> "People realised that they do like being around their families, and it gave many a sense of freedom"
I want to spend more time with my family and not have as many responsibilities, better start a startup.
I want to spend more time with my family and not have as many responsibilities, better start a startup.
But here are the things that are different:
* Nobody is earning millions here. The salary is roughly at market rate, if not slightly below.
* The funding is a parent-corporation sort of relationship that plays the long game and doesn’t expect to sell after 5 years. But it also means people are paid entirely in real money.
* We only hire as many as we need and not entire divisions to simultaneously re-invent deep learning, target the whole world, and bleed billions of investor dollars in the process.
Finally, this startup (well, scale-up I suppose) is European, and not US-based, and I think the whole unicorn-based way of running things is slightly foreign around here.
So is it a “startup” or just a business growing its customer base with a successful product?
How many founders move to the Bay Area thinking "you know, what I really want to build is a small business?" And how many HN techies would enthusiastically join a project like that?
In fact the desire of people to "just work on really neat tech" and have some creative influence and work outside of a big boring company is exactly what has allowed many startups to underpay and play carrot-on-stick with stock options for years.
Almost nobody is getting rich inside these "tech" startups, the options agreements are written to prevent it. Maybe the founding engineers, but nobody after that.
I feel like what has happened is that the words "startup" and "tech" have been redefined by a small segment of the population who are interested in one particular thing being described here in this thread.
But I've been around long enough to remember when it meant "a group of people getting together to make some really neat tech."
Honestly the motivations of people who started a bunch of the foundational SV ecosystem were exactly that and not "let's be billionaires" That is very much a post-Y2k mentality.
Think about it: if you can gain 1 customer through every 40 hours of work, then by working 80 hours per week you can essentially double the early size of your business. Hire twice as many employees, which can introduce exponential scaling opportunities. Make double the bets on new ideas. It’s a huge boost. After 1 month you could have sold just 4 customers working 40 per week, or closer to 10 and be writing job ads already by working extra.
It is a trap, though. Your health will suffer, your relationships will suffer, you’ll become completely self-absorbed. Some things just aren’t worth it in my opinion.
I think going from nothing to something will always be that difficult.
For the most part you’re required to deal with all the same laws that a multi billion dollar incumbent is, and often times even more (zoning, permitting that are hard law for small players and easily flexed by local government for dubious jobs claims by large players). Many areas charge fixed annual fees for incorporation that are notable for an individual but irrelevant at scale. Rigorous accounting and record keeping standards. High salaries even for uneducated manual labor work. Building any modest physical structure requires what amounts to most middle class individuals entire expected lifetime earnings and you largely aren’t able to legally do any of that work yourself.
There’s a good reason California startups exist in the way they do, and if you aren’t doing software or running an unlicensed pop up fruit stand or flower shop you often look elsewhere.
Do you have an example of a reasonably successful business that's a 9-5 job when getting started? Forget startups... let's say you want to open a dry cleaners, bakery or hardware store... none of those seem like they'd be 9-5 jobs. The one exception might be a consulting business if you already have lots of relationships in a space, although most independent consultants who I know tend to have periods of feast and famine.
The issue is that getting your first customers is hard. And then once you have traction, but don't have enough money to hire people, that's hard again. And then once you grow larger, you have more responsibility yet again. At some point, the gears start turning themselves and I've seen many owners who can take a step back, but at that point it's no longer a "startup" but a "business".
I think the highly-regularized pattern of the 40-hour work week, 9-5, is not a natural rhythm. I think it kills the human spirit with its unnatural regularity and monotony.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe one in ten vc backed startups will find a viable business model eventually.
If you don't take vc money maybe it's easier to find a smaller viable business, but then it's harder to pay yourself.
If you choose to play a long game, you can have a nice stable-ish income for 2-3 people after 5-ish years.
Took last week off from work. Just did nothing. Slacked off. This is the first vacation I've had for over a year. According to my fibit, my resting heart rate went down 12 points. I have so many new ideas and plans for what to do next. I feel more inspired and honestly like a new person.
I think a lot of small startups and entrepreneurs work too much. Working 12 hour days is strictly worse than 8 hour days over time. If you skimp on rest and recovery, you gradually transform into an idiot. Do you want an uninsipired idiot for a CEO for your tenuous new business? Because that's what you're turning yourself into.
That's the thing that needs to be taken into account during these discussions. 12 hours grinding away at a steel mill? Hard. 12 hours at my computer having fun writing code, cracking bugs, listening to good music, and eating tasty food throughout the day? Pretty neat.
> This is the first vacation I've had for over a year.
This is the tough part, though, and I admire you for that. I've always been perfectly happy to work 12+ hour days without days off, but only as long as I know that if I need a break, I -can- take a break, go off for a week or whatever. Knowing that I -can- tap out whenever I want is the key to stopping burnout, for me. If I couldn't, I'd have to be much more restrained.
Recently I thought “man, this new God of War is the longest game ever”, until I saw that I had only logged 16 hours in the game over 4 months.
They wouldn’t grow big. But there are plenty, from the neighbourhood plumber to the daycare to the modest insurance outfit that keeps being sold from person to person as they retire.
High demand, so little initial grinding for clients. High demand also means standards aren’t high. People can’t be that picky about daycare or plumbers these days.
The reason most successful startups take tons of work is that they are competing against peers willing to put in tons of work. If the whole ecosystem decided 9 to 5, 5 days a week was the effort cap, then sure, but game theory tells us that won't happen.
A real example is a friend of mine that only sleeps an hour or so every few days. Yes, his work output is fantastic, but his planning, decision-making, and "big picture" foresight are nil.
He is grinding out tried-and-true business models, but is unable to take it to the next level because he simply does not have the creativity, free time, or the wandering mind to make those leaps.
Sure, he makes a very good amount of money, but he's been hit in the past with having to shutter businesses due to completely foreseeable potholes.
When you focus completely on getting to your destination, you never stop and ask yourself if that's really where you need to go.
I will also note that the people that "work" 9 to 9 and so on are very rarely doing non-delegateable work or working on high-intensity "important" problems for the entire duration. That sort of thing is simply impossible, because you lose your consciousness after a short bit, and end up running on intuition and learned movements, i.e. a robot.
There is something to be said about working hard, but there is a lot of nuance lost in most discussions (dare I say, because most people that survived this game did so with a huge dash of luck, and are not cognizant of what really moved the needle).
In order to support this life, I had to provide consulting services for other companies. Many of them are startups themselves. In any case, this meant I worked at least three full-time jobs. I would work to find clients, work to provide services to those clients, and work to build my startup.
In one case, the startup would take off and pay all of my bills so I could focus on it. In another case, we raised money from investors to focus on it.
In any case, if you want a 9-5 gig contract and don't want to find the work, you can try and use recruiters if you are a knowledge worker. If you aren't a knowledge worker, then you probably will be relying on gig work like Uber/DoorDash. In the case of the latter, you better have a lot of roommates since those pay so poorly.
I believe 37signals meets your criteria, or perhaps Mojang pre-Microsoft.
I've done five startups this way.
Lots of people start “normal, chill” lifestyle businesses. But nothing about a successful startup is “normal” in the traditional sense of the term.
If it's a business built to be sustainable, sure, you should be able to run it 9 to 5.
I can't actually see what the article is claiming, due to the paywall.
Startups are something you want to transform, not sustain.
Regardless, all this entrepreneurial activity is great news for the country!
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[a] With apologies to Mark Twain: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8006482-a-man-who-carries-a...
Startups are very demanding on time and attention resources. Families with children would feel the strain of absent parents. It could work out in some cases but for the general case it’s not the best idea.
If you have to travel, take a couple days before/after and bring your family; see the city. Even ask whomever you’re meeting where to go. More often than not, you’ll spend some time with them because people want to show off their city, which just makes it that much easier to sell when it comes time to do so.
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Okay seriously this can work but it will really force you to work on your communication skills. Which is probably a good thing anyway, for both the business and the relationship, but it's very challenging.