Joining A Startup: 1,000 Terrors, 9,000 Delights

keen.io

34 points·jkresner··6 comments

Working at non-vaporware startups is hard. Very hard. Bootstrapping one is even harder.

Long hours, little time for family. After a big push I'll be entirely strung out and exhausted, staring at a wall mumbling random thoughts like someone who suffers from dementia. It's miserable.

And rewarding in so many ways. My personal favorite is that at the end of the day I get to say 'Look at what I built! Millions of people are using it!'.. Nothing beats that feeling.

I'm not young anymore. I've done more startups than most. I'll eventually be taken as a joke no matter how up to date my skill-set is. But for now.. This is what I love. Some people are just built for it.

That's a good perspective. It's not for everyone. I didn't touch on that in my post, but it's important. I maintain a pretty rigid schedule and it's not been a problem at this job.

A reason I'm well suited is perhaps many years of ops and on-call work. I am not necessarily at my desk banging out code all day and night but weekend and middle-of-the-night emergencies are nothing new.

I also have a spouse who very much believes in me being happy. She's been really great in this process too.

Thanks for your comments!

Why on earth is this title in caps?

Ummmmm. I think it's copy paste from the blog. + 8k delights?

Yeah, I was wondering that too!

Presumably OP just copied and pasted the title from the blog which actually has the title in caps (rather than using text-transform: capitalize). Nonetheless, this is hardly the HN way.

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