I think Paul Graham summed up the situation fairly well when he wrote:
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."
and this:
"Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job."
and the reasons why we might want to do a startup:
"For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."
That essay can be read both as an inspiration and as a warning. On the positive side, it is good to realize how much you can achieve in a few short years. On the negative side, you must be wholly focused on one thing during those few short years. The rest of your life needs to put on hold.
A personal anecdote: I am a bit of a news junkie, and I typically spend an hour or two a day reading the news, but when I had my own startup, I gave up reading the news. For the years 2003 to 2004, and for most of 2006, I rarely read the news. That was a huge change of personal habits for me. But avoiding the news was important for me to stay focused. I would write code for 12 hours a day, sometimes 14 hours a day. I think one has to have a very narrow focus during the first year or two of a startup.
Most startups fail. Throwing some of the best years of your life away and shirking parental responsibilities for a remote chance of a payoff is simply a dangerous form of gambling.
Paul Graham is basically just talking his own book. His model is to fund a heap of cheap companies that overwork work young, naive people. Most of these companies fail. The occasional one succeeds enormously which more than covers the costs of the failures. Meanwhile, the starry-eyed young employees often don't notice the system is rotten until their thirties.
I was once in the SF startup world, and it's a pretty disgusting place. It's sexist, extremely ageist, intolerant of actual diversity, and anti-family. The sooner that particular culture dies (and make no mistake, it's dying), the better.
It's also lazy capitalism; it loads as much risk as possible onto the employees instead of those providing the capital, and many of the twenty-somethings love it. Machismo (look at how hard I work) and confirmation bias abound.
This. I couldn't but agree with every single sentence you've written (though I haven't worked at SF)!
I almost fell into this trap while I was inspired to work for a super cool team within a bigger company; a la start-up within a giant. I, unfortunately, got inspired enough that I ignored my new born, didn't see him grow up. I realized that I was being played just in the nick of time (after an year).
Irony is that now I'm in a real start up for almost two years and these two years have been best years of my life, both professionally and personally. I get to work on something that's really challenging and rewarding and at the same time I get to spend a few hours of high-energy time with my son, wife and family (I also am very active reader).
All this just because I figured out how to balance by spending sane hours at work and work at home late night once in a while when everyone is asleep!
My take away from this experience is; after your needs are taken care of to a comfortable extent never trade time for anything. Not for money, not for equity not for anything. Especially if you have a young family. Watch your child grow spend time with her; children develop emotional attachment by the time they are 5 and it only comes with spending time.
Even if you don't have family don't trade your time; go see the world, read something new, learn something interesting. But don't give away your time.
These startups aren't just targeting 20-somethings anymore, either. It's either that, or else the people who contact me (mid-30s) haven't thought about what my college (graduate and undergraduate) graduation dates imply about my age, or they have an edited version of my resume and can't see these things.
The small number of times I've been interested enough to take the discussion to matters of compensation and effort have been an effective deterrent for me. I earn more base salary and get better equity by my investments, and have much more time to spend with my family and working on income-producing side projects, working my 9-5 as a full-time contractor.
It's telling that these comments rarely solicit many replies on HN, even though they apply directly to what HN is all about. I have no sympathy for willful ignorance.
You have to remember that PG is a startup investor, and has a vested interest in making you feel as though you need to code for 14 hours a day when he's given you a seed-round investment.
The overwhelming odds state that your startup will fail, no matter whether you spent six hours or fourteen hours every day working at it.
I saw that you got some flack for this comment, but I think your comment is very insightful. If it were possible to construct a regression on start-up inputs vs success, I suspect average hours worked past 6 hours every single day would not account for much in explaining success. (The occasional crunch time is a necessity, of course.)
Working hard is definitely a must, but I think market timing, number of competitors, and other features have more of an impact on success than whether you put in another 4-5 hours a day. In some new markets, there are so few competitors or such a huge distance between the leader and the laggard that hours worked doesn't even matter.
In some cases, capturing mind-share does enough to get you further resources and that alone buys you luxuries that free you from 14 hour days.
I think you're reading too deeply into what I said.
Spending fourteen hours a day might well give you a greater chance of success than working six. But the chances of success are still so remote that it isn't worth ruining your life over. That's the part that PG is invested in - the idea that startup success is within the reach of anyone who works hard enough. It isn't.
if we amend your second sentence to read, "while it changes the probability of success, the probability is still low", it no longer really makes sense -- if you have a 30% chance of survival with medicine, should you not take your medicine if it is 3% chance of survival without it?
Because the alternative to working at a startup isn't death. It's, y'know, taking a different job.
Studies show that if you work 14 hours a day, your productivity falls below 8 hours a day output after six weeks or so. Basically, you get tired and sleep deprived. So, while 6 hour a day may be too low, 14 hours a day is probably waste of time in the long term.
This is one of the areas where I think PG has it completely wrong. Sure if you're a 20-something with no kids/life and only care about your startup, you can code 24/7. But many of us don't fit into this stereotypical startup-founder box that PG and others have created.
Some of us have kids, some have partners, some have ... a life!
Does PG really want a bunch of code obsessed, single minded founders with no hobbies or life outside of their startup? I can't imagine he does, and as a result he should revise some of his advice.
If PG is looking to make a quick buck, churn and burn founders than it all makes sense. But if PG is looking to help founders build sustainable businesses, he should be telling them to clock out, and open your eyes to the world (and people) around you.
I didn't say it was the "right" thing to do, only that 20-somethigns can do it because of their current lifestyle. The post referenced in your comment is basically a guy who realized that while he can operate in this way, he shouldn't.
Even if you're fresh out of school and have no kids, job, or friends that you care to spend time with, you probably shouldn't be coding 80 hours a week, even if your body and lifestyle permits it.
"Enjoy youself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think."
Live each day as if its your last; do the things you won't regret. If you die tomorrow, was all your hard work at the 24-7 startup worth it? Or did you get to spend as much time with your family as you could?
That's predicated on things working out. In the real world the chances are very large that you will simply lose the years and get nothing back for it. And even if things work out, nothing will give you back the first four years of your childs life. Been there, done that.
The !POTENTIAL! return is correlated with the amount of "focussing on one thing during those short few years".
You may end up loosing your kids childhood while still working normal hours the rest of your/his/her life. That is provided not to much of your own money is in your startup, if that is the case you loose even more.
but when I had my own startup, I gave up reading the news
And my question would be: did you miss something important, that could be life-changing if only you had seen it on the news?
Being off the news myself (except tech news) for more than a year now, I'm yet to experience such an "event".
But of course some non-technical news "sip through" - get posted on HN, you hear from family etc. So there is no way to really miss something important, and no way to completely stay away from news.
You're right that the news is rarely actionable or locally 'useful'. But I do read the news and go to events where foreign journalists speak to shape my perception of the world, its diversity and scope, it helps me engage with people from considerably more varied backgrounds (and futures), it reveals new ways to approach or conceptualize unrelated events in my own life. Dont restrict yourself to the SF myopia (which is so easy and attractive).
Useful? Nah. Necessary? Absolutely.
Skip techcrunch, network tv, and USA today. Look for groups like commonwealthclub.org and find out who smart folk pay attention to (Ezra klein's following list on twitter is pretty golden).
It's absolutely true. I work less now and get far more done (I would say more than 3x) of what I did when I was pulling 7-days-a-week work marathons.
People waste lifetimes thinking they are working hard but are really just puttering around.
It's been stated by authors (I mentioned Tony Shwartz in another comment and I highly recommend his book) but I offer this analogy:
Consider you are standing next to a roaring river. It is treacherous. It is dangerous. On the other side, it looks like it's a lot nicer (more grass, nicer setting, maybe a picnic table all set up) than the side you are standing on.
Sure would be nice to get over there. But man, to swim that current...dangerous. So maybe you could build a raft? You start looking for wood, something to put it together. Can't find anything. You try looking at the river to see if there's an easier way to cross. Maybe some shallows? Not sure.
Then, behind you, suddenly there is a pack of lions. They look hungry. They ARE hungry. And they see you. And they start loping your way, drool dripping from their teeth. This ain't Hobbs. This is real. These lions are going to literally rip you apart and it's going to happen in a few seconds.
How long does it take you to get across that river now? Are you still going to try and build a raft? Still going to look for a shallow end?
Still going to worry about getting wet?
Focus is a curious thing. We think are 100% committed to something, but we are really not. We achieve what we are truly focused on.
I mean, it sure FELT like you were working 100% on getting across the river when you were trying to lash together a raft and when you were scouting the river for an easy way across. But when it meant getting across or being eaten, THAT'S when you focused truly 100%.
The secret is learn how to FOCUS, truly focus, put your entire mind intensely on the most important task...then take a break, recover. Then do it again. And wow...does it ever work.
I'm not saying that focus isn't a key to improved productivity. My question is, what does it have to do with being at a startup? His argument is that focusing AT A STARTUP can make you 3x more productive...it makes no sense. Focus alone can make you more productive, I don't see why the setting of a startup changes that multiplier.
You are conflating focus with fear and risk/reward evaluation. Those are not at all related, though, when focused you might be able to see another way out that was not apparent when you were just afraid and not focused.
A panicked jump into a roaring river can kill you just a surely as a well reasoned one.
But that smoldering fire to your left contains a branch long enough that waving it around a couple of times creates a flame an lions are scared of fire.
(If you can conjure up Lions, rivers and green grass to make your point I don't see why my imaginary fire is an illegal device. It could have been a machine gun for the same money, you'd dine on lion steak and congratulate yourself for not trying to swim to the other side of the river).
I think over the longer term, it's true, although not for individual hours. Knock some of pg's essays if you want (they deserve it), but "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" hits the nail on the head about productivity. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
What it says is fundamentally true but I'm curious about the allocation of "maker" and "manager". As someone who has worked as a manager and a developer, I value uninterupted time in both roles. It doesn't matter whether I'm planning, or writing a proposal, or coding - large chunks of uninterrupted time are good, a broken up day is bad and less unproductive.
Certainly managers might more often have to respond to changing situations (though if you're a developer with any involvement in support you might question that) but if they opt to plan around frequent task changes when they don't have to that's just odd.
To me it just feels like a difference between people who manage time well and those who don't, rather than a maker / manager distinction.
Yeah, I am constantly surprised at the apparent lack of mathematical thinking about returns on effort in start-ups.
The risks of the startup going down without IPO or buyout are extremely high, long hours, equity will be diluted, founders will lose control of the decision making, short term objectives will be prioritized.
Returns on efforts in bootstrapping seem to be much much better.
What's missing here is a simple fact: your life is different in every period. No matter if you can retire when you're 35: you won't be able to relive your 20s. I am not saying that all in all you won't be better off, but would keep this in mind.
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."
and this:
"Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job."
and the reasons why we might want to do a startup:
"For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
That essay can be read both as an inspiration and as a warning. On the positive side, it is good to realize how much you can achieve in a few short years. On the negative side, you must be wholly focused on one thing during those few short years. The rest of your life needs to put on hold.
A personal anecdote: I am a bit of a news junkie, and I typically spend an hour or two a day reading the news, but when I had my own startup, I gave up reading the news. For the years 2003 to 2004, and for most of 2006, I rarely read the news. That was a huge change of personal habits for me. But avoiding the news was important for me to stay focused. I would write code for 12 hours a day, sometimes 14 hours a day. I think one has to have a very narrow focus during the first year or two of a startup.