Happy Family, Successful Start-up. Impossible?
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Here is a post I wrote for parents in the same situation as me: http://maplebutter.com/superhero-tricks-for-startup-parents/
And here is another post I did last week summarizing 20 great articles on this topic: http://jeff.io/posts/20-inspirational-articles-for-startup-p...
I am always keen to read comments when these kinds of posts hit HN. We are not alone STARTUP PARENTS!!! :)
I quit my desk job 4.5 years ago. Worked at home up until last month. In that time I've had two kids (eldest now 3) and every day of their lives so far they've had both parents at home with them. I work weird hours, sometimes starting early, some times finishing late....all just depends on what needs doing. The 3 hrs I'd ordinarily spend commuting, I spend with my kids.
Now things are a little different. We have a startup with actual employees and that means office time. It's much harder now, but it's really just the commute and the time away that is difficult.
Like any job, it's up to you to balance your life how you see fit. Being your own boss at the very least gives you flexibility you'll never see in a desk job. So I think startups are perfect for work/life balance.
Chookaszian has chosen work and family. By all accounts, he has been very successful professionally and the stories he recounts about his family, casually woven into almost every conversation I've had with him, I am lead to believe that he has also managed to maintain great relationships with his wife and children.
In order to pursue successful and meaningful work and family lives, he had to give up his personal interests. As a young man he loved working on cars. He got a great deal of enjoyment out of fixing up old Porshes. About 30 years ago he purchased a Porshe that needed an engine rebuild. He took the engine out of the car and began working on it. Meanwhile, he got married and had children. Where is that engine today? It sits, neglected, in the same place and condition that he left it in 30 years ago. "I now know that engine will still be sitting there long after I am gone," he quipped.
In that same conversation, he also made another keen observation: "When someone says that they want 'work/life balance,' what they really mean is that they don't want to be in an executive position." For CEOs of successful companies, there isn't such thing as work/life balance. If you want that balance, you can be successful in middle management, but only those who are truly passionate and dedicated to their work make successful CEOs.
To illustrate the point, he mentioned a recent email he received from the CEO of a company. Chookaszian is a director on the board of the firm, and the company was dealing with a crisis. The CEO wanted to let him know that he would be out of town for about a week on vacation. The notion that someone would follow through with vacation plans in the midst of a company crisis was, in his view, absurd. "As a director, when I heard news of the company crisis, I cut short my ski trip with my wife and flew home on the next flight in order to deal with the issue." If the CEO felt that his vacation plans superseded his obligations as a CEO, it wasn't likely that he would have a job to come back to after his trip.
This doesn't mean that you can't have a solid relationship with your family. However, success in business requires that you first fulfill your obligation to the company and its constituents. That duty will require sacrifice. It will require long hours at the office, vacations cut short, and kids' soccer games missed. When there is a critical decision to be made at the company, that must come first. The additional difficulty in the start-up context is that, in a company's infancy, critical decisions are being made almost constantly.
However, it also doesn't mean that you can't maintain happy relationships with your family members, but something has got to give. Namely, personal interests must be sacrificed.
Work, family, personal. Pick Two.
I don't think so. I work about 60 hours a week and despite that I spend about 3 hours per work day with my daughter (more than most of my salaried friends can pull off) and 2 full days a week "off" with her too (although I then often work after she's gone to sleep).
I think the real danger is lengthy commuting or needing to be away from home a lot. Not every business requires this, but for those that do, it's those multiple nights aways and lost meals, bathtimes and bedtimes that could eat away at the bond. Pick your battles wisely, though, and you can keep it up.
Of course, that's the optimistic case where you have a spouse who does many of those things you apparently don't even think about, and who is willing to accept your devotion to company above family. In reality, that's not likely to last long and you'd be single in short order. Some would say that proves the point about startup/family incompatibility right there, but let's say you overcome the strong anti-male bias in our family-law system and become the custodial parent so you still have a family (sans wife). Now you'll need to spend even more time on food prep and housework, plus other tasks related to school or general care and feeding of a child. Also, many of those tasks will need to be done at particular times, not at leisure. Even if you slept a mere four hours a night, you'd be hard pressed to spend three hours a day of real time with your daughter.
In short, then, I just don't think your example proves your point very well at all. Maybe you're superman, the one in a million who could sustain such a schedule. That still says nothing about whether others can.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/preamble/hostages-to-fortune...
So often we look for simple rules as an explanation, but typically outcomes are a result of many smaller factors. It's like the recent discussion here about VC causing more startups to fail vs. succeed. Maybe we can realise that VC isn't the deciding factor, in fact there is likely no single deciding factor, just a bunch of things that impact the outcome.
Startups can provide flexibility, especially in working times and telecommuting options that larger businesses usually cannot. That flexibility can enable you to spend the right time with your family and still meet the demands of a startup (which you shouldn't underestimate).
I'm interested in the conversation that could happen here, but I feel the article itself is weak.
As for Ambitious Entrepreneurship and having a family - I guess it's possible to those that decide it is, and is not possible to those that decide it isn't. I for one have a daughter and another one due in a month - and i make time for both my ambitions and my family. It's obviously not easy - but really what has been worth pursuing that has been easy in life?
I think it just takes a very special kind of person, but in general...its not out of reach for the /normal/ entrepreneur. It is however very hard, but what in life isnt?
You get in what you get out of everything in this world, so i think it just comes down to being able to balance your life. Maybe one day i'll be brave enough to have children, but that wont be until i feel like im smart enough to understand how to balance the responsibilities.
Let's look at this from a hacker perspective. Does an instance exist? Yes. Is this instance replicable? Ah, now we have a question.