Does Startup Life Have To Be A 24/7 Grind?
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It attracts only young impressionable shutins to the startup and they feel like if they aren't working 18 hours a day they are slacking. Plus there is the "Stanford/Google effect" in play where everyone claims to be studying/working all the time but aren't if you factor out the foam dart / BBQ / bro time.
Oh god, all my life I've seen people waste so much time and then claim that they're so busy. It has developed into a huge pet peeve of mine, especially when they get pissed when I arrive to work at 8 AM and get up to leave at 5 PM. And I've done more in those 9 hours than they've done in their last two 16-hour days.
So if your main job is coding, you can probably spend about 6 real work hours on that. This leaves you with another 3 hours to spend on stuff like email, or writing or whatever. Certain types of hobbies do count into this as well.
But I've really only gained 2-3 hours over one 7-8 session. 12 or 16 hours is completely unsustainable over more than 2-3 days.
I'm not sure who did this research, but I can tell you from personal experience that this is simply not true. Maybe I'm a freak of nature but when I was first learning how to code I would hold one man hackathons in the summer from the moment I got up until deep into the night. Similarly, when I was younger and played a lot of RPGs, I would play quite literally all weekend, pausing only for sustenance and a little bit of sleep, and usually multitasking on the food part, far surpassing 6 hours of focus time.
Most folks cannot sustain focus for super long periods.
I suspect the "must work 24/7" thing is probably rooted in the fact that some folks are just like that and those folks are often crazily successful. But I think the inference that high number of hours worked is the thing to shoot for isn't really accurate. Some folks don't need a lot of sleep. Some folks can focus for long periods. Someone who has both traits may well be brighter than average.
Their phenomenal success isn't necessarily rooted in any one thing. Putting in the hours if you aren't that bright and actually need more sleep may be a recipe for disaster instead of a recipe for success. However, people like Bill Gates do tend to work crazy long hours. You can't ask to be born with his brains -- you have whatever brain you have -- but you can try to emulate his work habits and hope that's the most important piece. But I see no reason to believe it is. Perhaps long hours are a good idea. I just have yet to see good data which proves that. I have seen more data that for most people job performance improves if they cut back their hours and are working when fresh and focused.
Are they? What if you just don't notice the unsuccessful ones; they're at home spending ten hours a day drawing pictures of butterflies, or they're down at the gym obsessively lifting heavy things over and over again, or any one of a number of other obsessive activities that don't bring success.
Nowadays it's a bit different. My body just can't take the sitting in front of the computer for so long. Maybe it's a good thing though, but it really makes me want to think about how I spend my time on the computer and seek those creative hours when I am able to get into the zone and just code.
Usually I find myself doing from anywhere to 2 to 4 hours of concentrated creative work a day, and that's it.
As for me, I've noticed the amount of time I can focus on something go down a little over the years as well, though I still occasionally get inspired and hyper focus like I used to.
One of the defining characteristics of ADD/ADHD is ability to focus for extended periods. The main reasons ADD gets a bad rap is that people (often children) are either focusing on something that adults don't want them to focus on, or there is nothing interesting that holds their attention so they become easily distracted.
I have no problem with posting cat videos to facebook, more power to you, but don't claim that you're busy when your not. My fav is the "I didn't have the time (enter any task here)" forgetting that the two of your are friends on facebook and you can see the 189321983729 icanhascheezburger photos that were shared during the "busy" time.
And the 40 year olds who haven't accomplished anything yet, and hear the clock ticking, and realize they are running out of "at bats".
The reason this meme exists is that there is a huge economic benefit to (some, not all) founders and VCs to perpetuating it.
Yeah, I mean for a founder. I wouldn't expect an employee with minimal or no equity to go all that. What the heck would be their incentive to do it? I do it because A. I actually enjoy it in a way, and B. I stand to become very wealthy if we succeed.
The thing is, most employees with some paltry 0.5% won't, but peer pressure makes them feel like they need to keep up with the 5% founding employees and 30% founders in hours.
Most startups fail. That's scary. The natural response to fear is to run harder, run faster. And when the ride isn't scary, it's really exciting. Who can sleep when the growth curve looks like that?
And all this trickles down to the employees. And up to the VCs, the dumber fraction of which will try to measure progress by hours spent. If you aren't sweating, you aren't working, right?
Honestly, I think there's little economic benefit to all those hours put in. Especially for people writing code, where I think it's incredibly easy for tired people to be negatively productive. It's fear, excitement, and macho bullshit, not rational self-interest at all.
Our employees are also not asked to work crazy hours - we don't rush to get releases out, we're profitable and growing, and we're not concerned about flipping the company tomorrow. Our employees are also now in their late 20s, and we expect them to have children and normal lives too, and we want them to stick with us through that.
Any advice for someone starting down this path?
An acquaintance of mine built her company by selling her idea all over town. She got a few local businesses to sign on, and told them it would be a month of set up time. Over the course of a month she got the business setup, hired employees, bought computers, etc... 5 years of hard work later she sold the business and is currently vacationing at some random place in the world.
It's great that people can work 5-6 hours a day, no weekends, and still build a great business. But if that's truly more efficient, should we expect to see some massive billion dollar companies run that way? How much did Bill Gates, Larry & Sergey, Jeff Bezos, etc. work when they were getting their companies off the ground? When they look back, do they feel the time was wasted, or do they feel it was necessary?
Or to the Metalab example, who's to say that the success Andrew experienced when he cut back on his work was not due in part to the long hours he had put in previously?
Not trying to admonish people to work more - just saying there's some missing analysis here!
Unfortunately, as humans, we need recharge time. If I code 80 hours this week, the first twenty hours will be very productive, the next 20 will be slightly less productive, the next 20 will be significantly less productive, and the last 20 might be hurting more than helping.
After a day of rest, I might be back at the same productivity as I was for the middle 40 last week, and degrade from there.
The irony is that the more hours I work, the less I get done, the less difficult problems I can tackle.
Meetings take less out of people, be we still make poorer decisions by tiring our brains rather than taking passive time to rest, and using spare cycles to reflect on how we can squeeze more productivity out of the time we can work.
This, of course, ignores that some people burn out easier than others, and some have higher peaks than others. Working a truly focused 20 hours is more exhausting than 50 hours of semi-focused work for many people, and isn't rewarded in many corporate cultures. Find your own personal style.
Many startups aren't built to last. They're built to get to a certain size and then sell off their product and make a decent profit from it all. In this case, burnout isn't a worry because, if you get to the point where you're burnt out, your startup failed anyways (in that it didn't achieve the goal of attracting the attention of a larger startup-eating company). It's in these environments that the 24/7 grind is most apparent. Or companies that started with this model and then realized they couldn't sell and now have to try to turn their quick-buck idea into something that lasts.
Some startups, though, are built to last. These are places where burnout is a concern because they plan to be around for 10 - 15 years and they don't want to have to replace their entire staff every two years. In these companies, getting a good work:life balance is important for attracting and retaining talent.
People tend to think that if you're passionate about what you do (or love what you do), then you want to spend every waking hour doing it. But this kind of behavior is self-destructive. Even if you think you want to do it now, it will eventually wear you down and be unsustainable. Everyone needs to take breaks and have other interests and activities. And sometimes you have to force yourself or your employees to strike that balance.
To continue the vehicular metaphor, it feels like hustle culture advocates burying the needle in the red zone, even though that's the least efficient point on the power curve. And even though that's less a predictor of success than what direction you're headed in.
There are absolutely times when you and your team need to live in the red zone of your tach. But really that's a temporary solution to being caught in the wrong gear. Amazing opportunity, can't upshift = gotta floor it anyways. But curves ahead = can't floor it. All depends.
Hmm. That metaphor actually did OK.
When I take walks with my wife we have great convos that won't happen on the couch when we're exhausted. We walk this circular path around Duke's East campus, which is about 2 miles. Having a defined path like that helps too- you don't have to get distracted by where you're going or be temped to end it early.
If you haven't been paid in 6 months, and you've got a 2 month runway you're going to be working long hours.
If it happens that 24/7 weeks exist for a little while, it happens. I get that. But I think what bugs me most about this "24/7 grind" attitude is that it's not a magic pill for a product that doesn't work or isn't destined to become profitable (and I'm using 'destined' lightly here). I've seen plenty of entrepreneurs go all-in on something and fail not because they didn't put the work into it -- but because it wasn't a product that could succeed, even with a tough grind.
Because the prize most are after is the highest level. If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level. It's like preparing for the Olympics.
In everything in life, there are exceptions. But such are not the norm or the rule.
If you want to start a business making $500k a year. You don't have to grind. But if you want a chance at millions or billions then yes, you do have to grind. You are competing at the highest level.
Yeah, if your ambitions are that grand, you can't really expect anything to come easily... personally I feel like you have to be willing to scrape, kick, scratch, claw, bleed, hustle and basically battle your ass off if you're going to get there.
For me, I allocate damn close to every hour I have outside of my dayjob to working on Fogbeam Labs. Take out sleep time, and time to eat (plus occasional diversions like grocery shopping, etc.) and it's basically:
1. get up and go to the dayjob
2. leave the dayjob and drive to Starbucks or Panera Bread
3. sit there and work on the startup for 4-5 more hours
4. drive home, eat, sleep
5. lather rinse repeat
6. Except Sat. and Sun, which is pretty much:
7. work on the startup all day
Fun? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Healthy? Probably not. Necessary? Well, I think so or I wouldn't be doing it.
My cofounder, on the other hand, doesn't go to quite the same extremes I do, which is fine. I tend to be a little extreme by nature, and I don't really expect anybody else to do the crazy shit I do. :-)
But, yeah, when I'm in town fulltime, I do about a 2 hour MTB ride on Sat. mornings, weather permitting.
And, during football season, I do take out time to go to a sports bar and watch the Dolphins game on Sundays. But even then, I take my laptop so I can work during the breaks, or if the game turns into a blowout.
Beyond that, though, not a whole lot. I'm almost 40 and I'm running out of time to achieve some of my dreams... so it's pretty much "nose to the grindstone" right now.
But like I said... everybody needs a break every now and then. I will infrequently just take a random day off and do no startup work at all,and just kick back and watch movies, or go to the hackerspace and tinker with some Arduino stuff or something. I don't do it very often, and I feel somewhat guilty when I do, but I usually feel a bit recharged after one of those days.
The (original) article references Aaron Levie of Box, and how he works all day long and doesn't take vacations. Box is valued in the billions, MetaLab is not. Is there some correlation there? I'm not sure, but most of the "famous" founders encouraging long hours tend to have had larger companies.
This is retarded. Ya, you can start relaxing a bit when your company is 50+, but when you startup is just beginning, before profit, then fuck yes.
You can bootstrap a startup quite successfully just using a few hours a week. But not all startups. Depends what you're doing.
I guess that's true, when you consider something like patio11 and his BCC. It doesn't sound like he was pouring 60+ hours a week into that (or maybe he was, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, please).
But I'm also guessing that the set of startups that you can build with that small a time investment, is pretty small. Especially if you're talking about something that's intended to be a scalable startup, something that can be a billion dollar business someday.
From your profile, you're working at night attempting to become ramen profitable, which would mean that yes, you need to work your ass off.
But not everyone is in your situation, so please quit the "this is retarded" sentiment. It's childish.
For example, I'm part of a 6-person team at a startup in SF and I do not work 80 hours per week. I get to work at 9 and I leave at 6. And we're doing just fine.
Is your start up funded? Mine isn't.
Meanwhile my girlfriend and two of my best friends work at a 3 different startups doing the total grind 70+ hour/week schedule, and their results do not seem better. In a lot of ways those companies are doing worse because they are super focused on working harder not working smarter.
Count me in this group as well, though what contractor did you work for where you actually billed all your hours worked? The place I was at previously only allowed us (and required us) to bill 40 hours per week unless otherwise authorized. Such authorization was a rare occurrence.
There was still significant pressure to work 50+ per week, though. The attitude there was this weird mix of "if you don't do this you aren't loyal and committed" and "you should be lucky you have a job in this economy".