7 ms·

Death of a startup founder (2016)

83 points by koolhead17 8y ago

kshitij_libra 8y ago
Are there good examples of entrepreneurs who are able to maintain a healthy balance ? How does one balance life and startup (especially on initial stages)
- iKSv2 8y ago
  Might be hard to do (or to trust someone else to do it) but quality delegation helps.
- ht85 8y ago
  If you're talking about entrepreneur under the "startup" model, it seems like balancing work and non-work is a contradictory idea, at least if you want to be successful. There are and always will be many people who are throwing themselves at a problem, taking big risks and completely ignoring the negative consequences a failure could have on their life. If you don't do the same, your chance of succeeding will be a lot slimmer. As someone who's built a successful company working 70-100 hours weeks for several years, I know that those hours were one of the biggest factors in being able to bootstrap and survive with the little means we had. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I don't recall personally talking to someone who's built a stable tech business and didn't have to go through some insane grind.
  - kshitij_libra 8y ago
    I understand that’s the general idea, and that’s what every one out there says , but secretly I hope for some killer advice on how not to kill yourself doing a startup . Coz life’s short . Maybe there is some strong advice that would be really helpful
    - jaxn 8y ago
      The only way is to have more resources so that others can do what you can't/won't in order to maintain balance. You can balance some aspects of healthy life (sleep, exercise, eat right), but that is more about maximizing than balancing.
    - chadwittman 8y ago
      By no means do I have it figured it out, but my approach is somewhat balanced. 1) Expectations Start with setting expectations for yourself, then with everyone who matters in your life. 2) Define What is "work" to you? When do you work? How much should you work? For me, I'm mentally working nearly all day everyday... except for when I'm explicitly not. If I'm spending time with my wife & son, I'm 100% focused in on spending quality time with them. I've chosen to spend high quality limited time > low quality abundant time with my family. 3) Prioritize I've dedicated myself to 3 things in my life as it stands today: my family, my business, my health. That's it. I've painfully cut out friends from that equation (not friendships, but hanging out with them). I've cut plenty of other things as well, but it does take sacrifice at the end of the day in some dimension.
  - chatmasta 8y ago
    “There’s always someone working harder than you.” People hate that it’s the truth... but I think it’s really about working smart, not hard. Recovery periods are important. If you can produce the same work product in 70% of the hours of someone else, you get more recovery time which is an asset. It also seems the refrain of “70 hour weeks” often does not mean 70 hours of coding/producing, but 70 hours of availability to respond quickly to teammates, customers, investors etc. so that you keep everyone unblocked and moving forward.
    - ht85 8y ago
      I think the context is very important. When you're an employee, while the quality of your work will affect your outcome, there is a "good enough" performance past which your efforts will have diminishing returns. If you bootstrap a startup with a very small team, anything can make or break it. Any second, any thought, and ounce of energy you're not spending on it could be the demise of the whole project. The amount of work the human body can produce in a survival situation is astounding. If you truly want to succeed, this is the state of mind you're going to be in. > it’s really about working smart, not hard. What about both? > 70 hours of availability For around 18 months, my day looked like that: - 10h wake up, big breakfast, stretch, shower - 11h - 12h talk with rest of team, figure out the most important thing to do (sometimes ignore that step and resume grind from previous day) - 12h - 18h 90% coding, 10% infrastructure / research / testing / feedback - 18h - 21h run errands, eat, help a bit around the house, spend time with girlfriend (now wife :) - 21h - 4h 100% coding This would be every single day, except for 1-2 days every other week that I would dedicate to socializing and relaxing. I now work around 4 hours a day, fully focused, and I'd say it takes me 3 days to do what I would do in one 14 hours stretch back then. Productivity is slightly higher as I do less inattention mistakes, solve hard problems and figure out the right abstraction faster. That doesn't account for that much when you spend most of your time writing code and testing though.
- patkai 8y ago
  Yes, there are. The Basecamp founders wrote books about it, Rework and Remote. The reason you don't hear more about them is that heroic work is more glamorous to discuss. It is worth following https://twitter.com/dhh https://twitter.com/dhh
  - BooneJS 8y ago
    Basecamp is derided in the valley as a “boutique” business, one that does not take VC investments to take off like a rocket and become a unicorn.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      If rarity is what makes a unicorn then they are more of a unicorn than the social media company du jour.
      - jjeaff 8y ago
        Actually, the only rare thing is the amount of media coverage non VC backed companies get. Because most profitable companies are bootstrapped smaller ones.
jacquesm 8y ago
What a sad story. This is the sort of thing that you can plan for but you hope you never have to activate that plan. Cancer sucks.
- melling 8y ago
  Another person to pancreatic cancer. It has been 11 years since the Randy Pausch‘s Last Lecture. Probably an entirely new generation that have not seen it. https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/story/index.html https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/story/index.html I’m sure we’re almost ready to get started to attack this disease in a big way. (Yes, it’s hard)
  - majos 8y ago
    I hope this doesn't sound callous, but is there anything (beyond pancreatic cancer's aggressive mortality rate) to suggest that the disease is somehow "ripe" for increased research funding? "How much money should we spend on cancer research?" has been in the HN aether lately, so I'm curious.
    - melling 8y ago
      No one said the time is ripe or that it would be easy. It’s simply a deadly disease that really doesn’t get much attention: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pancreatic-cancer-research-funding-no-one-should-be-told-to-go-home-and-die/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pancreatic-cancer-research-fund... The US economy is $15 trillion. Beyond federal tax dollars there are likely other ways to incentivize research.
overcast 8y ago
This won't be popular opinion, and this is coming from someone obsessed with science, and space. The billions being spent by Silicon Valley elites, should be focused on things like eradicating cancer, disease, and cleaning up our only home before dumping money into yet another rocket company.
- ameister14 8y ago
  Yeah, I don't agree with that - last year 165 billion dollars was spent on pharmaceutical development, and tens of billions on oncology research. There are tens of thousands of people working on this. Everyone can help clean the Earth and eradicate cancer and disease. That doesn't mean the world needs to stop all other activities.
- JTbane 8y ago
  Cancer research often gets the spotlight due to the emotional nature of death and disease, but that doesn't make space research less useful to humanity as a whole.
  - overcast 8y ago
    I never said it was less useful, but we need to focus on protecting this planet first. There won't be one left by the time we even have the capacity to get to others.
    - jcadam 8y ago
      I'd like to think we've built a civilization that's able to pursue more than one goal at a time, but maybe I'm an optimist.
      - overcast 8y ago
        Clearly we can't handle it.
        fapjacks 8y ago
jordache 8y ago
strange emphasize on the job history of the wife, including her exact title, and the purchase of the luxury car... detracts from the core topic....
- mercer 8y ago
  What was the core topic to you? Her name is mentioned 34 times in the article and I found it rather nice to have such an important person in this man's life play a central role in the article.
  - jordache 8y ago
    about the whole diagnosis and dying process.. >The mother of two boys has been a software engineer for well over a decade with stints at Satyam Computer Services and Accenture. She now works as lead project manager with iNautix, a technology captive centre in Chennai of BNY Mellon Bank in the US. who cares where the wife worked, where she currently works, what her current title is, and what her current company's u.s. association is? Who cares that he bought a Merc B class?
- sudhirj 8y ago
  It's more a personal profile than a business profile, sort of a short form biography.
- justboxing 8y ago
  > strange emphasize on the job history of the wife, including her exact title, and the purchase of the luxury car. Having grown up there, I think I can speak to this. Both are very culture specific. Job Titles are prominently mentioned in wedding invitations (esp. in South Indian invitations). My dad's invitation also states his exact title as well as his degree in engineering, incl. the major and minor. I thought that was strange too and do remember asking my dad about it when I was a kid. I think he said something to the effect of "It lets everyone attending the wedding know that I have a good job and will be able to take care of your mother and that she is going into marriage with an educated man making a good salary." The luxury car mention seems to be a more recent cultural / social phenomena. Before the auto makers and loans came to India (think pre-1980s), having a car was a social status / symbol. It signaled to your neighbors that you were doing well in life. This probably doesn't hold true anymore, with the arrival of car loans and several foreign automakers who have dealerships across India. Given that the writer of the story is also east indian, I figured he placed an emphasis on these 2 things...
sibmike 8y ago
“Confront your own mortality, sooner rather than later.” Startupper or not, if you have family, get that life insurance; it is cheap when you are young.

83 points by koolhead17 8y ago

Are there good examples of entrepreneurs who are able to maintain a healthy balance ? How does one balance life and startup (especially on initial stages)

iKSv2 8y ago
Might be hard to do (or to trust someone else to do it) but quality delegation helps.
ht85 8y ago
If you're talking about entrepreneur under the "startup" model, it seems like balancing work and non-work is a contradictory idea, at least if you want to be successful. There are and always will be many people who are throwing themselves at a problem, taking big risks and completely ignoring the negative consequences a failure could have on their life. If you don't do the same, your chance of succeeding will be a lot slimmer. As someone who's built a successful company working 70-100 hours weeks for several years, I know that those hours were one of the biggest factors in being able to bootstrap and survive with the little means we had. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I don't recall personally talking to someone who's built a stable tech business and didn't have to go through some insane grind.
- kshitij_libra 8y ago
  I understand that’s the general idea, and that’s what every one out there says , but secretly I hope for some killer advice on how not to kill yourself doing a startup . Coz life’s short . Maybe there is some strong advice that would be really helpful
  - jaxn 8y ago
    The only way is to have more resources so that others can do what you can't/won't in order to maintain balance. You can balance some aspects of healthy life (sleep, exercise, eat right), but that is more about maximizing than balancing.
  - chadwittman 8y ago
    By no means do I have it figured it out, but my approach is somewhat balanced. 1) Expectations Start with setting expectations for yourself, then with everyone who matters in your life. 2) Define What is "work" to you? When do you work? How much should you work? For me, I'm mentally working nearly all day everyday... except for when I'm explicitly not. If I'm spending time with my wife & son, I'm 100% focused in on spending quality time with them. I've chosen to spend high quality limited time > low quality abundant time with my family. 3) Prioritize I've dedicated myself to 3 things in my life as it stands today: my family, my business, my health. That's it. I've painfully cut out friends from that equation (not friendships, but hanging out with them). I've cut plenty of other things as well, but it does take sacrifice at the end of the day in some dimension.
- chatmasta 8y ago
  “There’s always someone working harder than you.” People hate that it’s the truth... but I think it’s really about working smart, not hard. Recovery periods are important. If you can produce the same work product in 70% of the hours of someone else, you get more recovery time which is an asset. It also seems the refrain of “70 hour weeks” often does not mean 70 hours of coding/producing, but 70 hours of availability to respond quickly to teammates, customers, investors etc. so that you keep everyone unblocked and moving forward.
  - ht85 8y ago
    I think the context is very important. When you're an employee, while the quality of your work will affect your outcome, there is a "good enough" performance past which your efforts will have diminishing returns. If you bootstrap a startup with a very small team, anything can make or break it. Any second, any thought, and ounce of energy you're not spending on it could be the demise of the whole project. The amount of work the human body can produce in a survival situation is astounding. If you truly want to succeed, this is the state of mind you're going to be in. > it’s really about working smart, not hard. What about both? > 70 hours of availability For around 18 months, my day looked like that: - 10h wake up, big breakfast, stretch, shower - 11h - 12h talk with rest of team, figure out the most important thing to do (sometimes ignore that step and resume grind from previous day) - 12h - 18h 90% coding, 10% infrastructure / research / testing / feedback - 18h - 21h run errands, eat, help a bit around the house, spend time with girlfriend (now wife :) - 21h - 4h 100% coding This would be every single day, except for 1-2 days every other week that I would dedicate to socializing and relaxing. I now work around 4 hours a day, fully focused, and I'd say it takes me 3 days to do what I would do in one 14 hours stretch back then. Productivity is slightly higher as I do less inattention mistakes, solve hard problems and figure out the right abstraction faster. That doesn't account for that much when you spend most of your time writing code and testing though.
patkai 8y ago
Yes, there are. The Basecamp founders wrote books about it, Rework and Remote. The reason you don't hear more about them is that heroic work is more glamorous to discuss. It is worth following https://twitter.com/dhh https://twitter.com/dhh
- BooneJS 8y ago
  Basecamp is derided in the valley as a “boutique” business, one that does not take VC investments to take off like a rocket and become a unicorn.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    If rarity is what makes a unicorn then they are more of a unicorn than the social media company du jour.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Actually, the only rare thing is the amount of media coverage non VC backed companies get. Because most profitable companies are bootstrapped smaller ones.

jacquesm 8y ago

What a sad story. This is the sort of thing that you can plan for but you hope you never have to activate that plan. Cancer sucks.

melling 8y ago
Another person to pancreatic cancer. It has been 11 years since the Randy Pausch‘s Last Lecture. Probably an entirely new generation that have not seen it. https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/story/index.html https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/story/index.html I’m sure we’re almost ready to get started to attack this disease in a big way. (Yes, it’s hard)
- majos 8y ago
  I hope this doesn't sound callous, but is there anything (beyond pancreatic cancer's aggressive mortality rate) to suggest that the disease is somehow "ripe" for increased research funding? "How much money should we spend on cancer research?" has been in the HN aether lately, so I'm curious.
  - melling 8y ago
    No one said the time is ripe or that it would be easy. It’s simply a deadly disease that really doesn’t get much attention: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pancreatic-cancer-research-funding-no-one-should-be-told-to-go-home-and-die/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pancreatic-cancer-research-fund... The US economy is $15 trillion. Beyond federal tax dollars there are likely other ways to incentivize research.

overcast 8y ago

This won't be popular opinion, and this is coming from someone obsessed with science, and space. The billions being spent by Silicon Valley elites, should be focused on things like eradicating cancer, disease, and cleaning up our only home before dumping money into yet another rocket company.

ameister14 8y ago
Yeah, I don't agree with that - last year 165 billion dollars was spent on pharmaceutical development, and tens of billions on oncology research. There are tens of thousands of people working on this. Everyone can help clean the Earth and eradicate cancer and disease. That doesn't mean the world needs to stop all other activities.
JTbane 8y ago
Cancer research often gets the spotlight due to the emotional nature of death and disease, but that doesn't make space research less useful to humanity as a whole.
- overcast 8y ago
  I never said it was less useful, but we need to focus on protecting this planet first. There won't be one left by the time we even have the capacity to get to others.
  - jcadam 8y ago
    I'd like to think we've built a civilization that's able to pursue more than one goal at a time, but maybe I'm an optimist.
    - overcast 8y ago
      Clearly we can't handle it.
      - fapjacks 8y ago

jordache 8y ago

strange emphasize on the job history of the wife, including her exact title, and the purchase of the luxury car... detracts from the core topic....

mercer 8y ago
What was the core topic to you? Her name is mentioned 34 times in the article and I found it rather nice to have such an important person in this man's life play a central role in the article.
- jordache 8y ago
  about the whole diagnosis and dying process.. >The mother of two boys has been a software engineer for well over a decade with stints at Satyam Computer Services and Accenture. She now works as lead project manager with iNautix, a technology captive centre in Chennai of BNY Mellon Bank in the US. who cares where the wife worked, where she currently works, what her current title is, and what her current company's u.s. association is? Who cares that he bought a Merc B class?
sudhirj 8y ago
It's more a personal profile than a business profile, sort of a short form biography.
justboxing 8y ago
> strange emphasize on the job history of the wife, including her exact title, and the purchase of the luxury car. Having grown up there, I think I can speak to this. Both are very culture specific. Job Titles are prominently mentioned in wedding invitations (esp. in South Indian invitations). My dad's invitation also states his exact title as well as his degree in engineering, incl. the major and minor. I thought that was strange too and do remember asking my dad about it when I was a kid. I think he said something to the effect of "It lets everyone attending the wedding know that I have a good job and will be able to take care of your mother and that she is going into marriage with an educated man making a good salary." The luxury car mention seems to be a more recent cultural / social phenomena. Before the auto makers and loans came to India (think pre-1980s), having a car was a social status / symbol. It signaled to your neighbors that you were doing well in life. This probably doesn't hold true anymore, with the arrival of car loans and several foreign automakers who have dealerships across India. Given that the writer of the story is also east indian, I figured he placed an emphasis on these 2 things...

sibmike 8y ago

“Confront your own mortality, sooner rather than later.” Startupper or not, if you have family, get that life insurance; it is cheap when you are young.