How do you balance having a gf with running a business?

It's a choice. You can choose to spend time with someone you love and hopefully want to spend the rest of your life with or you can choose to spend time on your business. Think carefully about this decision. One will leave you with someone to hold your hand on your deathbed, with countless beautiful memories and, heck, maybe even children. The other, if you're lucky, will leave you with buckets and buckets of money. One of these sets of things is more important than the other. Hopefully you still know which is which.

Most of the time you don't. It's a cliche - but true - that trying to do a startup or run a time intensive business, is a relationship killer.

The money side of it, if it's someone that is really in to you, is not a big deal compared to the time.

You only get to choose to invest in to a few things time wise, when you're doing a startup. You can watch TV, or exercise. You can play video games, or eat healthier by cooking every meal. You get the idea. In my opinion, the best way to keep a gf during this time, is to abandon anything else that is worth less to you in life than her (except the critical stuff like health related items).

Don't watch tv, watch movies, or play games, unless it's with her. If you can, work out with her; cook, with her. Do the startup, and spend time with her, and that's your life.

Otherwise, until things settle down, don't date unless you're ok with casual dating or dealing with upset girlfriends.

I think you meant to write needy GFs take up a lot of time and money.

If you are consistently working more than 60 hours/week, then maybe you need to learn to delegate. Working 100 hrs/week only leads to burn out. With or without a GF you will suffer health problems. So having GF with whom to share non-working time and "exercise" (ahem) is good for you. If you don't feel invigorated after spending a couple of hours with her, then maybe it's an inter-personal dynamic issue - time to move on.

In my experience there are many entrepreneurial / career-oriented women out there who work hard and play hard. Believe it or not, they often complain they can't find men who can understand them ... so there's your chance.

As for the money. You probably don't choose to be a sugar daddy - so stop dating gold diggers.

Get/Keep your girl involved in your business.

Your girl might view your business as something to compete with for your time because she sees it as an unknown black box. The way to fix this is to talk to her about your business (and your goals). The more she knows about what you do, the more likely she will understand why your business needs your time.

(I am assuming that you are in a serious relationship with your gf. If you are not there yet, then it is best not to mix your business & personal relationships)

Marry her!

In any relationship, it's important to set limits. If you don't, if you permit others to transgress your boundaries, you are likely to become the victim of domestic abuse.

In my particular case, I wish now that I'd put a lock on the door of my office. My now ex-wife was heavily into how I should make my cables somehow go away. She felt they were ugly. I regarded this as hurtful, I always wanted to point out to her that "My computer cables make my computers go. Without them I would be unemployed."

HOWEVER!

It is also important not to let your work run your life. That was another mistake I made; to the extent you possibly can, make time for her every single day. Take the weekends off.

Given the way things ultimately turned out, I regard it as being for the best that we are divorced. But there are many ways that things did not have to turn out that way.

To the extent that we worked together towards a common purpose, we got along really, really well. I did not realize that, not in a conscious way, until just recently.