Many years ago, during a stupid-er time in my life, I stayed up three nights in a row. I was working on a robotics paper to present at a conference. My first.

Many years ago, during a stupid-er time in my life, I stayed up three nights in a row. I was working on a robotics paper to present at a conference. My first. It was a massive project and things had fallen behind schedule. With just three days left until I was supposed to be on a plane I had no choice but to work on the thing continuously and get it done. It was a solid three days of writing code and building/testing boards. I got done and packed with a couple of hours to spare before having to go to the airport. For some reason I could not sleep on the flight from Los Angeles to Seattle. Once I got to the room at the hotel I pretty much collapsed on the bed. My talk was scheduled for the next morning. I figured I could sleep a solid 12 hours and have a couple to get ready for the talk/presentation. Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up. I have no clue how long I slept up to that point. I had lost all sense of time. I went to the bathroom. And that's when the nightmare started. I washed my face and almost immediately my ears started to buzz. It was something like a 1kHz sine wave. It started at a low level and got louder and louder. Scary. At a certain point, my field of vision started to turn milky white. The tone got louder and all I could see was a bright white light engulfing my entire field of view. I was blind and deaf and in the worst possible circumstances I could imagine. I have no clue how long it all lasted. It felt like somewhere around 15 minutes. It could have been just thirty seconds but I had no sense of time and I was freaking out. All I could do was sit on the bathroom floor, hold on to something and think through the worst possible scenarios. After what I guess was about fifteen minutes my vision started to slowly come back and the tone started to fade away. That must have taken another 5 to 15 minutes. I was drenched in sweat and scared like I had never been in my life. I've never done drugs or alcohol. I imagined this had to be like a grade-A drug addict overdose experience, or worst. All I could do was go back to sleep after that. I was exhausted. The next day I asked to have my talk re-scheduled and went to see a doctor. He told me I was an idiot and lucky not to have ended-up in the ER with brain damage. That was the last time I worked on anything overnight. I know tech companies have a culture of working long hours to get things done. Be sure you are not killing yourself to crank out another 100 lines of meaningless code. The world can wait. And if your VC's don't understand you'd like to live a long an healthy life, well, fuck them.