"You have an idea so brilliant it burns. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. You just have to make it happen—now."
There have been plenty of posts on Hacker News about entrepreneurs and hackers being bad at work-life balance and/or trying to create better work-life balance with varying degrees of success. It's a real issue, and I think the common consensus is that entrepreneurs with poor work-life balance are more likely to experience burn-out (or other problems like alcohol or drug issues -- or depression) which will ultimately make them less effective at whatever they're doing.
So I wonder two things:
1) How much of this "work at the expense of all else" mentality is, in fact, driven by marketing like this on the Microsoft Ventures site? (Edit: Not that it's Microsoft's fault, but that this attitude is common in marketing relating to start-ups and entrepreneurship.)
2) Should having this kind of "work at the expense of all else" language in the most prominent position on the Microsoft Ventures site make me conclude that they actually kind of don't "get it" as far as start-up entrepreneurship goes? Or, at least, that they are trying to take some "cool" stance and "appeal to the kids" with some slightly more sophisticated form of the "EXTREME" everything marketing aimed at teens and twenty-somethings about a decade ago? Because it makes the site feel more like an ad for Mountain Dew or Red Bull than an advertisement for an organization that really cares to understand how start-up culture should work. Which, I guess it is, since the end-game for Microsoft is most likely to get more cool new companies to use their (otherwise struggling?) software platforms.
I understand I'm judging based on one throwaway tag-line, but it's literally the only non-menu-item piece of text on the screen when I visit their site. So I feel I have to give it a fair amount of weight.