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Comment by bckr | Hacker News Reader

Would love to hear some perspectives on this.

I worked at a YC company a couple years ago. They did not say they were 7-day-weekers, but the culture encouraged it.

There were 2 planning meetings per week, one on Thursday and one on Monday. So if you set a goal on Thursday… you should have it done by Monday.

A young manager there would work 24/7, stressing the hell out of most people who worked with them.

Of course, things would be broken that required weekend death marches.

The thing with startups is, it’s easy to default to this. After all, to the founders, this is the most important thing ever. It’s their ticket. And they try to make it seem like your ticket as well (it’s not).

But smart people don’t work like this. Smart thoughts don’t come out of exhausted brains. It’s a meat grinder for no reason. It’s sadistic.

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You're right but you're looking at a very small part of the picture.

> After all, to the founders, this is the most important thing ever. It’s their ticket... But smart people don’t work like this. Smart thoughts don’t come out of exhausted brains. It’s a meat grinder for no reason. It’s sadistic.

They're smart, but they're angry.

Go around and ask the 22 year old YC founders, "How do you deal with anger?" and their answer is "grind." I've asked 5 YC founders on different occasions, every single person said grind! They even used that word.

Some kids didn't deal with their anger, with their parents hitting them and the capriciousness of cram school. Other kids took Women, Gender and Sexuality classes, or they painted, and addressed their anger earlier.

Once a YC founder told me that "this" was "about" what sounded like a college aged vengeance. To proverbially prove all the haters wrong. Dude, that's nuts! These people are angry.

YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot. That's reasonable. Is it sustainable? I don't know, it's a complex question. I wouldn't do it to myself. But I don't feel angry every day.

> To proverbially prove all the haters wrong

I disagree on both points 1) that only young, inexperienced founders have this mindset and 2) that this mindset is somehow better than other forms of inspiration/opportunity.

No amount of "being angry" equals having the skill, finesse, or revenues to see a successful exit. I recently read the avg. age of a founder who exits (acquisition or IPO) was age 45. The 20-something founders who "grind" are not more successful.

Creating a company to "prove the haters wrong" seems misguided and actually far less potent than doing it out of survival, or because there is an incredible financial opportunity in front of you.

> Is it sustainable?

An adjacent question, but the answer is an obvious "No" right? Anyway I was really getting at the question: Is this what to expect from YC founders in 2024+? Context being I've never been asked to work weekends as a normal schedule in 15+ years of working at startups in San Francisco, but recently got asked twice in a row, both from YC.

interesting that you interpreted you interpreted the text as praise. to me it sounds more like a caricature of some hustle bros with anger issues.

It sounded like glamorizing because of:

> YC sincerely wants people to succeed. It's attractive for people who deal with their anger by working a lot.

Equating the success metric to people who have anger problems from the perspective of YC.

people who are angry are easy to manipulate. so, it's a win for yc. but of course for anybody else it's at best financially lucrative but more often than not just a highway to hell.

Maybe they should recruit founders out of prison, surely they're angrier. I still don't see a correlation to a lucrative exit.

> The 20-something founders who "grind" are not more successful.

Was there ever a consensus that 20-somethings who grind are more successful? I don't think so.

They simply do not have the requisite broad life skills that are required in business to succeed. They may have the energy, grit, a narrow set of skills and then stumble upon a goldmine product, but the combination of these factors results in what, a 1-2% successful exit rate?

As for the answer of "is it sustainable", it really depends how rich their parents are and how much they can fail upwards. Apparently, there are a lot of rich parents in the US.

> Apparently, there are a lot of rich parents in the US.

Another point of view is that, if what you say is true, then this isn't as important as it seems.

This sounds overly specific and unlikely to capture a majority of the founders there, but it is a new perspective I hadn't considered.

I disagree, I think you can trace pretty much all self-destruct behaviors to negative emotions, particularly fear. Anger is just a higher-level presentation of fear.

Fear is opposite to love, everything is between.

I have never worked at an SV startup but have worked at couple in other areas. We mostly had weekends off but coming in for a half day on Saturday was certainly not uncommon. 10+ hour days during the week, longer days or all-nighters approaching a deadline.

It can be fun in a way, for a while, if you don't have a family and you get along with all your coworkers and have a good team dynamic established. But it's not sustainable and it doesn't produce high quality code. When you are working with a deadline of "tomorrow morning" you make all kinds of compromises to get stuff working, that are then immediate technical debt that slows you down on the next feature and it just keeps piling up (this was also in the days before automated testing was popular, so you ended up breaking a lot of stuff that you didn't find out about until the QA team started reporting bugs).

We had a couple of middle-aged folks in the company and they tended to disengage from this, not so much because they did not have the stamina but because they had families and responsibilities outside of work, and they had enough experience to know that it was ultimately a path to burnout.

>When you are working with a deadline of "tomorrow morning" you make all kinds of compromises to get stuff working, that are then immediate technical debt that slows you down on the next feature

It makes total sense to create technical debt if you run against the clock spending VC money. If you don't make it till the next round -- it doesn't matter how great everything was.

But they time to pay it all back will come.

> It's sadistic.

That's the point.

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