
A day in the life of a startup founder - jgrahamc
(The following is parody of recent posts, it is not meant as criticism of any individual but as commentary on what I see as an unhealthy obsession with the habits of others and of people taking themselves and others in the 'startup community' a bit too seriously)<p>0523 Alarm sounds on my iPhone 4GS.  I don't use just any alarm program: I use Biorythym Alarm System+ which monitors my internal body clock and starts ringing at the appropriate time before 0523 to begin an in tune start to the day.  It uses Gregorian chants, nature sounds and recordings from inside the womb to ease me into the day.<p>0530 I'm in front of my MacBook Air (with 256GB SSD) at my desk made from recycled lumber from South African railway tracks.  Why did I get up 7 minutes earlier?  Because, as Manic Minute Minder Pro reminds me 7 minutes wasted per day 1.7 extra days of productive time per year. 1.7 days when the competition is literally sleeping!<p>I drink a large bowl of Jing Tea Matcha Supreme Green and a glass of organic milk.  At 0533 every day I'm hacking through my email, TODOs, tweets and catching up on Hacker News.  Every 20 minutes Time Out reminds me to stop, meditate and focus.<p>0645 I walk into my bedroom with a green tea for my wife Cassiopeia who is waking up.  We smile at each other and spend the next 15 minutes on One on One Time.  At 0700 it's time to wake our two boys: Dagwood and Spaniel.<p>0800 The house is quiet but Skype isn't. I stay in contact with my teams in Costa Rica, Montreal and Goa via Skype throughout the day.  This morning check in with the teams gives me a good view of where the business is.  Currently we're in double stealth mode (the public doesn't know what we're building and neither do we).<p>0830 I jog down to the ground floor of our New York brownstone and get on my Trek Madone 4 series bike for a 30 mile ride out into New Jersey and back.  My iPhone 4GS is cued up with a set of daily business podcasts set to run at double speed so I can get through all of them in the hour's ride.<p>0930 Shower and then spiritual time.  I have a small shrine set up that allows me to focus on the important.  I light an incense and gaze up at posters of Tim Ferriss, Kevin Rose and Warren Buffet.<p>0945 The day really begins.  For here on in it's meetings, hirings, firings, networking with the New York VC and angel crowd until 1900 when C, D &#38; S (or cease and desist as I call them) come back home.  We eat together and at 2200 I'm in bed with a light cucumber mask and the alarm set for another day.<p>Tonight's a little special because I've been invited to give a one hour keynote on being a startup CEO at Velocipede Ventures weekly Pumped and Primed meetup for other successful entrepreneurs like me.
======
leif
8:53 wake up. Hung over. Again. Meeting's in 7 minutes. Start a pot of coffee.
Stumble back to the desk.

9:01 answer the Skype call, offer a quick "I'm here" before switching to mute
so they won't hear the sounds of coffee brewing, much less the groaning.

9:12 carry around the laptop while starting laundry, then into the bathroom
and out again. Nobody suspects a thing.

9:35 coffee's starting to work. A good thing too, have to say my piece. Short
and sweet but not too gruff.

9:37 hangover's coming back for round 2. Get back in bed with Skype on low.

10:08 shower time. Really gotta buy drano soon. And toothpaste.

10:35 third cup o' joe. Start working.

~~~
johnhess
10:45 put on a shirt (but not pants) for skype video chat with client.

~~~
hef19898
10:46: take shirt off after I realise my webcam is broken.

~~~
acdanger
10:48 put on pants after I realise webcam isn't broken, just laying on the
floor.

~~~
alexkearns
10:50 Client emails to say she'd like to meet in person.

~~~
bluekite2000
11:12 Wife calls in hysterics because webcam is still on.

~~~
guynamedloren
12:00 Realize Hacker News and Reddit are actually the same thing.

~~~
mrkmcknz
12:15 Client emails to inform she is "en route" and is running 30 minutes
late.

~~~
flocial
13:30 Client arrives just as the wife pulls into driveway, someone calls the
cops after all the yelling

------
edw519
The problem with stuff like this isn't that there are a lot of details, it's
just that: they're details, not issues.

There's nothing wrong with details: all the little hacks that work for us that
we can share and copy. They're fun and cool and can really help.

But make no mistake about it: details are not issues.

Examples of details:

    
    
      - when I wake up
      - what I eat
      - how I exercise
      - my set-up
      - my preferences
      - my life hacks
      - how my team is organized
      - how we communicate
      - what I read
      - where we go
      - tips & tricks
    

Examples of issues:

    
    
      - the value I produced for my paying customers
    

Frankly, I'd rather talk about issues.

~~~
mindcrime
_There's nothing wrong with details: all the little hacks that work for us
that we can share and copy. They're fun and cool and can really help._

 _But make no mistake about it: details are not issues._

But... is there any requirement that every post to HN be fully deep, weighty,
intellectually challenging _issues_?? Sure, this crowd loves a good
intellectual debate (too much so, most of the time), but there is also a
practical, down-to-earth side to the crowd here... actual entrepreneurs who
are in the middle of building companies, and who find reading about the
experiences of others useful, even if they serve as nothing but inspiration,
or encouragement.

Sure, a post like the earlier @ryancarson post is mostly details... but so
what? That doesn't mean it isn't a valuable post to some of the members here.
Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but here's a thought: _no_ piece of content
that gets posted here is interesting to everybody.

 _Frankly, I'd rather talk about issues._

So would I, most of the time. But that doesn't mean that the occasional
"details" post deserves this much angst and controversy.

------
thebigshane

      # hours after post:                                 7
    
      # comments in this thread only expressing how they 
        thought the "double stealth" bit was funny:       10
    
      # American Psycho references:                       3
    
      # top level comments providing absolutely no 
        information or any point at all[1]:               10
    
      # of reddit-style "one-up" threads[2]               5
    

jgc: Very funny but in the end I'm more disappointed beacuse of the responses
here. This could have been a simple blog post and these comments probably
better belonged as comments on your site.

[1]: perhaps including this one?

[2]: is there a name for this yet?

------
eitally
For fun, here's an actual account of my typical workday routine. I'm a married
not-quite-exec with two toddlers managing a globally dispersed (9 countries,
14 time zones) IT department focusing mostly on appdev.

0550 Alarm
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobitobi.a...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobitobi.android.gentlealarm&hl=en)
\-- I LOVE this app!!) goes off and I sneak out of the bedroom trying not to
wake the 1 year old.

0551 Instant coffee in microwave & bio-needs-management. pull on shorts from
previous day and clean t-shirt.

0600 prepare lunches & snacks for wife & kids

[0620-0630 optional time to catch up on email if I was adequately well-
prepared in advance for food prep the night before]

0630 wake 1yo & wife. change diaper, dress, feed, and sunscreen 1yo.

0645 wake 3yo, usually with help from 1yo.

0705 wife leaves for work and i leave to drop off the kids at
daycare/preschool.

0745-1630 lots of meetings, some real work, possibly some exercise, dinner
prep, laundry, and possibly a couple of errands.

1630 pick up kids and proceed with the evening family craziness until putting
them to bed around 2030.

2030-2230 fluctuates between doing the real work I couldn't get done during
the work day and spending time with my wife. Usually more of the latter than
the former, something I am extremely thankful for.

The point isn't the schedule. The point is that finding a work-life balance
that accommodates productivity and supports happiness in both areas is a very
personal thing, and as jgc's sarcasm shows it's ultimately about what one can
accomplish and how one feels while working toward those accomplishments, not
the self-congratulatory circle-jerk minutiae so many people focus on.

~~~
wolframarnold
Only startup founders and not-quite-exec's at other companies have kids that
are born with a special gene that programs them to wake up or be woken up at
the precise time prescribed by some app only available on iphone. Everybody
else's kids (or if you have an Android--sucks for you) wake up at random times
at night, scream bloody murder and generally don't follow any schedule other
than their own.

~~~
pdx
Eh? That link was to the google play store. It's an Android app, and I use it
myself on my Android.

GP's kid had to get up to go to day care, he didn't get a vote, and would have
had to get up regardless of the alarm clock his dad uses.

What's driving me crazy is all these guys getting their kids to bed by 7:00 or
even 8:30. Oh, how I would love to have my kids in bed by those times. Of
course, my kids sleep till 9:00AM, but by then, I've been up and gone for 4
hours, so don't get to enjoy a quiet house at either end of the day.

~~~
bhousel
Have you tried any of the traditional "sleep training" stuff (e.g. Ferberizing
etc)? We have a 7mo that we just started sleep training last week, and it's
going surprisingly well. She goes to bed around 7:30-8pm, sleeps through
night, and wakes up around 7am.

~~~
VolatileVoid
I'd like to echo this. I know it's off-topic, but we've tried "graduated
extinction with parental presence" (i.e. I sit in the room next to my son's
crib after I put him down but do not pick him up) and it really DOES work if
you've got the stomach for it. The problem is that once the grandparents visit
for a week and spoil him, you'll need to retrain all over again (which we're
doing now, sigh).

But seriously: it really does work. It's hard for the first 2 nights or so but
gets exponentially better as time goes on.

------
Paul_S
Brilliant. Reading the comments I cannot help but think of Poe's law
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law>). Some poeple can't tell this is
satire despite or maybe because of how ridiculous and over the top it is.

~~~
renegadedev
Hearing about Poe's law for the first time but in my corner of the woods, we
blame it on the lack of a sarcasm font

~~~
captaintacos
A "sarcasm font"... People working on lightweight markup languages should pick
up the hint if they're looking for new additions. For instance, in Textile,
enclosing a string in between "(:" and ":)" could display the text into
sarcasm fonts (notice that I am being dead serious in here - those happy faces
around do change things in a paragraph).

------
mrgreenfur
Thanks for this valuable insights! It's great to know that it's possible to
run a wildly successful business and still have time for 15-minutes of one-on-
one with your wife. You seem to love your family very much. I myself am trying
to be a wildly successfully founder and it's very helpful to know how early
you wake up and all your little secrets (I have a Trek Madone 4 too!). These
are hte kind of innovations that will lift my startup into the VC cloud too!

------
simonbarker87
Loving double stealth mode - is triple stealth when your VCs don't even know
what your doing I wonder?

~~~
luis_ca
Triple is when VC's don't even know they invested

~~~
simonbarker87
Excellent! We're not even in stealth mode and I sometimes think our VCs have
forgotten they invested

~~~
bobsil1
Met a VC recently who snarked that another fund invests in competitors because
they can't remember what's in their portfolio.

------
sl4yerr
You forgot to include the picture of you charismatically laughing and showing
how lighthearted and simultaneously laser-focused you are.

------
shin_lao
This reminds me of the American Psycho's introduction.

------
paulovsk
I laughed hard on this one.

>"Currently we're in double stealth mode (the public doesn't know what we're
building and neither do we)."

------
crazygringo
"15 minutes on One on One Time"... Ha!

But seriously, I think "double stealth mode" deserves to officially enter
startup lexicon.

To quote Louis CK's interview from Tuesday... it's WONDERFUL!

------
Kynlyn
Oh this is spot on! There is far too much hipster drivel written about
personal habits, lifestyles and fashion choices of founders as if building a
successful company is largely determined by what kind of coffee you drink.

Likely because focusing on that is a lot easier than focusing on reality: It's
hard work, takes extreme dedication and sacrifice. Much easier to pretend that
certain types of yoga exercise are key factors....

------
paraschopra
Fantastic Parody. Though I wrote a _real_ one on life at my startup here
[http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-
ro...](http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-roller-
coaster-ride.htm)

I personally find honest accounts of day of life in any profession (not just
startup, but a doctor, firefighter, airline pilot, ice cream vendor) very,
very juicy and interesting. Gives a glimpse of what it is to live in a
different life. Maybe a bit voyeuristic, but what better way to know if you
would actually like a particular life / profession.

~~~
swombat
Just noticed this line in your article:

> Sparsh (our CTO) purchases a new server from Linode and configures it.

Have you considered switching to Hetzner? Rock solid stuff, and way cheaper
than linode for bigger boxes... Depends on where your customers are based
(ping times to west coast can be a bit slow), but otherwise, awesome.

~~~
paraschopra
We have already switched to Softlayer. Heard good things about Hetzner though.

------
EvaPeron
A friend of mine at Pierce and Pierce, Pat Bateman, recommends you always use
a moisturizer with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your skin, and
makes you look older. ;)

------
dr_faustus
Sounds exactly like my day, except I get up an hour earlier to reread my
favorite chapters of "Art of War" and I go to sleep an two hours later which I
spend getting inspired by amazing TED talks or Udacity courses about one thing
or another.

------
ryancarson
Touché :)

~~~
_sentient
For what it's worth, I personally like reading detailed, "a day in the life"
descriptions from productive individuals. It helps add a personal quality to
the usual startup narrative.

As someone who is planning on having kids in the next year, I also appreciate
seeing how other people manage to juggle their work amidst the rigors of
parenthood. I'm not much a morning person, but that made me want to start
waking up earlier. :)

~~~
bhousel
We just had our first baby 7 months ago. Parenthood does throw off your work-
life balance, but you will still get free time sometimes, you just need to be
focused and patient and organized. Teamwork between you and your partner is
key.

Also, nothing will improve your quality of life more than establishing a habit
of waking up early and exercising.

------
mixmax
The writing style is scarily close to Bret Easton Ellis in American psycho.
This could be the main character Patrick Bateman describing his morning
routine.

Scary indeed..

------
raheemm
Looking forward to Ryan Carson's response.

~~~
jgrahamc
He has nothing to respond to. His was just one of many such posts and posts of
the 'life hacker' movement. I was parodying a general sense of 'taking
ourselves too seriously' that comes about through the posts themselves and
through them getting upvoted highly on Hacker News.

------
chayesfss
Should have included a bit about how I don't really care about the inner
workings of the software, my job is to be the visionary.

------
vellum
"Currently we're in double stealth mode (the public doesn't know what we're
building and neither do we)."

+1. That's excellent.

I did a google search for desks from South African railways, and didn't find
anything. But you can get desks made with salvaged steel from American
railways.

"The Telegraph Desk features sections of salvaged 70-pound Tennessee Coal,
Iron and Railroad steel sliced into 1" and 4" sections to create "dashes and
dots.""

[http://www.railyardstudios.com/categories/desks-
tables/sub_c...](http://www.railyardstudios.com/categories/desks-
tables/sub_categories/desks-and-tables/products/telegraph-desk)

~~~
gsibble
My buddy owns Rail Yard! Great stuff!!!

------
benwerd
Double stealth mode is the best thing I've heard all year.

------
hef19898
Great read! But you should have gone more into detail, like where the Warren
poster is exactly positioned. And really left your team in Timbuktu ot of the
picture.

Like it! ;-)

------
ahmedaly
I wonder what is the different between a CEO and founder in the small
startups? Or its a matter of company structure?

~~~
asto
No difference. CEO is when the founder likes to call himself that! Think about
it - CHIEF EXECUTIVE Officer. Required only when you have many executive
officers and you need a chief for them.

Funnily, here in Bangalore, there are so many startups with only CxOs working
for the company/firm. So I guess they'er quite literally all Chiefs and no
Indians then! :-)

~~~
stevoski
I was the sole employee at a consulting firm run by a team of 3. The called
themselves:

\- CEO \- CIO \- CTO

I was "Senior Consultant". It was ludicrous.

------
mattm
I liked double stealth mode

------
basicallydan
For anybody who thinks this is a dig, it clearly isn't. It's just satire, and
it's funny :)

------
brittohalloran
I think you meant

0645 - 0700: 15 minutes of uninterrupted eye contact with Cassiopeia

~~~
daemon13
One on one sounds better!

~~~
brittohalloran
(reference: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMSd1IbxmFA> ) The description
made me think of Steve Martin in Baby Mama, or Kevin Nealon in Grandma's Boy (
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJLQ5DHmw-U> )

------
guillermovs
Heheheh, brilliant stuff. Loved the double stealth :D

------
slacko
Brilliant. I'd like to read the SF version of it :)

~~~
jgrahamc
We don't joke about that sort of thing.

------
jps359
What kind of water does your shower use? I personally only bathe in water from
the local spring, as it helps me stay in-tune with nature.

------
knighthacker
Thanks for sharing your schedule. I use Skype and IRC to work with my remote
teams too.

I don't really have a schedule per se. I do things whenever I want to.
Luckily, I am in the mood to hack all day long. And when I wanna take a break,
I go to the gym to clear my mind :).

For days that I am not the mood to hack, I decide to not touch a computer the
whole day. PS that never happens :).

------
SuperChihuahua
"0930 Shower and then spiritual time. I have a small shrine set up that allows
me to focus on the important. I light an incense and gaze up at posters of Tim
Ferriss, Kevin Rose and Warren Buffet." That's me! I always begin the day with
looking at some stocks and the twitter steams from tim ferriss and kevin rose
:)

------
bearwithclaws
Some infographics if you couldn't get enough of it (as if):
[http://www.inc.com/magazine/201109/inc-500-infographic-a-
day...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201109/inc-500-infographic-a-day-in-the-
life-of-a-ceo.html)

------
mutewinter
s/Velocipede/Vooza

<http://www.vooza.com/>

------
antr
John,

you just made my day.

Thank you

------
ivix
I think we all know which individual this is actually parodying :)

------
basicallydan
Double Stealth, love it.

------
eldios
geez if that's life my daytime is all screwed up :>

------
davmar
please, and i don't say this lightly, quit your day job. make a blog called
"fake startup CEO", a la "fake steve jobs".

please. this is gold. i need more.

------
gawker
Feels like I'm watching a short film :) Thanks!

------
bking
I only have one problem with this... There is no freakin way they were going
an average of 30 mph on that bike ride. No way.

------
mindcrime
I really wanted to flag this, because I really don't think that it's
constructive to engage in this kind of satire and what-not. How about put the
other guy's shoes on for a minute, and ask yourself how you'd feel if you were
the author of the post that inspired this one?

That said, this bit struck me as so funny that it (sort of) saves the thing:

 _Currently we're in double stealth mode (the public doesn't know what we're
building and neither do we)._

ROFLMFAO.

~~~
brown9-2
I disagree. Satire is a valid form of commentary.

~~~
mindcrime
Sure, it's valid, but is it constructive? I don't think so, at least not in
this case. This whole thread is nothing but a lot of useless meta navel-
gazing. In fact, I regret even posting in it, the more I think about it.

On to something else... I don't come here for this kind of negativity.

------
rodolphoarruda
I like the Trek Madone part. I do the same type of "getaway" on my luch breaks
and go for a 20 mile ride.

------
munyukim
It's hilarious

------
colinm
Liked the names! Sound like dogs.

------
bicknergseng
"at 2200 I'm in bed with a light cucumber mask"

Anyone else think of American Psycho when they read this?

------
cvursache
funny little commentary

------
ATPase
just 15 minutes for one on one? you're getting old .. ;-)

~~~
tedkulp
When you've got two kids, you're lucky if you get that much. :)

~~~
rodolphoarruda
twice a week, right? A daily one-on-one with two kids at home is barely
impossible.

------
syalam
correction: iPhone 4GS is really just an iPhone 4S

------
cientifico
I will not be happy with that way of life.

------
cristianocd
Double awesome!

------
lollancf37
lmao Nice one.

------
gooddaysir
Ah, double stealth. I've been in that mode for awhile (except I call it
"languishing").

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
Yeah I just went back to the drawing board with one of my companies. It's in
double stealth as well. Had a good laugh when I read it.

------
natarius
Sounds about right

