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Comment by automathematics | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the "bragging" part, yeah it's normal.

You are joining a startup. To you it's just a great opportunity at a job that seemed interesting to you. To the founder, it's his life. At 2:30am you might be leaving the bar thinking about whether to call an Uber or a Lyft. Your founders are probably awake thinking about how they're going to get that new feature out the door.

I started my own startup a little over 2 years ago. It's pretty normal every night between 2 and 5am for one of the three founders to send a message to another about something they're freaking out about.

He's not thinking "Oh it's 3am, I shouldn't email my employee this late". He's thinking "There's something on my mind about my company and I need to get it off my chest".

If you start your own company and get a few employees it makes a lot more sense VERY quickly.

Don't worry, he/she's just very invested.

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Even if one is generous and assumes this kind of behavior is typically well-intentioned, it's foolish to believe that it won't become a detriment as you grow your business.

A lot of startup founders don't think much about management principles and the importance of perception in an organization, but these things matter. When founders are emailing around the clock, many employees will come away with the perception that they're expected to be available at all hours of the day and night too. Your employees are never going to be as invested as you, so this typically creates stress and dissatisfaction for employees more than it motivates and impresses them.

As this Ask HN post demonstrates, a workaholic warrior complex is also a great way to convince your employees that you're an "i" word (insane, insensitive, imbalanced, incompetent, etc.).

One of the biggest mistakes I made while working on a past startup was listening to an advice like this. What you say is totally valid if your company is a fortune 500 company, but the type of people who start companies shouldn't strive to become those types of managers covered in business case studies. I made this mistake after reading too many business books.

It simply doesn't work. From my experience it fucks up the company culture when a founder tries to "tone it down", because that's not the quality required to make stuff happen when it's in the beginning stage.

A competent founder should be able to adapt as the company grows, but shouldn't behave like a fortune 500 CEO from the beginning.

Here's the biggest problem with your approach: in today's market, it's a lot harder for startups to recruit and retain good employees than it is for good employees to find new employers.

Just look at the OP: he left an ostensibly good job to join a YC startup and he's already questioning the founder's behavior and competence. When he starts feeling pressured to work insane hours, or completely loses faith in the founder's sanity and competence, how long do you think it will take him to find a new employer that promises something better?

At the risk of being overly harsh, if you feel you're incapable of making "stuff happen" without sending random emails at 3 am in the morning or acting like you don't have control over your schedule and business or terrorizing your employees into believing that they need to be online at all hours, you're probably out of your depth and should be honest with yourself about your readiness to run a business with employees.

A lot of people in the startup community have deluded themselves into believing that "hard work" is the one and only key to success but by and large, successful businesses are built by doing the right things, not by running around for 18 hours a day like a chicken with its head cut off. Thanks to the funding boom, a lot of chickens with their heads cut off are running companies. Folks like the OP work for them at their own peril.

thank you

Who would you pick if you had following two candidates:

1. A rockstar developer who wants work-life balance 2. Not famous but passionate junior developer who has potential

I would always pick 2 over 1. I know because I have made exactly that mistake of hiring #1. And the company culture went to shit. If I was the founder of that company and found out about this I would have a talk with OP and if there's disagreement I would rather let him go than trying to tone it down. Company culture is much more important than one or two rockstar developers. Also you don't attract great employees with a promise of work-life balance--you can only attract "good" employees that way. Great employees are attracted to passion.

Go to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and tons of other industry defining founders and ask them if they worked leisurely with work-life balance or ran around like a chicken with its head cut off.

I think the onus is on you to show that Bill Gates was a 9-5 man. AFAIK I've never seen anything claiming anything or the other.

Can't believe i have to google stuff to comment here. I don't know where you got that misinformation but here you go: http://www.quora.com/Did-Bill-Gates-really-work-16-hours-a-d...

Not all, but almost all of the successful founders I know are obsessively focused on their startups and they don't put much time into other areas of their lives (family, social life, etc).

Humans need sleep and whether they sleep 4 or 8 hours doesn't really matter. The work is just always on their minds, 24/7. They are always on call. They are always reachable. They never say no. The passion, focus, and obsession for the business oozes out of them, even when they are ''out of the office''. There is not even a question of work-life balance because work is their life.

Personally I like to invest in and work with people like this because they tend to succeed, make disruption happen at scale, and make lots of money upon exits. A lot of recruits burn out and don't like it, but the ones who survive learn a ton and make a lot of money too.

You're missing a key point: it is possible for a founder to be obsessively focused on a business without engaging in behavior that causes employees severe agita.

Without starting a debate about the benefits or perils of work-life balance, most startup employees should recognize the following facts:

1. Startup founders are not created equal. In today's hot market, there are a lot of inexperienced and incompetent people running startups. These people can work as hard as they want and ooze passion from every pore in their bodies but at the end of the day, they're incapable of building successful businesses.

2. Statistically, most startups won't achieve an exit. At those that do, most employees don't "make lots of money."

3. Many startups offer far fewer learning experiences than employees would like to believe because misdirected hustle and hard work are encouraged and rewarded even though they are not correlated with competence and outcomes.

I mainly agree, but I think there's a big difference between focus, which is good, and "talks about how little sleep he is getting like it is a badge of honor". A lot of great people I know are very dedicated, but I think that's very different than performing dedication.

Last night, for example, I had dinner with a super bright scientist friend. Within minutes we were into a detailed discussion of the science of using ultrasound to examine breast tissue. (It was great to watch people crane their necks to find out why somebody was talking animatedly about the racial differences in the tissue composition of women's breasts and what implications that has for frequency choices.) It's clear that when he's on a project, he just thinks about this stuff all the time. But never once did he mention how hard he worked, because he he's far too interested in the work to give a shit what people think about how hard he's working.

One of the thing that really troubles me about the current startup zeitgeist is the extent to which people are here because they want to do a startup, rather than their passion for their particular domain. If I were the OP, I'd really be worried that I had a CEO who was here because it was fashionable, one that focused on the performance of working than who was truly dedicated to making things happen.

I think there is a middle ground between your view and volaski's view. You are right that random 3 am emails give a bad impression to employees and founders should think about management just as much as product and market. However a founding team and at least the first few employees (2-5 not 50) should be at least somewhat obsessed and have grit otherwise the chance of success is less likely [1].

1. http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_suc...

I agree with you in the sense that for the first 50 employees or so you just plain can't afford to have clock-punchers. But on the other hand, if the founders are too obsessive and don't know their own limits, and they're not taking care of themselves, then mistakes will be made and productivity will have jumped the shark.

You don't know anybody who's worked for Apple.

This. You couldn't have put it into better words.

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