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The reality is that the vast majority of successful startups do work very long hours and push themselves to the limit. Only once a company is established and h
by axiom 15y ago
The reality is that the vast majority of successful startups do work very long hours and push themselves to the limit.
Only once a company is established and has a successful product can you begin to see huge leverage off of every hour of work, so that working crazy hours becomes optional (e.g. you have 10,000 customers and a proven sales model, so a 0.1% improvement is worth a lot.) The fact is that it's really really hard to build something from the ground up.
If you want nice confortable work/life balance and 40 hour work weeks, you need to go work at Google or IBM etc. The startup world is not for you.
- jswinghammer 15y agoI've only worked at startups and never found that anyone asked me to work one more hour than I wanted to. I have always been considered a top or the top contributor on every team I've been on so no one really has thought to hassle me I guess. I have avoided companies where the founders worked too many hours for my taste. I think it's unhealthy and I have two daughters who need me around more than the company does. I just don't want or need the pressure to stay late.
- enjo 15y agoI'm not sure that's true. It certainly isn't in my case. Most of the successful startups I've been around actually have done quite the opposite (including my own.. I'm comfortable calling us "successful" now). While there are periods of insanity, the overall cadence of a successful startup (again in my experience) trends towards sanity. Very people in the world have the mental endurance to keep a super intense level up for a long period of time. The founders who recognize that (again, in my experience) tend to have better outcomes. One thing to note: there is a curious thing about startup founders. I've always found it interesting that when they draw up the narrative of their startups path they tend to emphasize those long periods of work while minimizing the (more common) periods of relative calm. As an outsider you think everyone is working 80-100 hour weeks. From their stories, you'd believe it too. The reality doesn't always match the narrative tho. Just ask the social network.
- jswinghammer 15y agoWell it makes success seem more like the result of hard work and not dumb luck-which seems to very often factor into things.
- saool 15y agohard work can be achieved in a reasonable amount of hours, not only by "keeping your chair warm" for 100 not-so-productive hours a week. you wouldn't say a smart student aces tests out of dumb luck since he doesn't do much work.