The Truth About Starting a Startup
tracy.posthaven.com
tracy.posthaven.com
There are very few blog posts about those guys. Its the same with people who study 100% more than everybody else to pass a class but still fail.
You hear about those who made it thru, but never the ones who did not have the capacity for their goal.
Its up to you to know where you stand in this and what you want to sacrifice.
But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
As someone who ran two failed startups, it's all about perspective. I gave up a ton to build and run my companies, and failed, but in no way do I regret it, or consider it a sacrifice. The amount that I learned, the people that I met, the skills that I developed, I'd never get from working a regular job. (I wrote a mini-postmortem[1] for my last startup.)
There is huge personal value in taking big risks and doing difficult things even when you fail.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-mohi...
It depends on what kind of risk you are taking and when you decide its time to throw in the towel, and many other factors.
> But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
If you dont think hard work does good for the individual, then you are not only mistaken but most likely trying to justify your laziness more than anything else. And if you think the input size of your labor has to be proportional to the output size of success/failure, then you´ve completely misunderstood the relationship between labor and success.
Hard work on its own is insufficient to success - there are many other factors required (timing, capital, support/network, etc.) - yet it is required for success because having all the other factors come together without hard work to bind them leads to abject failure most often. And sure, you can talk about the few exceptions to the rule that got lucky, we can all envy those. But unless you are one those people who got lucky, you have no better strategy available to you if you want to succeed.
Besides, hard work has an insane amount of benefits to it even if failure is the outcome. You learn new things all the time, you connect with people that may become your greatest supporters in the future, you grow as a person and most importantly when you look in the mirror you come to respect yourself because you choose to bear a burden that few are willing to. Most people dont take risks, most people dont work hard, and most people would rather smoke weed and chill on a couch rather than work on something that will enrich their lives be it financially or otherwise. Hard work is the only reliable strategy available for the average person to become a better version of themselves and with that create a better future for themselves AND society.
So no, hard work does not "rarely" do good for the individual. It most often does good for the individual. The probelm with your statement is that you are equating "good" with "success" (mostly financial) and those two things are very very different from each other.
I think a lot of this hustle culture comes down to wanting to feel productive, but at the same time wanting to avoid the difficult problems that come along with being an entrepreneur. It's a lot easier to talk about how hard you are working than to actually do the work itself.
We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance.
0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.
This really resonates a lot with me. Yet it's really rare to hear people talk about it in the startup world.
Pretty much regardless of how much time you actually spend with them.
Since he was able to make both successful, we should be able to do that too :)
Also, how do you know Elon Musk relationship with his family is successful?
Just because the answer is no doesn't mean it'll matter, it sounds like everything is going well either way.
A lot of people hate spending time with their families and work hard (literally and figuratively) to avoid the home. Or maybe what they call spending time with their families is 1 hour of fun and games while a WAG does 11 hours of completely inane child care. It would be inappropriate to generalize that people get more joy out of hour 2 of inane child care than they get joy from something that actually requires their intelligence or whatever. For women in the startup world this problem is extra acute, because they are choosing between 3 and 11 hours of inane child care, while most men only are only really choosing whether to have 0 or 1 hours of fun with their kids.
So I really sympathize with Tracy Young's perspective here. And she is putting things in a way that does not require making anyone out to be an antagonist, a kind of maturity most founders don't have.
It’s very difficult. Doable but difficult.
Then count.
Unless you have a few 2am nights and full weekend days it’s relatively difficult to reach 100 hours plus. When you actually count it gives more reasonable figures.
That is not a startup, that's an SMB.
Just to be clear, I didn't mean the previous comment in any disparaging way.
I'm not sure we have something I'd call PMF yet. But again, that's all about your definition.
The answer is "yes" to all questions. I don't know what the article author wanted to say, but she just reminded me personally that the US tech "scene" is not healthy.
There's this huge culture of work so hard you ignore your family/personal health/etc, but at least you created something. It's overrated.
> I’ve come to believe that a big part of our jobs as founders is to manage our own emotions through the emotional rollercoaster called building a startup.
I totally agree with that, I'd go even further saying is not a big part, but it is THE big part. Necessary but of course not sufficient for a unicorn, but you need it to be able to persist .
Sounds great
It’s extremely tempting to grab the land that is available, as it has real consequences on the future.
My risk profile and my fomo are in constant conflict
I don't think that trying to dig a place over this timescale, given this uncertainty, should be a justification to sacrificing a big chunk of your life -- very few companies can expect to survive so long.
So, basically, if you are not seriously rich by that time, the additional effort might not make a difference.
There are reasons to invest one's life into a business (loving what you do, belief in doing the right thing, adding to the world, etc.), but market forces should not be on this list.
20 years ago we thought Internet Explorer would be the last browser we’d ever use, and... it just wasn’t. The network effects enabled by the internet, when triggered in the right way at the right time, can sweep through established markets faster than in most other sectors, and it will probably continue to be like that for a very long time.
There are many niche, local markets, there are many opportunities to innovate. But still you don't need to slave yourself to work to get those markets, I can't buy her message that starting a startup would require a complete self sacrifice for a decade. Then she says the most important thing is relationships, yet in the same interview she said you can't see your friends and family etc. Sorry, that is a very dysfunctional way to live for a long time.
If you don't do what your competitors do and you communicate it well, this can already be enough to differenciate.
It's not always a sprint, where everyone runs the same race. If all your competitors run in the same direction, but you choose a different one, you can very well walk for some time.
Work is work. Especially if you work for someone else - they pay for your time, that is all. Nothing more.
I saw a monk once, on his hands and knees, maintaining the grass at a temple. This is the craft he has dedicated himself to. Others have chosen other things.
It is not hard to see why many see their life's work as important to them. That isn't romanticism. That's just a different preference vector.
Personally, having read The Remains of The Day, there are certain end results I would consider failure. But clearly men such as Newton did not consider them that.
I think I see both sides. On one hand, as someone else said, it's not the building a SaaS app that entrepreneurs are proud of -- it's building the business and building the company. That in and of itself is a lot more impressive to me than building just an app.
Is it as impressive and historically significant as the great scientific discoveries of Newton? Maybe, but probably not. Or maybe they are apples and oranges. Suppose Newton had a collaborator who built a giant manufacturing empire with his discoveries. Would those two be comparable in terms of "who was more important", or would comparison simply cease to be meaningful at this point?
To your point, maybe that's what makes the Newton comparison somewhat of a non-sequitor -- it's at best a reach.
So, for instance, while you'd (taking a leap here and guessing) rate it useless for a Theravada monk to master his chanting, there is a portion of it that to him is sufficient to just be good at. A portion apart from the outcome that is just dedicated to the craft itself.
If you're not driven by the craft, you likely won't get it. That's okay. The path to living a fulfilling life is to find your preference vector and optimize for it.
>> When we only had months of runway left in the bank, there was no work-life balance. We had to work around the clock so that our company could survive. When we were behind on our big product launch, when we’re behind on our revenue goals, when we released nasty bugs to our users, or when our servers were down, there was no work-life balance.
This doesn't sound like someone dedicating themselves to the art of their craft, and I would argue that we released nasty bugs is the complete antithesis of what you meant. This sounds like making desparate moves trying to stay alive.
To me, a perfect modern example of someone putting the craft above all else (including their family) is Jiro Ono [0]. He does that because he wants to, not because he'd go broke otherwise.
I read GP's comment as not critizing craftsmen, but criticizing someone prioritizing the daily grind above their life. And let's face it, startups (or any other business) is 90% daily grind.
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For what it's worth, I think it depends on the shape of the thing. "What actually" is not a fixed concept like that. For instance, "what makes a good vacation?". One could say "not having faeces on your nose for the whole time" since, after all, it is unlikely that having faeces on your nose the whole time is likely to make a good vacation even if you're on the most lovely beach surrounded by all you live. But that's a baseline that's easy to meet. So what _actually_ makes a good vacation? The truth is: ∄ an activity or characteristic X such that ∀ vacations V that have X, V is a good vacation.
So what "actually makes people happy"? No one knows. We know things that can make you unhappy (faeces on the nose, not having any relationships) and we know that there exists a baseline happiness we have (the Hedonic Treadmill, etc.). But really, not much more.
There isn't one path to happiness. Yes, close relationships and helping others in close proximity can feel good. So can wealth, social status, or building a business that positively impacts millions of people. It depends on your values, and your ability to align your actions with your values.
> People like her and even the greatest in the field, like Steve Jobs, may lead extraordinary lives in our imaginations, but inside, they almost always feel horrible most of the time.
I believe you are actually the one romanticizing here. Most people do not have this type of success, and therefore, tend to discredit the lives of those that do in order to protect their self-image.
The story of the outwardly successful CEO who is inwardly emotional distraught is a great Hollywood story, but it's an exception. If you actually follow the lives of most successful entrepreneurs, I think you will find that they are quite happy - enjoying their wealth and social status in their free time.
Yes, the day to day work of a CEO is very stressful. But, when they have time to step back from it all, knowing that they gave it their all and made an impact can be deeply satisfying.
Again, the key is to not assume everyone shares the same values. Family and friendships are one thing to value. Impact, contribution, wealth, and social status are other values. No value system is better or worse, objectively -- as long as you are capable of fulfilling your values.
Reminds me of this scene in Margin Call, about the 2009 financial crash:
"You're one of the luckiest guys in the world, Sam. You could have been digging ditches all these years."
"That's true, and if I had, at least there'd be some holes in the ground to show for it."
Personally, I have found fulfillment from menial labour only when I have found no fulfillment from knowledge work. Achievement at the latter beats out the former by a large multiple, and doing the former when I have access to the latter feels me leaving like I've wasted time.
Obviously this is an extreme example, but some people just love what they are doing and happen to get paid for it and in this case he was in love with his project.
I enjoy having sex, but if I have sex 7 times a day I probably have a problem.
If that sex results in you having enough children to take care of you and work on/build a family empire with you, you may have more of a solution than a problem. Historically speaking, this happened quite frequently with male royalty.
My favorite observation of his was that in Germany, he would arrive at work, go to his cubicle, work until 4pm, and then go and get beers with his coworkers until 7pm, when they would go home to their partners.
In SV, he would come in, we would socialize, he would work, we'd have lunch and drink a beer, do some work, take a break for some beer, so some work, and then have a beer at work before heading home at 7pm to our partners.
We'd get the same amount of work done, and the same amount of socializing, but it would all be done at work.
He never understood why we would want to do that, and not just work all day and then leave to socialize.
The crazy thing is French gdp per capita (measured hourly) growth was cited to be higher than America’s in this book by Mitt Romney’s partner at Bain. Aka, hustle porn measures hustle not output. The French just work 1700 hours a year versus the Americans who skewed up towards 2100.
Is it possible that your coworker was making choice of going for beer every day till 7pm and other people did not made same choice?
In later jobs that didn't really happen & I think I caught the very end of that type of thing.
Daily Work-Load is a function of distance from domicile to workplace.
Germans generally live closer to their workplace, so its easier to come and go early, and also have a lifestyle outside the office (and even away from their own, moderate apartments) in a fairly cosmopolitan cityscape .. whereas Americans make hourly investments in their daily commute, just to get started, and don't typically have the kind of street-life infrastructure of your average European industrial region.
I think when Americans can walk to work, they spend less time overall at the office - but that is because they are more efficient/effective during the day. I have seen American colleagues take a few weeks to get used to the idea of walking everywhere, but then .. usually when the summer starts .. they become as Euro- as anyone.
Purely anecdotal of course, but I've noticed this swing myself over decades across Western world.
(Disclaimer: Japanese work schedule is way different, and I consider it more of an inverse case: Japanese move closer to their workplace, just so they can spend more time working .. and even though they 'walk everywhere' in the big Japanese cities, hours-long commutes are also a norm ..)
The average commute in the US (52 min round-trip, https://www.google.com/search?q=american+average+commute+dur...) is either lower or at most equal to the average European commute (1h24 minutes, https://www.google.com/search?q=Europe+average+commute+durat...)
I really don't know why the popular stereotype, that I held too, is the other way around.
Japan comes in at 1h19 (https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+average+commute)
The 4-letter word "work" encompasses very different activities:
(1) The so-called "work" that's genuinely interesting to the entrepreneur and he/she would rather not spend time on anything else
-- or --
(2) the work that people just barely tolerate as a job from 9 to 5
This means many observers using mental model (2) are confused why some founders have no "work/life" balance. In a previous comment, I try to explain what mental model (1) of passionate work feels like.[0]
If a person's MITTD (Most Interesting Thing To Do) happens to be a research scientist working 80 hours a week in a lab trying to discover a new molecule, or a musician practicing guitar "until his fingers bleed", or an Olympic athlete spending most of her time for years to prepare for competition, it's more likely that society romanticizes that "unbalanced life" with more positive labels such as "intense dedication".
But if that MITTD for a human happens to be working 80+ hours a week on an internet startup, we label it with negative labels such as "work" and that the entrepreneur is illogical for not having a good work-life balance.
If Warren Buffet is already worth $80 billion and owns a private jet that can take him to any exotic location in the world, why does he bother going into a boring Omaha Nebraska office every day to look at financial statements?!? Because looking at business numbers is the most interesting activity to him. Other entrepreneurs understand why WB doesn't just take it easy and lay in a hammock in the Caribbean or go whale watching in Alaska. WB is not "sacrificing" a tropical island vacation and he's not suffering at work to look at financial statements. That's what he prefers to do with his time. But to the accountant that wants to gouge his eyes out after balancing debits and credits for the 1000th time, WB's passion makes no sense at all.
Founders have less work/life balance than regular workers, in US, in Sweden and everywhere else.
For me: I’ve had many happy times in my life. Many of them where when I was working 60+ hours per week on a project that I didn’t own (sometimes literally owned none of it, other times 0.<many 0s>1 of it).
If you pay me well enough (exact definition subject to negotiation), keep the bullshit to a minimum, and put interesting problems onto the field of play, I’ll happily work 60 hours a week doing puzzles that you’re basically overpaying me to solve because I find them fascinating and would do them for free if the world didn’t run on money.
If you're applying the "work/life balance" to founders that are doing what they prefer to do, it means my previous comment didn't do a good job explaining the flaw with that distorted lens.
Imagine a retired person spending all day in her garden... planting flowers, trimming hedges into pleasing shapes, etc. When not outside in her garden, she's still reading about gardening in magazines and surfing website discussion forums related to gardening. When doing neither of those tasks, she still thinks about gardening while laying in bed and anticipates the tasks she wants to do the following day and the future plans for the next week/month/year. The sum of all of her gardening effort adds up to more than 40+ hours per week. However, most outsiders would not say the retired gardener is having a "work/life balance" problem or that she's a "workaholic". Instead, we give her a charitable label such as, "she's enjoying life".
For many startup founders, building the business is the "garden" or "creative canvas" to express themselves.
For others where the activities at the job are not the most fulfilling form of living, we then have to construct this mathematical ratio of "work:life" because the work is undesirable and it's the life that is desirable. (E.g. sayings such as "work to live instead of live to work" or "working for the weekend".) Therefore, "work-vs-life balance" is indirect code speak for "undesirable-vs-desirable balance".
The founders that are doing what they truly want to do (even if it's 60+ hours a week) don't have this giant misalignment of desirable-vs-undesirable activity and therefore, the whole "work/life balance" is meaningless to them. Their work _is_ the passionate life. You can't apply "work-life balance" to Warren Buffett. He's been fascinated by business financial numbers since he was a little boy. Thus, forcing Warren Buffett go on a whale watching expedition to fulfill our expectations of "life" in the work/life balance equation is actually cruel torture to him.
You just answered your own question. Moderate success can co-exist with any number of other goals and priorities. Extreme success requires extreme dedication.
The great thing about the modern world - no one is "forced" to pursue extreme success. Everyone is free to pursue their own goals and life purpose. You don't have to justify your priorities, and neither does the workaholic.
I think it's a SV (and some other industries) thing. Even more specific, it's a thing for a certain type of product. For a product like the one in the OP it's a natural monopoly. To be really successful you need the designers of a building and the builders using the same software. The plumbing contractor can't say that they don't use PlanGrid and expect to get the bid if that's what everyone else uses. So there's enormous pressure to be the winner since there's only going to be one while everyone else loses.
And the rewards for winning are tremendous. She spent ~7 years on PlanGrid and now is (presumably) extremely wealthy. She never has to work a day again in her life. In terms of balance that is pretty great, no?
Describing yourself as a "refugee of Communism" is an explicitly political stance which initially put me off reading this article. Was it relevant? Considering that she then describes working beyond the point that it damages her health, I'm not sure that this is such a great advertisement for capitalism.
Nobody is a refugee of 'communism' at least as far as nobody is a citizen of communism - communism isn't a nation-state.
(In general, people claiming asylum from communist states have been aristocrats with the power to choose to leave, and choose to do so rather than lose their status: so this shouldn't in itself be seen as a claim to poverty or disadvantage)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI&feature=emb_logo...
Have you done the math here? Take the cumulative market cap of YC companies (use a conservative measure). Divide that by the hours worked by founders. Multiply that by founder ownership percentage. I think you'll find that founders are properly incentivized.
Nevertheless, I was very happy to be there and was happy to take YC's deal. Pretty much everybody else was too - we were all adults (average age ~29) and we knew what the deal was and were very happy to take it. If I do a startup again, I will certainly apply for YC again.
More broadly, your attitude/comment is very typical of the negative, cynical place that HN has become and it's quite sad. This place used to be more balanced between encouragement and criticism - the top comment in the famous Dropbox thread was actually encouraging, the famous dismissive comment was not #1. Today, there is little beyond self-reinforcing cynism and negativity around here. That is, your comment is not insightful, edgy or even remotely realistic. It's just shitty.
I bought into it myself and spent precious years of my life working for the benefit of such investors which I have no doubt will regret on my death bed. I am not attacking you or your decisions personally. I am speaking as a recovering startup employee who is tired of watching yet another generation being sold appealing ideals like risk-taking and entrepreneurship and who pay dearly for it with their health, family, and friendships.
I love the work I do, so do not attempt to paint me as a sad negative hater. I just want more people to think critically about YC's business model. Read stories like Tracy's and think twice before signing up for life at a startup. Better yet, I would like to challenge the idea that it takes 80 hours a week to be successful. YC wants you to think so, because if they can overclock you for a 1% chance your company will hit it big, then they win. They don't care if you burn out because there's another startup school class right around the corner.
Human's effort is not linear.
Try this: Go outside, measure some distance by counting steps, like 500 meters, or measure it with google earth.
Experiment A: Then take your clock and start running your distance multiple times, do for example 5 Kms, apply more and more effort until it is reasonable but not that exhausting and can sustain it. Run for 20 minutes. Write down your time and how do you feel.
Experiment B: Now do the same thing another day but applying all the effort you can. Then you will be forced to stop in order to rest and not die. Then try again, stop when you can't do more and so on until you make the distance. Write down your time and how do you feel.
Compare both times. Compare your feelings in both situations. You will be surprised at the results.
You can do bigger distances if you are trained, like 20 kms, because it represents better work load.
In places like Singapur, or China and now the US(it used to be different in the past because of religion) they are living their lives like in experiment B.
In places like Germany or Israel they live their lives like in experiment A. In Germany people is not less productive than in America, or Singapur. Quite the contrary.
In China people work all the time, they sleep on work, but the intensity of work is very low. Working all the time means you can't be excited for work. All work, no fun,your mind sabotages you.
Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world.
Now the US goes backwards, glorifying hard work until you die in your 30s because of cancer.
I have known several guys die very young of cancer in the startup scene and it is not a coincidence. The immune system and organs are depressed by constant stress. Stress is good if you can rest. Tissues are not repaired. They eat badly and don't sleep.
Do not do that. Do the above exercise with your work. Measure the real output of your work. Force yourself to rest and be with your family, go hiking or to the beach like in experiment A. Work as hard as you can,and do not take breaks, like in experiment B.
Do that for a week and compare your output results. You will be surprised.
Ostensibly, Christians dominated the world by pioneering monotheistic proselytization. The day of rest didn't necessarily preclude Abrahamic religion from continuing the human sacrifice culture carried over from the polytheistic Canaanite roots of early Judeo-Christian religion. To the contrary, human sacrifice was elevated to the foundational myth vis-a-vis prophetic martyrship and symbolic rebirth.
On the whole, I agree with your broader point. Sacrifice cultures and result oriented cultures are intrinsically at odds with each other -- at some point, the culture must decide what is more important: appearances, or sustainable throughput? Cultures that decide to prioritize the latter almost all converge to your experiment A.
But...
> I remember on so many occasions; I would turn the corner in our house to find one of my co-founders, who are all tall, strong men, sobbing in a corner, mourning our best friend.
I can't help but find this line ironic given the talk is from Future Founders Conference for Women.
If you’re arguing to edit out the clause “who are all tall, strong men”, I can sort of see your point, but I think it does paint a useful picture for me and I don’t think we should hold talk authors to sub-sentence standards of perfection.