How Sleep Deprivation Drives The High Failure Rates of Tech Startups

Once upon a time I did the start-up, sleep-deprived, living at work thing, and frankly younger me thought it was awesome. Older me looks back and things younger me was sometimes an idiot.

Recently I had a kid and got to experience the sleep-deprivation effects all over again except this time with one big difference: I work with an awesome team who were able to pick up the slack, and I was smart enough to know when to ask for help (once literally saying "I'm too stupid to do this now, can you do it?")

Sleep-deprivation is going to continue to be endemic in our industry (not just amongst start-ups, the twenty-somethings today are going to be having kids soon themselves). Instead of fighting through the slack, find ways to mitigate it; build your teams with people you can rely on to cover you when you're short.

This is a really weak article. As much as the headline is somewhat plausible, none of the cited evidence even indirectly supports it. In fact, it mentions only Mayer/Dorsey as data points linking sleep deprivation to success, and they're counterexamples!

... so why is this article being upvoted?

One of the fascinating parts about needing "x hours of sleep per night" and in the past people slept "x hours a night" is I never see anyone take into account the seasons. For all of us at one end of the year we're in a place with 14 hours of darkness and later we're at 14 hours or more of light. I think that impacts how much sleep we need probably by 10 - 20%. I for one hate 6:30am flights in winter when it's dark but don't find them nearly as hard in the middle of summer when the sun's been up for an hour.

Here is another single datapoint (but supported by a peer-reviewed paper!): I just bought blue light blocking glasses which I put on at around 9 or 10pm every day. They look goofy but it seems to actually work! It’s like a real-life Flux app. I seem to fall asleep much faster and it seems that the bright bathroom light does not to make me as alert anymore.

http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/mind-read/what_keeps_you...

http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT-Orange-Anti-Fo...

http://justgetflux.com/

I think success in this context is less about hours of sleep and more about manic focus. You can sleep 8 hours, spend 2-4 hours on random crap, and still work/be around work for the other 12-14 hours. I've been either inside or involved early on with a few very successful startups and none of them felt like an environment of balance or moderation. The founders and early employees (especially technical employees) are maniacs who focus on their product, vision, or whatever it is, at the expense of all else. Founder types especially seem to think about work 24/7 and never really switch that off until the companies have matured significantly.

Unfortunately, the people used as examples do not support the claims (Marissa Mayer and Jack Dorsey). Perhaps those two are part of the 1 to 3% of the population who can get by on four hours of sleep at night. One of college professors had this phenotype.

Personally, I need between 8 and 9 hours to be at my best.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870371250...

People often work long hours because they feel more productive at the end of a long stretch.

It's hard to be stressed when you're sleep deprived. You just say "fuck it, X will work well enough, and I'm too tired to care if it's good enough". Which is probably what you should have done 8 hours ago, but didn't, because you were worried it wasn't good enough.

I find it's just as useful to close your eyes for a minute, and think "I'll probably figure it out later, and I'll still be smart enough to refactor any ugly but pragmatic code when inspiration finally hits" can be just as productive.

This explanation makes sense to me. I have seen a sort of reverence for people who don't get enough sleep, as though they're a good example of people doing whatever they can for their company, when really they're making themselves much more likely to do things that have a net negative impact.

As an aside: "my startup" is the new "that novel I'm writing".

This is a likely explanation for the myriad of terrible ideas and the people willing to fund them. The problem with sleep deprivation is that the person who is depriving himself of sleep oftentimes cannot see the obvious (to others) degradation in the quality of their work, thinking, and life in general. To the sleep deprived, things look like they're going well to the point that they will deny that there is any loss in quality. This degrades to the point that sleep deprivation is now a badge of honor amongst people who are cranking out worse and worse work with each day that passes.

So true! I know when I don't get a decent night's sleep for more than two or three nights in a row, I get a LOT less productive. I lock myself out of my car, forget important things I had to do. It's terrible. An occasional melatonin supplement has been a lifesaver when I just can't turn my brain off, obsessing over my startup.

A concerning statement from a link in the Forbes artcile - 'Marissa Mayer admitting to 130 hour work weeks at Google' [1]

> "Burnout is about resentment," she said. "It's about knowing what matters to you so much that if you don't get it that you're resentful."

Is this statement implying that burnout is a psychological condition related to 'resentment' rather then the physical symptoms? I can't help but feel that one could interpret Google's VP as pseudoscience ...

[1] http://it-jobs.fins.com/Articles/SBB000142405270230340470457...

Working excessively long hours has obvious negative impacts on a programmer's performance. If you do it constantly, instead of being considered a hero you should be considered a liability. Would you board a plane with a pilot who flies, say, 300 hours a month

I am fine with chasing a bug for hours every once and then or to extend your schedule when your muse pays you a visit, but if you do it so frequently that it starts impacting your performance negatively, you should stop out of consideration for your colleagues.

This article may not be the best... but honestly the social construct that start-upers (especially in the early stage) are maniacally dedicated to work has become so tight that I worry it's solidifying into an expectation.

When I started working on my idea, I felt guilty when not working. (I naturally don't feel happy unless I'm productive, but this is probably also externally influenced.) In January, I worked 100+ hours. I cooked, ate, slept, went to the gym, but other than that I largely worked. Since I don't consume media entertainment by nature and am an introvert, it was easy to work on my passion unless a friend proactively reached out. I slept-worked a lot, but never felt mentally tired or burned out. Physically though, I became a wreck, at some point tweaking something to the point where I couldn't turn my head. Scary.

I used to think 4 hour work weeks were reserved for those who sought escape from a job they didn't like. But I now realize that the larger goal of work/life balance is equally important for people who love their jobs. And I get that time feels threatening: we have to move fast or the opportunity will pass. But if this idea is something that I'm truly passionate about, I should have no problem devoting a lifetime to it (not blindly treading water without success, of course!).

Now, I know my happiness is still driven by productivity, but I'm trying to redefine that for myself. A day with friends, cleaning the apartment, or climbing at the gym is actually very productive and a good recharge. I really hope more entrepreneurs read this article, and really evaluate what working and living means for them.

FYI I wrote a blarticle about my experience in January and work/life balance here: https://medium.com/entrepreneurs-corner/9461ce206589

I'm watching (and writing up) the Improvides' interview of Vincent Walsh on creativity right now, which addresses a great many barriers to creativity and problem solving, sleep being among the factors. Highly recommended:

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=QfMvqkrQkYQ

http://redd.it/21qgiv

Along with the importance of sleep and naps, "creativity is not team sport".

I'm not sure if I ran across this through h/n or not originally, it happened to be in my downloaded videos queue, however.

I can't function at the top of my game without 9 hours. At 9 I feel godly, everything sinks in, at 8 I'm OK, at 7 I'm phasing out all the time.

Sleep deprivation has been a major cause behind more things than people appreciate. Many major disasters have occurred during the wee hours of the morning, often by people working later than intended. Chernobyl, for example, and the Bhopal leak. Sleep deprivation isn't the only cause in those cases but when there are minimal safeguards the effects of sleep depression become that much more dangerous.

>I fall asleep most nights writing and rewriting opening lines and first paragraphs in my head. And every morning before I wake, I am somehow still writing sentences in my head, twisted into my sheets while comparing arguments and searching for counter-arguments that could undo a whole story.

While some of the arguments in the rest of the article seemed a bit dubious, this opening segment resonated with me—I find myself dreaming in code fairly often, tossing and turning while my brain works through some non-existent problem, iterating non-functional lines of code. It's bizarre, uncomfortable, I don't feel rested and I wake up tense. Generally I take it as a sign that I need to scale back how much of myself I'm sinking in to my work, as I think it's more likely to happen when I've been working longer or later days. I think if I worked in an environment where I was expected to work so much that I started having dreams like this on a more regular basis, I'd burn out or quit very quickly.

I wanted to like this article, because I agree with the premise, but the author went a bizarre direction in trying to prove his thesis.

As constructed, several far-fetched notions would have to be true to support the conclusion in the way he argued:

- the high failure rate must be due largely to bad ideas and not to poor execution

- sleep deprivation must be endemic at Google, Facebook and Twitter

- Google Glass and Android Wear (and corresponding FB and Twitter projects) must be the product of the sleep-deprived, and shown to be bad ideas (kind of early), and representative of projects at the company.

I think it would be easier to show that lack of sleep just results in poor work. It certainly makes more intuitive sense than honing in on the problem of "crazy" ideas.

I hate reading on Forbes, it flashes text in the position:fixed headerbar every few seconds, an absolute nightmare to focus on the article while that's happening.(although I do manage to simply remove the headerbar from the page using the dev tools :P)

Well I don’t believe in the rules like “you have to sleep at least 8 hours”, I think it depends on the person and in the part of your life you are in. Some people are able to perform great 8 hours, other people 10 hours and other people 16 hours (like Jack Dorsey). Each one has to know himself/herself.

What I don’t understand is that if someone is about to faint because he didn’t sleep enough keeps working… Here is a quote that this article remind me of:

"Make rest a necessity, not an objective. Only rest long enough to gather strength." -- Jim Rohn

Which only happen in countries without proper unions.

I think the desire to work as hard and long as possible is admirable -- but if the long-term result is lower real productivity, then it's ultimately futile and counterproductive. The flip side is, some people can pull this off occasionally, and a few can do it more than occasionally.

Oh, and the article does not support the title at all.

Article itself is not as useful as the discussion it will bring. This is not a "How" article. It brings up some evidence that might connect to start-up failure but the evidence presented is super weak.

I'm not sure I'm more productive on 8 than 6 hours' sleep - is there any way to verify this? I'd even pay good money to find out the optimal amount of sleep for me.

Aside: Does anyone else find the top bar on the forbes website with the flashing headlines extremely distracting?

Light on evidence, still true enough to be worth discussing.

I think that sleep deprivation and the high failure rates are connected but not that the causal arrow isn't so simply drawn. People can be well-rested and still have terrible ideas. It might go the other way. It could be that, because these ideas are so terrible, people throw insane amounts of effort behind them to avoid being blamed when they fail. When you have a death march (and most VC darlings are whole-company death marches) you're going to see a split between those who disengage and drop out, and the "A for Effort" strategists who believe that 110-hour work weeks will be noticed above and have them "rescued" (promotion in a big company, EIR gig in VC) when their current project fails. Generally, founders are going to take the "A for Effort" strategy so that, if they fail, they can launch their careers in VC. Employees generally don't have those exit options, but they can't exactly leave before their bosses do in most of these companies.

What we have is an economy of asymmetric risk. Just as hedge fund managers share profits but not losses, and therefore have a higher-risk tolerance than the principals, the decision makers in the VC-funded world benefit disproportionately from obscene risk. Being able to say that one was in Facebook early is career-making for a VC, while 0x and 5x are essentially identical in the personal career calculus.

Founders share some of the risk (they suffer if the thing fails) but at least take part in the upside. Employees get mainly the downside: mediocre equity and no control, nonexistent career support, high risk of job loss and painful hours.

This leads to a risk fetishism (young people! fail fast! sleep is for the weak!) that doesn't make for a good place to work, nor does it produce broad-based success (VC is an underperforming asset class). It produces terrible ideas, reckless business expansion, and the extreme long hours of the startup ecosystem.

TL;DR: the sleep deprivation is a symptom of a deeper problem (risk fetishism arising out of the principal-agent problem in VC).

Sleep deprivation was an integral part of my work experience, from working on my dad's farm during the height of the summer harvest, to the Army. If you couldn't keep up, someone else would.

I often go 30, or more, consecutive hours without sleep when working on certain projects.

No drugs involved, no coffee, just a driving desire to accomplish my goals.

I also sometimes go 2 or 3 days without eating a real meal.

I think I got around 3 hours of sleep last night.