A day in the life of a CEO
ryancarson.com
ryancarson.com
The person on Twitter clearly asks about the business. The author then proceeds to write 18 points about his day, only five of which are actually about the business, including some gems like, "Crank through todos".
Does this guy think he's a celebrity or something? Why am I interested in his personal life whatsoever? He's the "CEO" of a small company most people have never heard of.
Someone in the comments asks him why he calls his phone an iPhone, rather than just a phone, to which he replies that he wants us to know the all the details and specifics. Oh, so you go into detail about how eating right away boosts your metabolism, but 3 hours of the day is "meetings"? Thanks for being specific.
1. Get up at 5 AM or sooner
2. Go to gym every day
3. Eat organic food or be vegetarian or vegan
4. Use iPhone and 11" MacBook Air
5. Work from coffee shops
6. Write a blog post about it and post it on Hacker News
Feel free to add ideas. :)
(I'm not mocking the author, but the idea.)
My only beef is when sideline critics go ballistic just because someone works hard and wants to be a part of a team that works hard. Take a look at the HN-linked article from yesterday where the Google manager talked frankly about being driven and the manager of a group that's very work-oriented and driven. From some of the comments in the thread, you'd think that she was talking about her joy of drowning kittens.
It's a shame to see that kind of attitude dominate the conversation of even one thread on HN, a site that should be open to many routes to success for entrepreneurs, including very hard work.
People go ballistic when you suggest that they are obligated to accept terrible working conditions where they don't have (for example) any free time to spend with their beautiful family. They go ballistic because such arguments tend to be very successful and result in bad working conditions. Hopefully you understand that hard work does not require you to put in 160-hour weeks.
People go ballistic when you suggest that they are obligated to accept terrible
working conditions where they don't have (for example) any free time to spend
with their beautiful family.
I'm talking about people going ballistic when there's no true obligation in question.
We're in a high-demand industry where you can normally go get another job. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but typically there isn't a need to suffer in a bad job. When I don't like my work/life/compensation balance, I find a new job. People I work with do the same thing.
Hell, HN is a site dedicated to people who have or aspire to creating their own companies to mold the work environments that suit them and the people with whom they wish to work. Read the article this thread is attached to. Ryan Carson is living a work/personal life balance that is enviable by many standards. I would argue that in order to allow people like Ryan to go out and do what they want, you need to allow other people who want different work/life/compensation balances to pursue the environments they want. Freedom of choice and encouragement to experiment would seem to be a much greater set of principles to embrace, rather than sniping at hard workers from the sidelines because their idea of working through a Saturday evening with their team while they're trying to get that big contract isn't your cup of tea.
What place does glorified perpetual self-victimization have here?
It is better if we do not promote a fashion of 160-hour work weeks, because that is bad for human beings. If you run a company, holding people's lives in your hands, you should try to be a good person who makes a good difference in those lives. From a production perspective, productivity actually drops off as fatigue increases. From a business standpoint you should want employees who generate significant value to be happy so they will be loyal rather than leaving or melting down. And it's probably better NOT to become known for squeezing dimes to the detriment of others' health because you thought that was a better way of making money than growing the business.
That isn't "sniping at hard workers" and it isn't "self-victimization." It is resisting the attempt of some employers to give everyone 160 hour work weeks and classify people who don't accept that as antisocial communist complainers. That isn't free-market capitalism, it is the company store.
Give people who bring value to your business fair conditions and fair pay. If a few people want to spend more time for some specific reason that doesn't need to be specifically encouraged and made into a fashion or a de facto requirement. This makes people miserable and it kills them early and it is wrong.
> You have caricatured people you disagree with
right next to this:
> It is better if we do not promote a fashion of 160-hour work weeks
If you disagree with the substance of what I'm saying, I'll happily discuss the finer points and think about my arguments vs the ones you're offering. I'm here to actively learn, share, and find motivation -- not really to just howl and argue by using fallacious reasoning and cheap debating tactics.
If all you can do is throw up straw men[1], then I'm going to have to challenge you to show where I've made any such arguments. You'll need to show where anyone is advocating 160 hour work weeks, much less "forcing" others to work 160 hour work weeks. That you're distorting the facts of easily-referenced articles[2] is troubling.
Seriously, I'm happy to concede a point and learn from my mistake... but if you think I'm making one, you'll need to provide better arguments.
Give Ryan a break. Running a startup and balancing that with personal / family life is a huge question for many entrepreneurs, and I for one am pleased to see Ryan being candid about it.
Glossing over the "Crank through todos" section is fine with me too - These are likely different day-to-day, and I'd rather he painted a picture of how he steers the company, than get bogged down in company internals.
Besides, if you want to know specifics just ask him (he hangs out here), rather than acting like a douche.
1. The person on Twitter doesn't exclusively ask Ryan about the business. He specifically asks how he spends his day. Even if the asker wanted to know more about the business and less about his day, Ryan's response is appropriate given how the question was phrased.
2. Ryan does talk about which business activities he focuses on. He specifically mentions how he used to handle newsletters, wireframes, support emails, and marketing plans but now focuses on strategy, product, and team communication.
3. Ryan is a CEO of a venture-backed company and people, including ones on HN, are sometimes interested in the lives of people like him, both the personal and professional aspects. The personal details he shared helped me understand how he's able to maintain work-life balance, notwithstanding the demands of a CEO, which I find personally useful.
4. As to your complaint of him specifically mentioning his iPhone, one of the other commenters put it best: "Because his identity revolves around the brand of his phone and he's just begging for your validation. OR The post is full of specific details and he owns an iPhone."
If you want Ryan to be more specific, you could ask him on his blog. But I think it's unreasonable to expect that Ryan should have had the foresight to be more specific, and then subsequently criticize him for not being specific.
Wrong. He asks: "can you blog about how you spend your day running your biz?" followed by "What biz activities do you focus on now that the product is up?". "Biz" is referring to business, in case you didn't pick that up.
>" Ryan is a CEO of a venture-backed company and people, including ones on HN, are sometimes interested in the lives of people like him, both the personal and professional aspects. "
I'll tell you what his life is like: it's just like yours, or anyone else who has a work-day. Do you really think that somehow being a venture-backed CEO of a tiny company changes your life? That's incredibly naive.
>"As to your complaint of him specifically mentioning his iPhone"
I didn't complain about it, someone in the comments did. His reply was what interested me.
>"If you want Ryan to be more specific, you could ask him on his blog."
No, I don't care to read his blog. As I've said, I have no interest in his day-to-day life. I care about reading HN, and this article appeared today. It's the only reason I stumbled on it, mostly because it had such an eye-catching title.
In fact, I'm quite amused that people find this post enlightening and insightful, when I find it to be...obnoxious might be too strong a word, but definitely self-promoting and lacking any substance. Apparently some people agree with me. Life is funny like that.
I actually agree with your assessment - this post is terrible. It denotes a work day austensibly running a business where the CEO spends 28 hours per week "tackling todos" with very little time for anything that comes up.
I would love to go to work at 11 (from home, after feeding wife, hitting gym, getting kids rady for school, lawyering up, etc)...
I envy this guys schedule, but not much else.
Wow. Well, he's the CEO isn't he? He can answer the question he thought should have been asked.
Does this matter, since he's a relatively-unknown CEO of a small company? Would it matter if he were a famous CEO of a huge company? That might attract the interest of more readers, but I don't think it really matters any more or any less. He's a fellow human who is offering his insights. Maybe you don't need his insights, but that's okay. There are lots of people offering things that I do not need, but that doesn't mean they should keep to themselves.
Not to slam the guy, but if you examine his submission history, he seems to be using HN as a tool to build his "personal brand". Regardless, readers upvote it.
[1]: Fogbeam Labs, the up-and-coming Open Source collaboration/knowledge-management company. http://www.fogbeam.com Go there now and sign up for our newsletter. It's not necessary for you to spend the rest of your day thinking about how cool Fogbeam Labs are, and how much you want to email all your friends and tell them about us too. But if you can remember a time when you were really excited about a company like Fogbeam Labs, then think back to those feelings and how that made you feel, and do the right thing.
No. Nothing wrong with tatsuke95 giving the reasons why he thinks the emperor has no clothes either, though.
Maybe if the consensus at HN is that some organizations are over-using link bait for self-promotion, a little more awareness of that isn't a bad thing.
Personally, I found the link to have a couple of interesting tidbits, but I welcome contrary thoughts on the value of the article as long as they're stated reasonably politely and appear to have some logic behind them.
I don't have an issue with self promotion on the part of anyone including what you have done with the [1]. (As an aside I've never charged anyone for anything mentioned in my hn profile although somehow I suspect that some people have felt that I am self promoting. (Which is not to say I won't charge I just haven't so far...)
There appears though to be an imaginary line that some HN posters cross that seems to upset people here depending on the poster. Based on a recent ryancarson post he may have crossed it. (Someone wrote sarcastically that he writes the BEST blog posts, Ryan thanked that person, then someone else basically told ryan he was a schmuck for not seeing the sarcasm (the parent was quickly deleted interestingly).
Regardless of whether someone finds Ryan annoying, pompous or not (personally I don't like the picture of him with the hat, sorry Ryan) I definitely know who Ryan is now and I think he's gained more than he will ever lose by tooting his own horn. And that can only help him. To this day people still make fun of Donald Trump. So if a hacker would rather toil in obscurity and not brag that is his choice. But there is a benefit to bragging and being pompous in achieving your goals and that should be kept in mind. Being humble only gets you so far.
As an aside, you need to get some serious lorum ipsum on your site if you are going to promote it as you've done.
Good point. We've been so "heads down" writing code, that the website hasn't been much of a priority to date. Truth be told, I'd forgotten that "coming soon" was there. Thanks for pointing it out. :-)
And if it's excessive, you're likely to get called out on it.
Look, I have no agenda here. I got up this morning and started reading HN, like I do every other day. I got to this article, read it, and thought, "My god, this guy is full of himself." So I came to discuss my opinion on the article, which is precisely what this forum is for. He didn't answer the question that was asked of him. He talked about wanting to give us specifics and details, and didn't give any. Glossed right over anything pertaining to the business. Then submitted the article himself. So it's not like someone stumbled on it and thought, "Great stuff!"
As far as putting CEO in quotes, that's a bit of a joke. I'm aware he's the CEO; it's there on that page about 5 times. In fact, he refers to himself as CEO more times in that article than I've heard my CEO refer to his title....ever. Again, a little obnoxious.
I admit, I don't know the guy from a hole in the ground. All I can do is judge him on how and what he writes. That's what I'm doing, and what others are doing to me. I'm glad you found the article insightful. I found it to be crap. And I think that the story he's selling is unsustainable. Time will tell. But I can assure you I'll be following this company closely from now on.
Anyway, I've stirred it up a bit more than I intended, so I'm going slink into the shadows...
Fair enough. I guess your earlier post just struck me (and apparently some other people) as overly antagonistic or something. No biggie...
Great post with a well rounded view of his day.
>Why am I interested in his personal life whatsoever?
Didn't you just open an article called 'A day in the life of a CEO'?
> He's the "CEO" of a small company most people have never heard of.
He's got 50 people working for him, and works from home. I think most of us would love to have 50 people working for us and to never have to suit-up to sit in a closet for most of the day.
I can see why you're nitpicking about some of the items, but for the most part I've picked up some valuable tips from these posts, and I'd rather see content like this then a dozen repeated posts about something silly facebook did.
To be honest, it sounds like an ideal schedule. A schedule many would love to have, including myself (minus the kids :D).
The bigger picture I get from this post, is to take control of your life and schedule. Design the type of life you want to live, and then figure out the small details like how to afford this lifestyle and make time for it.
Does that matter? If you find the content valuable, does it matter whether or not he thinks he's a celebrity? Conversely, if you don't find it valuable, does it matter whether or not he thinks he's a celebrity? Maybe it would be better to focus on the message and not the personality behind it?
He's the "CEO" of a small company most people have never heard of.
I'm not sure why you put CEO in quotes there... are you saying he isn't actually CEO of a company? And what difference does it make whether or not most people have heard of the company? Most people haven't heard of most of the companies founded by people who post on HN... and it sounds like Ryan has already done more than most of the wantrepreneur types who hang around these kinds of forums. What try to put him down for what he's accomplished?
He isn't being put down for what he has accomplished. He's being put down for writing a shallow self-serving blog post that is completely devoid of intellectual content, and then submitting it to HN. I hope enough others here flag this as well.
I think the point is: he might be trying but he is doing a horrible job at sharing that experience because the only thing he gives us is "he is a big picture thinker", he "cranks through to dos" and that Paul is important. There is hardly any "meat" or really interesting, helpful stuff in there - that's what the slamming is about. Is this really so difficult to see or differentiate?
Not at all. I never said it was wrong to provide feedback or constructive criticism. But the tone of the earlier post - that kicked off this thread - just seemed (to me) a bit overly antagonistic and demeaning, as opposed to constructive.
As far as I know, the social norm here at HN is not to "slam" somebody when constructive criticism would suffice instead. I mean, this is something of a community of (largely) like-minded peers in many ways. And I, for one, would like to think that that we're sort of "on the same team" here.
Side note - reminds me of my first FOWA, where Ryan hogged a majority of the QA time from each presenter to ask questions about his own business. I admire his business success, but to me, he comes off as self-centered.
I'm just curious how you handle spending quality time with your employees. I've worked at companies where the CEO is never around, and when you do meet with him, it's in meetings that feel rushed and they are always looking at their watch for the next meeting. Frankly, it's disrespectful and it does negatively impact the morale of the team.
I'm in the CEO role right now, and I'm realizing a lot of meetings that we schedule are frankly worthless. We'd be better off canceling them and spending time working on stuff with the team.
As a side note, I enjoyed watching some of the making of the Boeing 777 (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3551731641323350192). Then-CEO Alan Mulally is often in meetings with the employees and not trying to control every thing. It's pretty refreshing.
if you want him to go into more detail about a paticular item, why don't you ask about it?
if you don't care at all, why don't you just find a different item to read?
Surprisingly the OP's profile says:
"Not a hacker whatsoever, but enthralled by the culture."
Ryan has gotten ink on HN. There is something to be learned from that. It is a part of the culture or it wouldn't get comments the way it has.
Here's the link to the Podcast, which should be available in different regions.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jxtfb#synopsis)
They also mention some research (that he read via the London School of Economics) about days in the life of Italian business people (but quite large businesses, 8,000 employees) - I haven't found that report yet.
The Bottom Line should be interesting to many people on HN - it's a less formal discussion guided by Evan Davis with business people.
I wrote the post because I'm interested in the details behind everyone's daily life. It's where talk meets action. I don't think I'm a celebrity. I merely wanted to be transparent about my routine so that other CEOs could see how their life compares.
I submit my articles to HN, but it's the community that puts them on the front page. Take them or leave them. It's just my blog :)
Not a celebrity yet.
Julia Allison was roundly made fun of a few years ago for her ability to garner press on some blogs and people felt she was totally overexposed. (So was Bethenny Frankel for that matter). Both of them now have TV shows.
Is this meant to be satire or something? This was seriously put into his schedule as a 5 minute task?
When it's just you and your thoughts, 5 minutes can be a long time. I don't think it would be a good idea to stretch this activity out longer for the sole reason of showing how important it is.
Imagine telling a designer:
"From the hours of 12:00pm to 3:00pm, be creative."
Life doesn't work like that, and if you're scheduling your life down to individual minutes, then I can't imagine how you're also managing to be creative.
Maybe he should have just said, "take a quiet moment before starting my day, because it helps keep me relaxed/whatever" or something to that effect.
So having it on a schedule isn't a bad thing. I think it's in a previous post that Ryan was talking about that as a mini-meditation. Many people meditate at specific times, he just does it at a smaller scale, and I'm sure it's still better than nothing.
The author had a great chance to address this... but all we're told is "meetings" and "todo list."
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/what-a-ceo-does.html
The main point is this:
"A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank."
I could set an alarm for 5 am but I predict that I would be even more tired compared to my 10 to 7 schedule.
Alternatively, have some children and your sleep will not be the same for a long long time.
Ryan Carson says he has a 1 year old child, so I doubt he's sleeping through the night. :)
I have never tried supplements, always thought they were a bit extreme and only for hardcore athletes and fitness buffs. As I get older, I realize the importance of metabolism (who cares about it when you're a teen and it's sky high), knowing eating breakfast really kicks up your metabolism and how fibre and greens play in your health.
Now I'm actually very tempted to try this supplement out - seems really healthy even though it comes packaged in a plastic jar and powder form.
I'm not sure this is experimentally verified. There is also the "skip the breakfast" camp that advocates remaining in the catabolic state a little longer to keep burning the fat.
Also, why not throw the exact same greens into a blender. Surely that powder in the tub cannot be any better than fresh vegetables.
Any advice for someone that still has a day job? I don't have kids but do try to spend a good amount of time with my SO.
Obviously, this doesn't work for everyone who works for someone else. I'm fortunate to have a job with a great deal of flexibility. If I'm in the office, I'm rarely there longer than 7-8 hours a day.
"When Treehouse was <25 people, I actually did a lot of execution. I’d write newsletters, sketch wireframes, answer support emails, start marketing campaigns, etc.
Now that we’re about to hit 50 full-time employees, I spend all my time ‘steering the ship’.
I suspect some of the vitriol here is due to the relatively large audience of entrepreneurs in startups less than half his size. To be more relevant, I'd love to see his schedule when he was a 3-5 person company.
Maybe because you know intelligent people.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundament...
Sounds like a dream job.
This is why I don't have a blog.