> But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
As someone who ran two failed startups, it's all about perspective. I gave up a ton to build and run my companies, and failed, but in no way do I regret it, or consider it a sacrifice. The amount that I learned, the people that I met, the skills that I developed, I'd never get from working a regular job. (I wrote a mini-postmortem[1] for my last startup.)
There is huge personal value in taking big risks and doing difficult things even when you fail.
Wait there's a lot of blog posts there on "how I failed", "why my startup failed" etc. Do you not mean that? It was a whole topic thing 5-10 years ago IIRC.
> Think about all those people who always worked more than everybody else and sacrificed everything just to fail.
> But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
If you dont think hard work does good for the individual, then you are not only mistaken but most likely trying to justify your laziness more than anything else. And if you think the input size of your labor has to be proportional to the output size of success/failure, then you´ve completely misunderstood the relationship between labor and success.
Hard work on its own is insufficient to success - there are many other factors required (timing, capital, support/network, etc.) - yet it is required for success because having all the other factors come together without hard work to bind them leads to abject failure most often. And sure, you can talk about the few exceptions to the rule that got lucky, we can all envy those. But unless you are one those people who got lucky, you have no better strategy available to you if you want to succeed.
Besides, hard work has an insane amount of benefits to it even if failure is the outcome. You learn new things all the time, you connect with people that may become your greatest supporters in the future, you grow as a person and most importantly when you look in the mirror you come to respect yourself because you choose to bear a burden that few are willing to. Most people dont take risks, most people dont work hard, and most people would rather smoke weed and chill on a couch rather than work on something that will enrich their lives be it financially or otherwise. Hard work is the only reliable strategy available for the average person to become a better version of themselves and with that create a better future for themselves AND society.
So no, hard work does not "rarely" do good for the individual. It most often does good for the individual. The probelm with your statement is that you are equating "good" with "success" (mostly financial) and those two things are very very different from each other.
One of her favorite quotes is, in part, "Life is short. Take care of the ones you love." It seems to contradict one of her main points, which is that work always ended up coming first (otherwise, they'd run out of money, a competitor would beat them, insert $reason). I admire the vulnerability, but she might consider examining what she is professing to value vs what she is actually valuing, and why that might be for her.
I spent some time in a fairly well known startup incubator. What always stood out to me is that the other founders in the program seemed to be more interested in playing the part of a "startup founder" than they did in actually building their companies. They would hold hours and hours of coffee meetings, pitch deck reviews, and presentations, but spend very little time each day actually coding or making sales calls.
I think a lot of this hustle culture comes down to wanting to feel productive, but at the same time wanting to avoid the difficult problems that come along with being an entrepreneur. It's a lot easier to talk about how hard you are working than to actually do the work itself.
As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that?
We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance.
0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
>As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that?
The answer is "yes" to all questions. I don't know what the article author wanted to say, but she just reminded me personally that the US tech "scene" is not healthy.
For me, having a family with kids, I always look at Elon Musk : He does 80-hour work weeks. That's also my goal: 80 hours. He splits it between Tesla and SpaceX. I split it between my company and my family ;).
Since he was able to make both successful, we should be able to do that too :)
The CEO literature (perhaps not startup focused) centers (iirc) around 55 hours per week. Which is still materially higher than the average worker but not fictitious. There’s mentions of 80 hours in this thread but actually go track your hours ... can you _average_ 80 over a year? Including vacations? Including sick weeks.
As a corollary, don’t ask people how many hours they work. Ask: when do you go home? On Friday’s too? Do you work Saturdays? Oh yeah how much? And Sunday’s too? Same amount?
Then count.
Unless you have a few 2am nights and full weekend days it’s relatively difficult to reach 100 hours plus. When you actually count it gives more reasonable figures.
Just because the answer is no doesn't mean it'll matter, it sounds like everything is going well either way.
A lot of people hate spending time with their families and work hard (literally and figuratively) to avoid the home. Or maybe what they call spending time with their families is 1 hour of fun and games while a WAG does 11 hours of completely inane child care. It would be inappropriate to generalize that people get more joy out of hour 2 of inane child care than they get joy from something that actually requires their intelligence or whatever. For women in the startup world this problem is extra acute, because they are choosing between 3 and 11 hours of inane child care, while most men only are only really choosing whether to have 0 or 1 hours of fun with their kids.
So I really sympathize with Tracy Young's perspective here. And she is putting things in a way that does not require making anyone out to be an antagonist, a kind of maturity most founders don't have.
Why do you keep calling child care inane? It's not stupid, or simple, and raising the next generation is literally the most important task. Diminishing the role of caretaker by calling child care inane is extremely offensive, especially to people who choose to devote their lives to the task.
On solution is to pick parenting book which will make you feel guilty for not spending enough time with kids or not giving them enough quality of time.
Pretty much regardless of how much time you actually spend with them.
All this hustle porn is meaningless. Why are you doing it? Everyone is doing it to escape the system. Anyone that says different is lying to us or to themselves. You can't escape the system if it kills you first.
Pace is what is relevant here. You can probably get more done faster by putting in more hours. However for the vast majority of companies shipping something sooner rather than later really will not intact the company bottom line.
Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.
I think some people are also very ego-driven. For example, very young Steve Jobs said that he wants to be a very important person one day. That's not about getting FU money, that's about fueling an ego.
I've seen similar situations from close, it makes you think twice about asking for money, the moment you get funds you also get a runway, and that can be a huge stress, for some more than others, it depends if you have all your shit together before starting, some people might have traumas and attach their self worth to the outcome, and everything becomes a big drama under the stress, others might avoid conflict and explode at a later stage, there are so many ways people break under pressure.
> I’ve come to believe that a big part of our jobs as founders is to manage our own emotions through the emotional rollercoaster called building a startup.
I totally agree with that, I'd go even further saying is not a big part, but it is THE big part. Necessary but of course not sufficient for a unicorn, but you need it to be able to persist .
> So the only thing we could do to compete was to make ourselves into multiple people, 10x if we could. An easy way to 10x ourselves was by not having a personal life and not taking care of ourselves.
The truth about starting startup in the Silicon Valley bubble, there are many ways to start a business and pursuing what you believe without slaving once self at work and ignoring their teeth for a decade.
The thing is, an immense market has opened because of Internet in general, and it is up for grabs. In 20, 30 years, we may meet economic shrink and we’ll be in a replacement market instead of an investment market. By then, Tracy will own a territory in this market, others won’t. She’s digging a place for her and her descendents.
It’s extremely tempting to grab the land that is available, as it has real consequences on the future.
Predicting the economic future 20-30 years down the line is very ambitious, even more so because markets are changing faster then ever.
I don't think that trying to dig a place over this timescale, given this uncertainty, should be a justification to sacrificing a big chunk of your life -- very few companies can expect to survive so long.
So, basically, if you are not seriously rich by that time, the additional effort might not make a difference.
There are reasons to invest one's life into a business (loving what you do, belief in doing the right thing, adding to the world, etc.), but market forces should not be on this list.
Looking back 20 years, occasionally I have the same view: “if only I had stuck to X, I’d be a millionaire now”. But the truth is that I just wasn’t built for X, I would have been just another one of those 90% of businesses that fail, and cutting my losses by getting a regular “salaryman” job gave me the peace of mind to focus on what I actually like - which often happens to be coding for the pleasure of it.
20 years ago we thought Internet Explorer would be the last browser we’d ever use, and... it just wasn’t. The network effects enabled by the internet, when triggered in the right way at the right time, can sweep through established markets faster than in most other sectors, and it will probably continue to be like that for a very long time.
There is also this elitist vibe that comes from posts like these. The message is that she've worked so hard, she is extremely passionate, and she is willing to neglect her family and her teeth to pursue what she has in mind, therefore she is more worthy of the success then others. Truth is, there are many factors in play, lots out the control of the people and few are, working hard is a really minor factor, many people work hard everyday, they get nowhere really. Also, a lot those founders climb on the shoulders of many workers and investors (like the wework guy)...I'm not a fan of this culture at all.
Market is volatile specially these days, it is in constant churn. Who knows what will happen in 20, 30 years?
There are many niche, local markets, there are many opportunities to innovate. But still you don't need to slave yourself to work to get those markets, I can't buy her message that starting a startup would require a complete self sacrifice for a decade. Then she says the most important thing is relationships, yet in the same interview she said you can't see your friends and family etc. Sorry, that is a very dysfunctional way to live for a long time.
If anyone's interested, here's Nithin Kamath, founder of India's largest brokerage firm, on bootstrapping a multi-billion dollar fintech business: https://youtu.be/1ExWh4zm1zg (the major theme is they preferred to run the business on their own terms and pace).
I think, in many industries speed isn't that important. Sure, a new feature shouldn't take a year, but also new stuff every week isn't the key.
If you don't do what your competitors do and you communicate it well, this can already be enough to differenciate.
It's not always a sprint, where everyone runs the same race. If all your competitors run in the same direction, but you choose a different one, you can very well walk for some time.
Readit News
There are very few blog posts about those guys. Its the same with people who study 100% more than everybody else to pass a class but still fail.
You hear about those who made it thru, but never the ones who did not have the capacity for their goal.
Its up to you to know where you stand in this and what you want to sacrifice.
But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
As someone who ran two failed startups, it's all about perspective. I gave up a ton to build and run my companies, and failed, but in no way do I regret it, or consider it a sacrifice. The amount that I learned, the people that I met, the skills that I developed, I'd never get from working a regular job. (I wrote a mini-postmortem[1] for my last startup.)
There is huge personal value in taking big risks and doing difficult things even when you fail.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/quid-sudo-shutdown-h-now-mohi...
It depends on what kind of risk you are taking and when you decide its time to throw in the towel, and many other factors.
> But always remember, romanticizing hard work only does good for society but very rarely for the individual.
If you dont think hard work does good for the individual, then you are not only mistaken but most likely trying to justify your laziness more than anything else. And if you think the input size of your labor has to be proportional to the output size of success/failure, then you´ve completely misunderstood the relationship between labor and success.
Hard work on its own is insufficient to success - there are many other factors required (timing, capital, support/network, etc.) - yet it is required for success because having all the other factors come together without hard work to bind them leads to abject failure most often. And sure, you can talk about the few exceptions to the rule that got lucky, we can all envy those. But unless you are one those people who got lucky, you have no better strategy available to you if you want to succeed.
Besides, hard work has an insane amount of benefits to it even if failure is the outcome. You learn new things all the time, you connect with people that may become your greatest supporters in the future, you grow as a person and most importantly when you look in the mirror you come to respect yourself because you choose to bear a burden that few are willing to. Most people dont take risks, most people dont work hard, and most people would rather smoke weed and chill on a couch rather than work on something that will enrich their lives be it financially or otherwise. Hard work is the only reliable strategy available for the average person to become a better version of themselves and with that create a better future for themselves AND society.
So no, hard work does not "rarely" do good for the individual. It most often does good for the individual. The probelm with your statement is that you are equating "good" with "success" (mostly financial) and those two things are very very different from each other.
I think a lot of this hustle culture comes down to wanting to feel productive, but at the same time wanting to avoid the difficult problems that come along with being an entrepreneur. It's a lot easier to talk about how hard you are working than to actually do the work itself.
We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance.
0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
The answer is "yes" to all questions. I don't know what the article author wanted to say, but she just reminded me personally that the US tech "scene" is not healthy.
Since he was able to make both successful, we should be able to do that too :)
Also, how do you know Elon Musk relationship with his family is successful?
It’s very difficult. Doable but difficult.
Then count.
Unless you have a few 2am nights and full weekend days it’s relatively difficult to reach 100 hours plus. When you actually count it gives more reasonable figures.
Just because the answer is no doesn't mean it'll matter, it sounds like everything is going well either way.
A lot of people hate spending time with their families and work hard (literally and figuratively) to avoid the home. Or maybe what they call spending time with their families is 1 hour of fun and games while a WAG does 11 hours of completely inane child care. It would be inappropriate to generalize that people get more joy out of hour 2 of inane child care than they get joy from something that actually requires their intelligence or whatever. For women in the startup world this problem is extra acute, because they are choosing between 3 and 11 hours of inane child care, while most men only are only really choosing whether to have 0 or 1 hours of fun with their kids.
So I really sympathize with Tracy Young's perspective here. And she is putting things in a way that does not require making anyone out to be an antagonist, a kind of maturity most founders don't have.
There's this huge culture of work so hard you ignore your family/personal health/etc, but at least you created something. It's overrated.
Pretty much regardless of how much time you actually spend with them.
Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.
This really resonates a lot with me. Yet it's really rare to hear people talk about it in the startup world.
That is not a startup, that's an SMB.
> I’ve come to believe that a big part of our jobs as founders is to manage our own emotions through the emotional rollercoaster called building a startup.
I totally agree with that, I'd go even further saying is not a big part, but it is THE big part. Necessary but of course not sufficient for a unicorn, but you need it to be able to persist .
Sounds great
It’s extremely tempting to grab the land that is available, as it has real consequences on the future.
I don't think that trying to dig a place over this timescale, given this uncertainty, should be a justification to sacrificing a big chunk of your life -- very few companies can expect to survive so long.
So, basically, if you are not seriously rich by that time, the additional effort might not make a difference.
There are reasons to invest one's life into a business (loving what you do, belief in doing the right thing, adding to the world, etc.), but market forces should not be on this list.
20 years ago we thought Internet Explorer would be the last browser we’d ever use, and... it just wasn’t. The network effects enabled by the internet, when triggered in the right way at the right time, can sweep through established markets faster than in most other sectors, and it will probably continue to be like that for a very long time.
There are many niche, local markets, there are many opportunities to innovate. But still you don't need to slave yourself to work to get those markets, I can't buy her message that starting a startup would require a complete self sacrifice for a decade. Then she says the most important thing is relationships, yet in the same interview she said you can't see your friends and family etc. Sorry, that is a very dysfunctional way to live for a long time.
My risk profile and my fomo are in constant conflict
If you don't do what your competitors do and you communicate it well, this can already be enough to differenciate.
It's not always a sprint, where everyone runs the same race. If all your competitors run in the same direction, but you choose a different one, you can very well walk for some time.