Ask HN: Founders, what's your lifestyle like? - dereking
======
dangrossman
Mostly free time. Probably not much different than most retirees with money in
the bank.

I always wanted independence. I never wanted employees. SaaS is a wonderful
business model for that. It took 10 years and a dozen ideas to find 2
businesses I could run on my own, be low-touch enough that I'd not have to be
hands-on with every customer, and pay enough to be a viable alternative to
employment. Most of my web app ideas didn't go anywhere, nothing happened
overnight, but eventually I had the right mix of learned skills, experience,
and luck to do something right.

I spent 10 years living like a broke college student. I _was_ a broke college
student in the beginning, but I didn't move past the one-bedroom apartments
and cheap home cooked dinners until I had some solid business and a good
runway in the bank. I was never a risk taker.

Now I pay myself a $30K/month salary. I saved enough to buy a house, rather
than mortgage a house. Met an awesome girl and moved her, and her pets, in
with me. She's always hated the work she originally trained for, and has gone
back to school for a career she's passionate about -- working with large
animals. I've been working every other day, a few hours at a time, recently. I
work more in the summers than the winters, just because I prefer working
outside in my sunroom with the fresh air, but it's not heated. We spend most
of our time together, taking day trips, eating out, visiting friends, and
don't worry much about money.

~~~
nthState
$30k a month? - Incredible

~~~
general_failure
I read it as per year. I went back and double checked. Per month it is!

------
23323888
Throw away for obvious reasons.

My partner kidnapped my children to different country.Three week granparent
visit for "trial" will be soon two years. I dont have much options, so I
followed. Now I am at country with zero friends and unknown language. I can
not order in shop, my children just started talking in foreign language and I
need translator.

This brings lot of stress, but it is also (sort of) distraction free. There is
basically a truce with my partner. I am lucky to work from home and spend lot
of time with my children.

I work about 2 hours/day to pay our bills. For another 5 hours I work on my
"PROJECT". Very niche programming library in good field. Next year it will be
ready, I am planning to divorce and scale up the business.

I am 10x programmer in very narrow field, all this reduces my productivity to
third, so still doable.

~~~
gokhan
Which country is it? Maybe one of us can help with daily problems (language,
communication etc.) I'm in Turkey.

~~~
dereking
Seconded

------
spiritplumber
Bad: I work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Good: On something I like to do.

Bad: Have to keep most customers happy. Good: Can tell that one customer who
is genuinely being an asshat, to go fuck himself.

~~~
dereking
How big is your team?

~~~
spiritplumber
Three people full time (me and two others), around a dozen collaborating while
they do other stuff.

That's about as big as I can manage it, so that works out. Not looking to
expand at the moment. Some people may work for us full time when they wrap up
their day job.

------
bazillion
I'm in the 2-person weeks-away-from-launch phase of a startup, and it can be
fairly hectic. There are so many little things to do (make email templates,
fix this bug, make that feature), that I use trello to keep track of a weekly
plan. I split things up into a weekly to-do/doing/done and only keep on the
board what I think I can accomplish throughout the week (and revisit it
daily). It helps a lot with lining up tasks in the order I need to do them in.

The lifestyle part of it is that 7 days out of the week, I wake up whenever my
body wakes up and pretty much roll over to the computer desk and start
working. I'm married (with no children), and although it took her a bit to
really buy in on giving me uninterrupted development time, I finally have that
for most of the day. I pretty much do this until 9-10pm, and then my wife and
I catch up on TV shows or watch a movie or two.

There are, of course, minor distractions throughout the day like reading HN,
or playing a few iphone games. In order to combat that, I hold off on doing
anything like that until I hit micro milestones on my current task.

As far as money goes, I left my full-time job in order to work on this idea,
so there's absolutely no income until I start generating it from customers.
I'm borrowing against my house to pay the bills, but that's how much I really
believe in what I'm working on, and I've intentionally forced myself into this
position because it makes me prioritize everything as if my life depended on
it (which it does).

------
gumby
Basically I work all the time but I really enjoy it. Company is at the 10
person/just started shipping phase and we are busy trying to change it from a
"just get something working" to "organized chaos for growth" company.

What makes it hard is I am a single parent; fortunately he's old enough that
he can get to and from school on his own. But it's tremendously tough to give
him the time he needs. Luckily if I manage that it gives me the "off time" I
need too. Which is great since I've abandoned, for a time, all the other stuff
I used to like to do (camping, playing tennis, reading, biking, writing code
for fun...). I sit with him while he's doing homework and can answer mail and
do other interruptible tasks and still talk to him about his homework, help
him write something etc.

I figure there are another couple of years in this nozzle and then the
pressure will drop. But at the same time: I wake up in the morning and that's
when I want to read HN or my RSS feed simply because the rest of the time I'm
having waay too much fun working.

------
t0mas88
Constant running 10 hours a day 7 days a week for 1.5 to two years until we
had the first real product launch and enough market traction to hire a bigger
team. Then shifted back to 5 days + some reading etc on Sunday morning.

Now (1.5 year later) busy with international roll out (we're in Europe) so
working a few 12 hour days + flying when abroad, then taking regular "no
phone, no email, just girlfriend" weekends to relax and make up for not seeing
her for a few days a week.

The reality is that hours don't mean that much if you get energy from your
work instead of spending energy on it like I would when I was working in a
"normal" job. But even then I feel it is important to keep time for sports and
enough focused "offline" time with your boy/girlfriend or kids. Otherwise it
becomes unhealthy over the long term even though you feel a lot of
accomplishment / enthusiasm.

------
riggid
All in all, I love it.

I am living off what I made with my last startup and work fulltime on my new
startup. Most days I jump out of the bed and start working 7am in the morning.
And often I am still working at midnight.

The one thing that bugs me: I decided to not travel until my current venture
is making 5 figures per month. I miss traveling. I am looking forward to the
time when money is pouring in again and I can take a one way flight to
wherever I like. And stay in some comfortable airbnb apartment or upper class
hotel room for as long as I like. That's what I was doing when my last startup
was flourishing. Now that I am living off my savings it would feel somehow
wrong to do that.

I can relate to bionic's description "living in a dimension outside of space,
time, matter, mass and gravity". It's all my own rules. My own goals. My own
story that nobody around me can relate to.

~~~
johnward
You're telling me you even get to sleep in?

~~~
riggid
What does that mean?

~~~
johnward
It was just a poor joke about 7am being considered early in the bay. Mostly
because I loath my 5am wakups for my corporate job. Sorry.

------
fslihue390
Throwaway due to paranoia about visa status [1].

We both applied to YC summer 2014, were turned down. As the "business" founder
(although I make a few commits every week as well) I sought clients out, and
we found a medium sized retailer who had some backend issues almost by
accident. We became their DBA for 100k USD a year each [2] (something we have
a collective decade experience in) plus a work permit so we could live there,
working half time. We spend the other half working on our idea, which turned
out to be a good thing because the two AI problems core to our success took a
bit longer than planned to be solved (our 40+ competitors all use humans).

I save around 50-60% of my salary, fly to exotic countries at least monthly
(typing this from Australia, going to Japan in 3 weeks) without having to take
leave, I live in a nice flat in the centre of town (next to the President's
house) in a first world city with nice weather, I never have to wear a suit,
and best of all, we don't answer to anybody because the client treats us as
expert consultants, not an employee (there is a significant difference!) and
we don't have investors and won't need any. The chilled out nature of an easy
DBA job with good (enough) money means we can do research properly and build a
good quality product. I have to say, whilst I understand PG's dislike of
bootstrapping vs taking investor money (and it makes sense when your idea is
new and first mover advantage is important)... well, it's a really nice way to
start up I think. YMMV. I think financial freedom, and freedom from irrational
management techniques designed to control you and not just your output, is by
far the highest quality of life improvement I ever made.

[1] There is some fuzziness here about the terms of the visa from the gov.
Technically, you're supposed to work for only one employer; that is, you can't
just work part time and build your own business with the other half, nor have
a split company visa. In practice, a lot of people do it and the government is
very pro-entrepreneurship; but I'm not leaving a paper trail just in case.

[2] Cost of living and taxes are quite low here, so in SF terms that's
probably equivalent to 200k.

------
corford
(Solo-founder in the middle of a last pre-launch crunch): all the emotions I
had (excitement, fear, doubt, fun, confusion) seem to have been dialled out to
white noise and I find myself in a moment of almost zen like tranquillity. I
know what I need to do and am just doing it. I get up, go to my computer, work
and go to bed. I do this 6 days a week and spend day 7 re-assuring my
girlfriend she's not in love with a robot.

It's not sustainable, the end's in sight but perversely it's quite liberating.
I feel like I've finally achieved complete internal acceptance of what I'm
doing.

~~~
nartz
Sounds like you are approaching burnout my friend. Beware the unsustainability
of this approach. Launch is simply the start of a long journey. If the launch
fails to get traction, will you have the energy to continue?

------
2D
We work 6 days a week with sabbath off No fixed hours but try and keep sleep,
exercise and weekly update meetings regular. As most people say we either work
"all the time" or "not at all". I like it no matter how hard. My partner
suffers because the uncertainty eats at him a bit. We're at that stage where
people think we are a) nuts to leave high paying jobs or b) deluded that we
can actually do this ourselves... So the family/social support is kind of
50/50 which impacts lifestyle a lot. Example: we get free rent at home and our
friends have preordered because I think they worry for us and want it to work.
I noticed I have less tolerance/ time for mates other than my closest friends
who know me best and accept that sometimes the only time to chat is via Skype
while waiting at an airport.

Overall, and I'm embarrassed to say this but this is the best lifestyle I
could ever imagine. To be successful while living free like this feels almost
like its unfairly good, though I'm not sure yet if I'll ever experience that.

We try and do volunteer stuff as when you're a founder it's so easy to be self
centred. This helps us look outward and be less wingy bitches when the shit
hits the fan.

------
bwb
I sleep in, wake up, and work till about 7pm depending on time zones I am in
(right now most of my calls are 3pm to 7pm since I am in Europe for a few
months). I've scaled the late nights back a bit since I got married, but
occasionally I'll work through midnight, and occasionally a day on the
weekend. I love my work so it takes a lot of work to make sure the balance is
there. Before I got married I worked a much more flexible schedule, I worked
when I felt like it, and when I didn't I didn't. I usually ended up working
around 50 to 60 hours a week.

I never minded the stress prior to this last year, generally if I get burned
out I take a vacation and I'm good after 10 days on the beach. But, this last
year has been very stressful and it has taken a full year to find a solution
to that. Stress management is key to maintaining a good lifestyle, I exercise
a ton, and working to add meditation to my daily habits (you need both).

I love the flexible time, if I need to take a day off I take it off, and I put
it back in somewhere else. As the company has grown in size it is a little
more rigid in structure, I've got meetings on Monday/Tuesday that I usually
can't skip. But usually that leaves Wed/Thur/Fri free for project work and no
meetings.

I love to travel and this lifestyle. Since the entire company is remote it
doesn't matter where I am. I traveled for all of 2012 and 2013, I spent a year
in Australia, 6 months in europe/UK, and 6 months in South America. I am
typing this from Nice France where my wife and I will be for a month, and then
Croatia for a few months. I use AirBNB to find places to stay and it has
worked out brilliantly so far.

I go to 3 to 4 conferences a year, sometimes more, I really enjoy the industry
I am in and have a fair number of friends through that network + work meetups.
Given the nomadic nature of my life for the last 5 years, and the higher hours
I don't have a ton of close close friends. Just a few from college and it is
hard to maintain those friendships when we are all different places in the
world. I am looking forward to being a bit more settled as I've gotten older
:).

The hardest part? It is hard to shut down, it is a constant battle to make
sure my life has balance, both for hobbies, and for my wife/family. I would
imagine that once kids are added to the mix that will really adjust some of my
priorities and time :)

~~~
manueslapera
If i may ask, what is your strategy for long term airbnbn rental? My wife and
I are thinking of doing the very exact same thing that you and your wife are
doing, and would appreciate the info.

~~~
bwb
Yep, basically I pick out the ones I like and email them that I am looking for
a place for around 2 months and if they can give me a better price. I
generally do that with 3 to 5 of them and see who comes back with a
competitive rate and price drop over weekly. Usually asking nicely is great
and they love long stays as they don't have to mess with turn over.

If I can help in anyway my email is bwbbwb@gmail.com, Thanks, Ben

------
kendrickwkm
I work in a small country in Asia on an early stage startup (raised seed),
before starting this I was told to have a work-life balance. Go to work, spend
8-10 hours, come back and offload your mind for a few hours. I tried that for
a few days, it was horrible.

I wake up at 6am for a morning run, do some meditation, get a quick breakfast
and am in the office by 8am. Time moves too quickly (startup relativity?), the
next thing I know it's 10pm and everyone has left the office, by 10/11pm i'm
out the door, back home and asleep by 12. This is Mon-Sat.

On Sunday a few of my colleagues and I would find a cafe and work there from
10am-7pm then head for dinner or back home.

I haven't seen my bestfriend in 3 months, it didn't work out with my
girlfriend because of the working hours and i've missed too many birthday
parties to count.

It's not ideal but I found if I really wanted something, I have to be willing
to give up something of equal importance to focus. If I could go back I
wouldn't change anything about this.

------
eastdakota
What's struck me is how much it's changed over the last 6 (!) years of
building CloudFlare.

2009: "Student Life" / CloudFlare started as a student project. First year
felt very academic. Worked irregular hours. Weren't sure what we were supposed
to be doing. Lots of research. Lots of change (relocated from Boston to the
Bay Area). The whole time we didn't really think we were building a company,
we thought we were researching an interesting problem and seeing if we could
come up with solutions for it.

Pre-October 2010: "Playing Company" / We'd raised money at the end of 2009 and
hired our first employees and moved into our first office in Palo Alto in Jan
2010. I'd take the train from SF every morning answering emails on my iPad on
the way down and playing Angry Birds (for a stint I was among the top ranked
players in the US) on the return. We struggled to get our first 100 beta users
and took the whole team to Vegas when we did. We weren't sure exactly what we
were building and sometimes the uncertainty made me anxious but generally this
was a fun time. The 60 days before we launched at TechCrunch Disrupt on Sept
27th were stressful but fun and incredibly productive. Everyone had a clear
goal and date it needed to be done by.

Personally, I was wearing many hats (occasional coder, biz dev, and primary
customer support) and nearly 100% of my time was dedicated to obsessing about
CloudFlare. There was still a lot of uncertainty and throughout the course of
2010 there was increasing sense that we had a big opportunity and it was ours
to take or screw up.

During this time I tried all kinds of tricks to manage my own psyche. Most
effective was going to Suchadda Thai Massage near my house every weekend and
getting a 90 minute really deep tissue massage that was hard enough that it
took my mind off anything other than the knee or elbow being jabbed into my
back. I'd been dating a woman who was an academic for the last two years but
had become a pretty terrible boyfriend. Not a surprise that we broke up just
after this period.

October 2010-December 2011: "Chaos" / We launched. We didn't get around to
putting on any limits on who could sign up so anyone and everyone did.
Thousands signed up in the first few days. Every signup increased the traffic
across our network. There were only 8 of us and we were running a 24x7
network. I lost the ability to sleep for more than about 2 hours at a time. My
phone would buzz with every network issue. At the same time, it was fun to see
that things were generally working. Customer attention lead to investor
attention and the relationship with investors shifted from us pitching them to
them pitching us. I wasn't doing any more coding and spent much more of my
time managing potential investors and trying to recruit. We moved the office
to San Francisco within a few blocks of my house. Being closer removed the
regular routine of the train and, somewhat counter-intuitively, meant I worked
longer hours because the last bullet train leaving Palo Alto didn't define the
end of work anymore.

With the lack of predictability came a feeling that every day held a new
crisis. One afternoon in the spring of 2010 we got word some group called Lulz
Security had signed up. Then the media started calling. We had no idea who
Lulzsec was. I stayed in the office well past midnight reading Twitter and
articles on the group and trying to figure out what to do. I only went home
when I got spooked sitting in our dark office and thought I heard someone. I
headed home only to be awakened by a call from my co-founder. Turned out
someone had broken in and four laptops had been stolen. I raced back to the
office and a bunch of us holed up on a conference room and debated (seriously)
whether it was the hackers, law enforcement, or some corporate espionage agent
who had broken into the office. That's how crazy life felt. Turned out the
truth held fall less intrigue: it was a simple burglar who had broken into
several other offices and was caught several months later.

I started dating a cancer surgeon. She lived on the other side of San
Francisco and had a similarly chaotic schedule. We'd find time to get dinner a
couple nights a week and exchange stories about the chaos in each others'
lives. Having nothing in common almost felt like a virtue for a time as we
could both provide each other an escape.

2012 - 2013: "Growing" / We built up the start of a competent team and things
began to feel more stable. I started to attend more external events and spend
more time outside the office. Started attending more conferences. Telling the
CloudFlare story more broadly. I started writing regularly for our blog,
largely telling stories about technical challenges we'd faced and how we
solved them.

Being more of a public figure made me more of a target. Some of our less
savory users, or the hackers trying to take down the sites we protected,
decided to mess with me from time to time. I'd been pretty casual with the
personal details of my life. It wasn't hard to find my cell phone number or
home address. One night at 4:00am I had the SWAT team called on my home.
Thankfully they rang the buzzer rather than breaking down the door. At the
office, we regularly had bomb threats phoned in. We became pretty good friends
with Maggie the bomb sniffing dog. Our Board suggested that I should have
personal security, especially when traveling, which seemed absurd given how
small a company we were. It also didn't thrill my quite private physician
girlfriend. Having nothing in common started to be more of a liability and we
broke up.

2014 - Today: "Real CEO" / Today I have three jobs: recruiting, external
affairs, internal affairs. I spend about equal time on each. We're hiring
about 3 people a week at this point and I still talk with all of them to
answer their questions and try and judge whether they'll be a cultural fit.
External affairs involves speaking to customers, investors, analysts, bankers,
media, etc. Internal affairs involves a bit of product strategy but mostly
managing people and team dynamics. Talking with CEOs of public companies that
are far ahead of where we are today, my sense is this will be my role for the
rest of my time leading CloudFlare.

My work day is pretty tightly scheduled but I have quite a bit of control of
that schedule. I don't have a lot of downtime during the day which has made it
harder to find time to do things at work I used to really enjoy, like writing
technical blog posts. I find myself much more playing what Jeff Bezos, CEO of
Amazon, described as "switchboard operator": taking some input of an idea and
routing it to the right person on our team. It's rare that I write an email
that's more than a couple sentences anymore. It surprises me every day to walk
into the office and see so many people. We've passed the Dunbar Number of
employees and it's hard that I don't have a personal relationship with
everyone on the team. Soon I won't know everyone's name. We've tried to keep
the organization very flat, in order to ensure that we're the kind of place
where the best idea will win, and I am surprised whenever I hear someone
hesitates to "waste my time" with something because I'm "the CEO." I try to
stay approachable but see how that inherently gets more difficult over time.

I'm getting better at taking time for myself, secure in knowing there's a
great team handling things better than I could myself. As a fellow founder
said recently, the job of CEO is to fire yourself from every job within the
company -- and replace yourself with someone more competent. I like that and
think it's right.

I'm proud of the fact that the three of us that co-founded the company are all
still at the company and are all still friends who respect each other. That's
very rare. Our story would make for a very boring book. Other personal
relationships are sometimes difficult. You lose a lot of friends along the
process of starting a company -- largely because I haven't made time to keep
up the relationships. At the same time, I've met a lot of great new people who
I think will develop into meaningful, long-term friends. Dating presents a
real puzzle -- but that's a whole other topic for another time.

Looking ahead we're likely on the path to being a public company and I'm
trying to spend as much time talking with other newly public CEOs about how
that changes their lifestyle. For now, I count myself fortunate that I can
take a few hours on a sunny Saturday morning in San Francisco and, on a whim,
sit down and write an answer to this question and not have to send it my our
compliance department to ensure it doesn't contain any forward-looking
statements.

~~~
rajacombinator
Great story thanks for sharing. The parts about your personal and business
security problems was surprising. I would think Cloudflare is a pretty niche
product with a rational customer base. But I guess if you really piss off some
developers they can think of clever ways to make life miserable.

------
h6dMLRHBwd6aPx
YC reject here, Winter '14\. Started 11/12 as a side-project while working at
another YC backed startup. Applied to YC after establishing baseline product
market fit. Worked 10hrs M-F at job and another 4-6hrs on startup when home.
10+hrs on Saturday & Sunday on startup.

Went full time 3/14 after getting into another accelerator. Since then work
about 10+ hrs 6-7 days a week, sometimes taking the occasional weekend off.
Started charging 5/14 and have been profitable since day 1. Pay myself and
cofounder a nominal salary (~2k/m). By early '15 have grossed over 100k and
still profitable.

We have about 5 consistent contractors that we pay for different parts of the
business and work harder than ever managing time and people. I don't code as
much as I like to anymore (still ~40 hrs per week), but I work just as hard.
Only ever have more things to do, never less.

------
moron4hire
I have a very small consulting firm. I spend 20 hours a week on a gig that I
picked up 3 years ago, and I have two part-time people working for me about 10
hours a week each. I have a hands-off business partner who handles the
billing. It's my mother, actually. She has her own consulting gigs, so about a
year ago we just decided to combine our billing.

It pays pretty well--even though I'm nowhere near charging what I've been told
would be the going rate for my skill set--well enough that my wife and I took
three camping trips and three international trips last year, and took the
entire December holiday season off.

I don't own a car anymore; we are a one-car household now. Well, I do own one,
but it hasn't ran for three months now and I'm probably just going to donate
it. I exclusively work remotely. I'll occasionally walk to a coffee shop or
co-working space (I live just outside of DC in the Old Town district of
Alexandria). It's kind of lonely, but it's a hell of a lot better than having
a boss.

The rest of the time, I (try to) make things that interest me and try to
develop them into salable products. But, I'm having some issues with self-
doubt. I've had tons of side projects over the years and none of them have led
to anything, mostly because I've never managed to put any of them up for sale,
because I believed they weren't good enough to sell, because I tend to focus
on big chunks of interesting, technical work rather than the long-tail of
chore issues, both technical and non-technical.

But finally, after 10 years, I got _one_ project up and running on its own
site with a "buy" button. Nobody _has_ bought it, and I still don't really
feel like it's worth buying, but at least I've gotten over that one particular
hangup.

I'm hoping I can just keep whittling away at the hangups and skill
deficiencies, one by one, until I've got something with all the right parts
and all the right moves. I'd just like to know how close I am, though.

------
beermann
I think "manic" describes things well. The highs are very high and the lows
are very low. And if you're just floating along in the middle, you're always
wanting more. It's one of the reasons trying to do this on your own is so
hard. Ideally when you're having an off day your cofounder is there to pick
you back up. In this sense, being in sync with your cofounder isn't always a
good thing.

On any given day, it's difficult to manage everything. When you have customer
service, outreach, growth, and development to do, something gets dropped.
There's never quite enough time.

Then there's the difficulty in taking time off. When you try to make time for
other parts of your life, you're always looking at the things that you didn't
get to and thinking about when you're going to do them. I don't go to as many
happy hours as I used to; I certainly don't organize them. I'm not playing
volleyball right now. I try to workout, but it's hard to tear yourself away
from the computer when it'll just take another hour to finish your current
task. It affects your conversations, your relationships, your health,
everything. It is consuming.

On any given weekday, I work at least 10 hours. Generally it's about 12-14. I
make sure to take a night or two off to spend time with my fiancee. On the
weekend, I try to fit in time with her as well but I'll still get in at least
4 hours each day, sometimes more like 8.

I get stressed about money a lot. We're bootstrapped so not everyone is in
this situations. In any case, everything is framed in terms of how many months
we have left. That 12 dollar sandwich? That's a couple days of server time. An
expensive car repair? That's a whole month of our runway.

And yet, it's the most rewarding thing you can ever do. You get to build
something from nothing. People use it. They talk to you about it. You are
making the decisions. And it isn't going to last forever. It'll last for a
long time, but it'll get better. But most importantly, I wake up every morning
without an alarm and am eager to get back to work.

~~~
curiously
I can attest to this. it's like a roller coaster. for me the lows are when
nothing happens. it feels like eternity. the highs are when you make sales and
everything goes well. it's something I am working on, trying to separate
emotion from the business like a robot would. It's expectation management.

------
andrewhillman
Simply put. I need a vacation but can't take one.

~~~
beachstartup
seeing this makes me laugh.

of course you can take a vacation, you just don't want to. your ego is bound
up in a workaholic identity and you've lost grip on reality.

every small business owner or co-founder i've ever known takes at _least_ a
week off every year and most government holidays, because it's the responsible
thing to do when you work with other humans.

------
zephyr4434
I am in year two of my startup and it's basically:

Wake up at 7am, work out, work until 7pm, rush home to eat quickly for 20
minutes (on the walk to and from work listening to podcasts about startups and
business), and working until midnight.

Weekends, spend the afternoons working. Paying ourselves (two founders)
$36k/year until we reach certain milestones.

I make tradeoffs - there is only really time for work, working out, and
occasionally going out. This means not a lot of time with friends, going back
to China to see extended family, and constantly feeling stressed.

But getting to work full-time on something you believe in and having the
opportunity to build a great business and achieve financial independence is
totally worth it.

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awicklander
5:30am - 6:30am: wake up, coffee, meditate 6:30am - 7:30am: customer support
from overnight 7:30am - 9:30am: breakast with family, kids to school 10:00am -
4:30pm: work, office, lunch 4:45pm - 5:30pm: beer with coworing space
coworkers 6:00pm - 10:00pm: Dinner with Family with support sprinkled in
throughout the night. Yoga class sometimes. 10:00pm - 5:30am: Sleep

(Of course in the real world there are lots of deviations from this, but this
is the goal schedule.)

~~~
i2
I bet it's no more than ten minutes on a busy day, between 6:30 and 7:30,
between coffee and thinking about work. Meditation is hard when you have
something to do and must do it. Meditation is an Eastern thing and it doesn't
play well with the Western values.

~~~
awicklander
Yeah I do about 10 or 15 minutes with the headspace app. It's not a lot of
time but it's quite nice and even that little bit of time is very impactful.

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amac
I try to work on my startup on the side between a job and studying for a
masters. I spend time on my company (an ecommerce based wearable startup)
developing and shipping product.

The free time I have I use to run around Hong Kong Island where I live and
elsewhere, in the university library reading various books.

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lucisferre
My wife and I are co-founders and we have a 3 year-old daughter. Our startup
is also still in its early stages, so things are pretty busy and often
chaotic. I can definitely say that, as a necessity, we've become much better
at time management than we ever were before.

Our days are fairly planned and we try to keep things routine as much as
possible, consistency helps immensely. Also we've managed to ensure everything
we need is fairly close by. We live about 10-15 minutes from work and our
daycare and gym are both in close proximity to our office. We each typically
have two scheduled mornings a week to hit the gym, one of us goes to the gym
and the other deals with daycare. We also occasionally hand off daycare pick-
up to allow the other to work a bit later. In fact, we hand-off on a lot of
things to make everything work, particularly meetings, typically only one of
us will go so the other can stay at work and grind on other things. As a
software developer this is pretty important, I can skip out of a lot of
meetings and keep working on product and we can catch up on what happened in
the evening.

Having a child means our days need to be somewhat time-boxed so there's little
room for severely late work hours. I actually believe this to be a good thing,
as I'm forced to get the most out of my work time and continue to improve on
my time management skills. That said, we're often catching up on things during
downtime, weekends, evenings and since we live together, we have the advantage
(or disadvantage depending on how you look at it) of being able to discuss
work whenever we need to. To make things even more interesting my brother and
father work in a related business, so family dinners can be... interesting.

Outside of that we try to keep everything pretty normal and we enjoy our
downtime. We like to cook a lot, we make a regular trip to the market most
Saturdays with our daughter. We cook dinner with our daughter often and eat at
home often which provides valuable family time. The grandparents usually watch
our daughter on Friday nights so we can hang out of with friends once a week
as well, and we occasionally sneak out to have a drink together, after her
bed-time, while they stay and watch her.

Almost all of our family lives nearby, so my parents and her parents help out
a lot. It really starts to become a team effort to make everything work out
without an excessive level of stress. I can't stress enough how important
family is when things get to this level of "busy".

Like most people here, we love what we do. We don't mind being somewhat
"always on" and we try to plan our lives in a way the reminds us to do other
things too and not to neglect family and friends. That's the bigger challenge
I think, not figuring out how to work hard at something you love, but
remembering to live your life too.

Overall, we are very fortunate things have worked out as well as they have.

~~~
2D
I'm also married to my cofounder and the experience is a lot like yours...
Startup families are very tight:) Some people say "startup is a contact sport"
but we prefer "startup is a team sport". Keep being grateful and good luck!

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eli
Roughly the same hours as when I worked for someone else, but I care a whole
lot more.

~~~
dereking
Early stage?

~~~
eli
Just over three years, about 27 employees.

------
solve
Clinical addiction to creating, with associated negative quality of life
effects.

------
dennisgorelik
Working remotely from a house with 5 kids in Florida.

Developers are working remotely abroad.

I work probably around 60 hours/week, but it is hard to say exactly since work
and fun intertwine.

~~~
porter
All on postjobfree?

~~~
dennisgorelik
Yes, all on postjobfree.com 4+ years part-time + 3+ years full time.

------
njern
Very similar lifestyle as when I was a student - small apartment, eat in most
days... but couldn't be more satisfied with my "job" :=)

~~~
dereking
What stage are you in? early days?

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ryanjmo
My lifestyle is pretty great right now, but it has changed and improved
remarkably throughout the years.

I have found that at about $30K a month in spending money, is more money than
I need, even in the most expensive cities (as long as I’m hanging out with
normal people with normal jobs and don’t do anything to crazy that month).

Currently, I live between Aspen, CO and San Juan, PR. I live in Aspen, because
it is my favorite place in the world. There are so many amazing outdoor
activities and the girls there are the best in the world (for me, I'm kind-of
and extreme sports person and there are a lot of girls like that up there).
The party scene is hard to beat up in Aspen, in both the summer and the
winter.

Mostly though, I dirt bike all summer in the mountains and ski and snowmobile
all winter.

I just recently moved to Puerto Rico for a percentage of the year for the
great tax benefits of living here. So far it has been really good. I live in
Old San Juan, which is somewhat like living in the Mission in SF. Dirty,
grimy, hispstery and fun.

I walk or get driven everywhere I go. I don't like driving at all and don't
really need to either place I live. I am in walking distance to 20 great bars
and restaurants in both places.

I try to work every weekday from 8am-4pm EST no matter what timezone I’m in.
That doesn’t always happen, but the more I work, the better, more stable and
more profitable my business gets.

What I have found to be most important, is to make sure that I get up and get
emails out early, so that no matter what is really going on in my life, it
signals to everyone who interacts with my business that, I’m up early and
working hard every day, which is often the case anyway.

However, for example, on Friday me my employee and a girl from down here, took
the day off and had an awesome drunken brunch on the beach.

My number one employee and best friend, lives and travels around with me. We
are an awesome team together and get shit done in all parts of our lives. We
eat out every meal and I literally pay for everything for him when we are
together. It feels a lot like he is my kid in a lot of ways, lol.

I’ve had girlfriends throughout the years, but almost every one of them has
been unemployed or working on something like acting or trying to start a
business. It is really hard for me to date someone with a 9-5, I think because
my lifestyle is so flexible (I also require a lot of attention). My last
girlfriend was a consultant and worked at home, which was the best set up so
far. We would just work next to each other from each others apartments.

It took a good amount of time to get here. I’ve been founding companies for
about 6-7 years. This is my third entity. Back in the day I was living on the
floor in the ghetto of Berkeley, CA without an extra dime to spend on anything
other than Ramen.

I’m looking to the future right now. Hoping to grow my business, save some
money, spend a lot of money and have a lot of fun.

My next big plan, is to get a harem of girls to simultaneously be my
girlfriends and travel with me between Aspen, Puerto Rico and the rest of the
world. I’ve been working on it, getting apartments set up in both places that
will work for this. Also, I’ve been looking for super smart, super hot girls
who would be down for this.

So far, you’d be surprised at the reactions of most of the girls who I tell my
plan to. Very few have been negative about it. Most have been at minimum
supportive and they think it is cool.

I know it is a ridiculous “goal” for the future, but there are no real rules
and boundaries in my life and I am going to do my best to take full advantage
of this one awesome life :)

So far I think I’m on a good track.

~~~
bshimmin
I will admit I actually double-checked the font colour for this in Chrome's
Developer Tools, so surprised was I that a post containing the phrase "My next
big plan is to get a harem of girls to simultaneously be my girlfriends"
hadn't received any downvotes.

~~~
ryanjmo
Haha, like I said, I too have been surprised at the general lack of negative
feedback this has been getting when I have brought it up to family, friends,
acquaintances, etc.

------
HankRollings
I build and sell an enterprise software product. First 12 months--sales were
low. Eventually, I saw sales in the $10-50K/mo range. I'm now seeing
$50K-100K/mo. I work alone, I have no investors, and my overhead is minimal.

My main luxury is eating out. I don't sweat ordering what I want. I get that
appetizer when I want it. I don't wince when a waiter reminds me that refills
cost.

I live in a modest city apartment.

Last year, I took a few short vacations. Nothing extravagant. They were the
same types of vacations I might take if I were employed as a developer.

I travel a lot to promote my business. When I travel on business, I make sure
I'm in a nice hotel, eat nice meals, and I travel comfortably.

When I'm home, I wake up around 10am. I go through email and whatever other
distractions I come up with . I go eat lunch and then I head to my office. I
usually work until dinner time. Some days I work after dinner until I go to
bed. Other days I don’t. I slow down, here and there, to avoid burn out.

My personal financial goal is to build a retirement account capable of
supporting a modest life style. I don't know what the rest of this ride looks
like, so I'm trying to capitalize on it and build some personal security.

I don’t have much of a social life right now. When I’m in a mental state to
produce, I get quite stressed when I have to attend a party or otherwise
disrupt my productive work to “hang out”. I have friends though and I get to
spend some time with them. Usually it’s when we cross paths on our work travel
or volunteer activities.

I'm pretty happy with my situation and have a lot of satisfaction from my
work. Some of the things that I like the most:

1\. I don't have to ask anyone for permission for anything. If I want to do
something, I go and do it.

2\. I don't have constant reminders about my low place in the organization's
hierarchy. My customers and I enter into a business transaction as peers. This
mutual respect is very important to me.

3\. I have absolute control over my work. I like the freedom to pursue my
product's vision without having to stop and justify it to others.

4\. I like succeeding at business development. I’ve met a lot of “pure
business” people who would like me to believe there’s something special to
what they do. There isn’t. As a programmer, I find this very empowering.

5\. I also like succeeding without investors. I started my entrepreneurial
journey on HN and for a time believed I needed someone else's blessing to
succeed. While I have friends who have done well with investors, I like
knowing that my two hands made something from nothing and got me here.

~~~
tootall
This was highly inspirational and I _loved_ it, especially "My customers and I
enter into a business transaction as peers. This mutual respect is very
important to me".

If I might ask, what kind of enterprise software can generate that much profit
from a one-man shop?

Thanks

~~~
HankRollings
My business is in the IT security realm.

------
arsalanb
Eat, Sleep, Conquer, Repeat.

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curiously
Playing CS:GO most of the time until a customer needs help or a bug needs to
be fixed. I'd like to get a second monitor so I don't have to alt-tab all the
time.

~~~
angularly
Heh, that reminds me of this video:
[http://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE](http://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE)

~~~
eridal
awesome!! thanks internet!!

------
biomimic
Brute, austere, spartan on one side and counter-tempered with persistence,
determination and long-term grit. On the other side, it's like living in a
dimension outside of space, time, matter, mass and gravity.

