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I wonder if one thing that distinguishes successful startup founders is that they are immune to some force that limits the amount of productive work that other

• mweibel 14y ago
  Of course a certain excitement can help doing more productive hours a day for a couple of weeks/months but I don't think this holds on for a longer time. As a software engineer I exactly notice the things the article mentions. After 6-7 hours I'm getting tired and after 8 hours it becomes really hard to concentrate.
• stcredzero 14y ago
  i'm curious: do you think you are or have been an outlier? I've had the occasional 16 hour stint on something I'm excited about, but this isn't the common case for me. 4-6 hours a day is what I produce in optimum ordinary conditions nowadays.
• lbarrow 14y ago
  One possibility is that for a startup founder, there usually is a great variety of work. One hour you could be writing code, the next answering a support email, the next pitching a prospective customer, and so on. It could be that by switching gears every few hours, people are able to retain some of their productivity.
  • patio11 14y ago
    Context switching is, in the literature, known to be productivity destroying, and while it may feel like a very productive day if I do things from four categories, I can tell you that when I actually go back and look at the results it is feelings-nothing-more-than-feelings. e.g. If I were doing nothing but customer contact mode, I know that I can send 50 emails in a day of moderate complexity. (e.g. Consulting mini-proposal for a client, support issue for BCC customer, pre-sales question for AR, ... x50. I know this because I have verifiably done it on e.g. launch days before.) I did four things today -- video recording, hopped on a call, sent emails, and... shoot, only three things but I thought I remembered four. My subjective experience is that 1/3rd of my day was email. How many emails did I send? 1/3 * 50 = ~15? No. Five. And it (subjectively) felt like pulling teeth even though three of those were the same email with a few hand-written edits in the middle of them, whereas after I get into email flow mode for I can normally do two hours without getting bored. I've got at least two hours into working with video today. How many 5 minute videos have I completed? Umm, zero. Contrast this with yesterday: yesterday I putzed around to 6 PM and then coded until 10 PM then quit for dinner. I got two features coded and tested then squashed a pair of bugs. Yesterday feels non-productive in some ineffable way ("I putzed around until 6 PM! I only worked 4 hours and my salaryman brain rebels against the sheer laxity! All I did was code six measly little commits!") but it almost certainly added more to the business.
• aidenn0 14y ago
  In that case, my Dad should have founded a startup; he seems to be able to work 60 hour weeks indefinitely.
• chubot 14y ago
  That was what I observed when working at EA (I was actually part of the EA Spouse settlement so this kind of comes home). Probably 10-20% of the people on the dev team just loved it. They couldn't get enough. That includes engineers and artists. They could work from 9am to 11pm for months. But then management expects 100% of people to be like that. And there's peer pressure not to let down your coworkers. But in reality some people just have more stamina, and can get more done with the incremental hour, while for others it was just clocking time and being a zombie. I definitely couldn't get much more done in all those late nights, although it in part it has to do with the fact that there was some sort of "schedule". If you know that you can take a day or 2 off whenever you want, you're likely to have more stamina for a 16 hour bender. Anyway, there is so much human variation in other things; it doesn't surprise me at all that it's true for how many hours you can productively work in a day. I would bet startup founders need that stamina, although I'm sure there are many more components to success.
  • critium 14y ago
    I think the main difference is engagement vs grinding. Take gaming for example. How many hours can you sink into that? My personal experience was that I could go pretty hard at it with very little sleep (I know, i know) and still be quite effective. I get the same way when im hacking away at something i love. Right now, im trying to put together a JS debugger for vim. Its 3am here and I can just keep on going. Now, the same cant be said about writing TPS reports.
    • chubot 14y ago
      Yeah for sure... I just spent about 25 hours in a single weekend coding on my own stuff. And I feel great now. I had that high today, on a Monday! But even though games are somewhat interesting, it wasn't my main passion and I wasn't that good at it, so I got burned out pretty fast. So bottom line is that it's futile for management to push people that hard. Some people love the problem and they'll put tremendous hours int oit. But you can't force that upon anyone. On the other hand, perversely, I can see the logic to it. There are 20% of people who are running full stream and being super productive for 14 hours a day. Maybe you just keep everybody in the office so that those people feel like everyone is making a sacrifice too? If you don't care about burning people out, I guess it is rational to keep people in the office if only 20% of people get more work done, if those 20% would leave if everyone wasn't there.
• aheilbut 14y ago
  Whether it's purely emotional or a subconscious economic calculation, there's a big difference between work on something that you own and care about and work done because it's your job.
• ctl 14y ago
  That could be the case; but it's also certainly possible that many or most successful founders are not much different from normal people in their ability to effectively work long hours. (And my personal intuition is that this second possibility is more likely than your theory.) Incidentally: in your essays (which I enjoy), you often imply that founders should work long hours. If founders working long hours actually decreases the likelihood of a startup succeeding, then you've been giving bad advice for many years now. (And I'm sure that people have been taking it.) That's something that you should think seriously about.
• netcan 14y ago
  That's an interesting question. people obviously vary greatly in how much work they can get done in all sorts of ways. How much they can get done in an hour, how many hours they can do. They also vary within individuals in depending on circumstances, mood and seemingly unrelated things. I know someone who became extremely productive for a time after exiting a relationship. I think everyone has experienced extreme bursts of productivity at some point where they think "If I could keep this up: I could work just 3 months a year / complete a degree in 6 months / build this thing in a 3 weeks." The differences between average and awesome, for the same person, are huge. My guess is that the people who can consistently keep their productivity at the far end of the spectrum are there because of a combination factors, but I am really just guessing.
• bermanoid 14y ago
  You mention this as if you don't already have more than enough data to tell us whether it's true or not. Is it? When you run a spreadsheet and scatter plot hours worked over the first few months against your ROI on startups, do you see a meaningful correlation? I say "first few months" because once a startup is successful, the founders are almost always going to put in more hours than those that languish in obscurity.
• ricardobeat 14y ago
  I felt a strong urge to downvote this. It sounds like a paternalistic excuse to dismiss the whole article, but then... Isn't it the case that they can do more in the same amount of time, not work longer? Either way it's a net win, but I don't think you need superpowers to be successful.
• mattmanser 14y ago
  This is exactly the attitude everyone is challenging. This is the superman myth, it doesn't exist. If Bob, our intrepid entrepreneur, actually worked 40 hours a week he wouldn't spend so much time faffing. The 'busy work' disappears. Overall productivity drops the more you work long hours. I've nowhere near your experience with entrepreneurs, I totally admit, but one of the symptoms I've noticed in crunch entrepreneurs is their mental diarrhoea, they take 15-20 minutes rambling on talking to you about a decision you've asked for that they normally would have made in a minute or 2. You start walking away and then suddenly they have another point/thought. They're mentally exhausted. I can reflect back on myself and see the same thing when I was doing crazy hours. Some of these people have succeeded, some haven't. But the person them self doesn't notice. They still think they are operating at high productivity.
  • sageikosa 14y ago
    At a certain point (or at multiple points during a suitable long stretch), enduring the long hours becomes a top priority for an individual actor in an attempt to avoid the "slow-down". The actor may decide to switch to a task that they can more easily handle so as to remain "productive", but this switch is not necessarily to the most important task to complete the enterprise goal; or may be a "refresh task" which does not directly contribute to the enterprise goal (though may help with the productivity on future tasks). [Edit] As a result, they see high productivity, but do not see the focus shift. Staying on task is what is important in crunch mode, and there may be some utility to founders that have more tasks (and thus goals) in shifting focus, but larger organizations suffer from defocusing, task shifting, and worker collisions.
  • pg 14y ago
    Attitude? Your use of that word should set off alarm bells in your own head. I'm talking about a matter of fact, not a point of ideology. I know people can work many more than 40 productive hours a week for years at a time because I did it myself during Viaweb. I know lots of YC founders who do as well. I also know from my own experience that this ability varies between people. I can't work the hours now at 47 that I could at 30. Why shouldn't ability to work vary among humans? Practically every other ability does.
• nostrademons 14y ago
  Does RescueTime have any data on this? ISTR Tony posting here once that they measured the amount of time each startup in their batch spent in front of the editor, and the very top end came out to about 7 hours/day, with most clustered around 4-5 hours/day like the rest of us. Edit: Found it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195 7 hours was his personal max, 4-5 hours was his personal average, 10 hours was more than anyone in the group ever spent coding.
• pfortuny 14y ago
  You did not read the article, did you? What it shows is that it... does NOT depend from person to person as, say, the hair colour or the ability to sing properly.
• crazygringo 14y ago
  I think it's the sheer variety. For example, at one point in my life I worked 8-hour office days and 8-hour evenings as a bartender. I was astonished to discover I could do this for months without getting exhausted at all, because they used completely different parts of my brains, with virtually zero overlap. Office work was intellectual, bar work was physical and social. I personally can't do truly effective, intellectual coding for more than about four hours in a day. After that, it exhausts me. But I can happily deal with meetings, or project management, or marketing or whatnot. So because startup founders can often divide their time up into blocks of entirely different tasks, it makes sense they can work effectively over longer hours. Note, I'm not talking about being interrupted all the time, though -- I'm talking about 4 hours of coding, 4 hours of meeting, 2 hours of product, 4 hours of marketing.
• speleding 14y ago
  I agree it seems common sense that the maximum number of productive hours would vary per person, just as so many other things in life. I would also expect that the number of productive hours is highly dependent on the type of work, the variation in the work, and the incentives people get. Startup work would be very different from other work in that respect. Lots of people with a 40 hour work week go home to play a computer game for several hours a night. If your work was as much fun as playing a computer game you would have no problem working 10 hours a day. Startup work might be just as much fun as computer games?