two hours, programming furiously through lunch with her and her parents till I had it fixed to a point where I could leave it for the next 6 hours. Thank god my Nexus One has tethering support and my girlfriend was supportive. Her parents seemed indifferent but other patrons were looking at us strangely as my GF sat there playing with her phone while I went apeshit on my laptop.
Kudos to the author for being an awesome mate; and I second the advice of becoming "involved".
I've been patient when his company adapted this agile practice that means a release until 4am every Wednesday.
One thing I'm wondering about is the "get involved" advice: I'm a pretty mean developer, but I work in languages and environments that are very different from what my husband is working on. Whenever I try to discuss his work problems, I end up asking lots of wrong questions and generally annoying him. There is very little I can do to actually help him work on problems. Thats with me having 15 years of coding experience.
There is simply no way a girlfriend who is just learning to code can help her startup SO work on his projects.
Now 'furiously coding' at the restaurant (not a coffee shop) -- that I've never seen before, and I've lived in SF for a long time.
(note that it depends on the definition of 'restaurant' - I realize that McDonalds is called a 'restaurant' too in some parts of the world, I mean a place with tablecloths and staff that comes to your table, so starting at around a neighborhood pizza place or so. Also I've asked my wife to move to the bar or the lobby several times when she got out her computer in similar situations, I've been on all sides of the table on this one.)
"Open up my macbook, now open up this document, now open a terminal, type in ./deploy.sh" etc
I'm not patient giving instructions and she's not patient being on the receiving end of it. But she's been a life saver quite a few times now :)
when i was doing a startup in the 90s, my SO was in law school and she was working even longer hours than i was. so our conversations were often "i'm afraid i'm going to have to work late tonight." "bummer. me too, though, so it's probably just as well." we worked side by side a lot too, and both made it a point to be involved in what the other was doing: i'd quiz her about outlines to help study for tests, she gave a lot of feedback on what we were doing as a startup ... it worked out great.
Instead arrange for her to accidentally stumble upon it. Better yet, if you can arrange to have her befriend the blogger in question without mentioning anything...
Barring that, pay the utmost attention to her whenever you are together.