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Comment by fascinated | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for trolling, Ryan.

It's easy to think this is impressive, but the reader forgets about the number of years Ryan has worked on creating businesses. He has made awesome stuff, but all that time can't be ignored. The suggestion that others can easily do it too if only they were less "messed up/caught up in old manufacturing ways", is some smug shit.

These crazy hard-working Americans are trying to figure out their first startup, with very limited resources. It's a different game, and they are in a different place in the food chain.

I am sure if they too have sold multiple companies and worked in the industry for 10+ (?) years, they too would adopt all kinds of relaxed ways of working and running firms. I agree that if they still work long hours after that, it is misguided as you point out.

But lets not get carried away with how the 1% works. How many days a week did you work on your first company?

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We've been working the 4-day week since 2006, when I hired my very first employee. I distinctly remember us hitting £10,000 in our bank account. It was huge.

This proves it's possible, even when you're young, stressed and unprofitable.

So you were around 28. I completely agree with your post and it hits home for me. But to a hustling 21 year old, who is super passionate and has nothing else going on and really, doesnt quite know what he/she is doing -- I think that 5th day would just be spent playing video games or being hungover.

You're describing someone who's lazy, not a 21 year old. The point is to give that person more time to do whatever they want. If you hire the right people they wouldn't be the type that play video games and drink all day.

Hold on, who are you to judge people on that? If someone wants to drink and play video games all day on their fifth day, then good for them! If they are producing quality work, then what does it matter? There is this obsession with productivity in the US and the startup community in general that I find incredibly distasteful. People are already risking their financial lives for startup businesses and you're going to come on here saying that's not good enough. That's typical Silicon Valley hivethink.

Maybe you need to get out of the office more, bud.

Remember he was targeting 21 year olds. As a 21 year old I can confirm that not all of us just drink and play video games. As I said "The point is to give people time to do whatever they want." I don't care what you do or how old you are, I'm just not going to be sitting on my ass all day when I could be doing something productive or be "out of the office."

I think that 5th day would just be spent playing video games or being hungover

You say that as if it was a bad thing.

People need fun. It makes them feel better. People who feel better work better and are more productive. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that an extra day of fun makes the four days more productive than the five days of work.

Hours worked is a lousy way to measure the contribution a person makes to the organisation.

I believe the proper metric should be "profitability delivered per # of hours". If I can be more profitable, in less time, that should be more valuable than how many hours as a whole I've worked.

Great comment :)

Who are these 21-year-olds intelligent and passionate enough for a start-up with nothing else going on?

I still disagree that your case is the average and that your situation can be used to model any young startup. Don't get me wrong, I admire what you're doing and the strong statement you're making about productivity and balancing priorities. I just agree with the above comment that it sounds a bit smug, especially by the title. There's an implied message of "I rode this methodology to ~$5M in funding, so you can too", and I think that makes a huge oversight that this is the same company that hosts some of the largest international developer/new technology conferences six times every year. Aren't you also the owner of the company that hosts FOWA, FOWD and FOM twice a year each? Doesn't that at least deserve a mention? "This works for us, but we also have the kind of industry connections and positioning that practically predisposes us to this kind of funding the second we're in the black anyway"

What I think happened here is that you did a number of things right which affords you this flexibility in hours. I would say the real story is that you made something of value vs the free-but-pointless model we read about much more often these days. You built a business around something valuable with a relatively high price point that makes it less of a victim of the kind of scalability issues that "general public" web based services are dealing with.

I think the bigger take away would be: If you make something awesome for the general public that millions of people will be using all day long, plan to work seven days a week 'round the clock and there's no guarantee you'll ever see a penny. If you come up with something valuable that people would be willing to pay $25-$50 a month for, your life will be much, much more enjoyable and you might actually get to watch your kids grow up and/or have some time left for your hobbies.

There's quite enough "we worked 100h weeks and ate ramen on our road to success" stories out there to balance this one out, don't worry.

from what I remember Ryan has been doing this for a long time. Probably during the time that most of us were thinking - oh shit I better work weekends as well.

I don't know how he did it, but his posts suggest he built the company this way, not just introduced it as a working practice later on. Maybe some employees will post here what they actually worked... although I don't doubt there were weeks that were more than 4 days.

But that aside, I have my own project, I won't call it a startup yet. I work on it evenings and weekends, maybe that adds up to 2 days per week total, the rest of the time I freelance to earn $.

So for me, Ryan is not just providing an aspiration of work/life balance, but actually that you can build a company in the first place without having to work 7 days per week.

I don't think he's trolling. It's good to have alternative working model. You've heard companies prided themselves on working incredibly hard and long hours all the times. Advocating working less is rarer to be heard. Ryan is presenting an alternative model, with profitable data to back it up.

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