Burnouts, VC Cons And Slave Labor: A Marxian Drama

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44 points·cleverjake··4 comments

> No. I’m saying that working very hard is a necessary ingredient to being successful. Unless you are very, very lucky. But working hard doesn’t mean you’ll get rich.

"Working very hard" is neither necessary nor sufficient.

'Working hard' without 'working smart' doesn't get you anywhere. Why is no one talking about 'working smart'? It involves knowing how hard to work, when to stop working, when to step back and take measure of what's going on, when to go home and sleep... and every other thing that goes into making a successful company.

'Working hard', by Arrington's definition, doesn't cover any of these.

Here are the facts.

To have a chance of a successful exit everyone in any startup needs to work real hard. Simple as that.

If you are not interested in that, do not sign up for a startup, whether as a founder or employee. If you want to do startup, the deal is to work hard for a chance of a successful exit. Run your scenarios, estimate the chance of a successful exit, how much you can make realistically and decide if that kind of deal is for you. If not, there are plenty of larger companies hiring or you can bootstrap a slower-paced lifestyle business.

There is no real controversy here.

Startups vary in what they mean by "work real hard", though, so it's possible to pick one where it doesn't mean 80-hour weeks. A subset of the job openings (including some of the YC-company ads here) go out of their way to emphasize normal-ish working hours, strong work/life balance, commitment to avoiding employee burnout, etc. It seems a lot of startups complain about the difficulty recruiting employees, and offering more appealing working conditions might be one way to improve that.

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