Ask HN: As a founder how does your weekends look like? - semicolondev
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shopinterest
Uhhhh, the usual, restless sleep, wake up at 7am, check email, check bank
account balance, silent panic, cold sweats, yesterday's coffee, 2 days ago
Pizza, a few dozen rejection emails from assorted VCs and angels, listen to
cofounder latest complaints against team he hand picked and trained himself,
checks site, checks google analytics, one transaction, a faint smile, a hope
of a better future, an attack of naivete, and Monday is here again....

~~~
atmosx
For something everyone is aiming at, sounds terrible. Do you at least _get the
girl_ or something in the end?

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luckydude
What are these weekends of which you speak? :)

Just kidding, I'm in an 18 year old company so my weekends are pretty sweet.
Driving tractors and stuff.

But when we started, and even now, it is rare that more than 6 hours go by and
we haven't checked email. We are weird, we do pretty great support so people
check emails on weekends to see if there is a big problem. If there isn't, off
we go to some fun. If there is, rally the troops and get it fixed.

We're in the enterprise software space so it's sort of expected that we have
some coverage on weekends.

All that said, if we do our job right, weekends are pretty boring. Which is
why we peer review everything and regression test everything. Even with that
some stuff slips through but not very often. We did a .0 release 6 weeks ago,
found one bug, about to push a .0.1 release out the door. Boring. Which is how
I like it.

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cpncrunch
My situation is similar. 18-year old company. At weekends I check email
occasionally, but don't reply until Monday unless it's an urgent issue (which
it generally isn't).

There generally should never any need to do any work on weekends unless it's
an unusual situation. You're just reducing your overall productivity if you
work too much. Having said that, sometimes I do work on problems over the
weekend just for the fun of it.

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semicolondev
Emails are very tempting. I am on the same boat but, I have been working with
a remote team and usually happen to work a lot during weekends because of
timezone issues. Working with 5 year old company (remote), bootstraped and I
recently moved to Bay Area. Was wondering how it goes with other founders
here. Thanks for writing.

~~~
cpncrunch
For me it is mostly support, so it tends to be questions like "how do I do
this thing that is explained in the FAQ that I didn't read"?

If it was questions from colleagues then I might reply, although it would
probably depend on the situation, and I certainly wouldn't want there to be an
expectation that I would reply quickly to any and all emails. (I don't have
any colleagues, so it's not an issue for me :)

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atsaloli
I'm flying up to Silicon Valley tomorrow (from LA) to host a user group
meeting. I don't do that every weekend; usually I try to balance work, family
and church. But yeah, there's work. (5 year old bootstrapped company; doing it
full-time for the last 4 months only. 1 employee, in training.)

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malux85
I use weekends to do experimental work ... trying out new frameworks, or
different machine learning strategies, which I'm doing right now, 2am Saturday
morning :)

Sometimes I take 1 or 2 hours off during the day to play some PS4 ... dont
push myself too hard in the weekends

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hbcondo714
I try to stop work by Friday evening and start up again Monday morning but
lately I've been using Sunday nights to get an early start on the work week.

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tptacek
Like a normal person's weekend.

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Tomte
How was it at your first startup? Different, I guess?

If so, do you think your "normal weekend" is mostly related to one of the
following points, all of them, or something else entirely?

a) wealthy enough, not _needing_ to make it work to put food on the table

b) old enough to have priorities shifted

c) easier circumstances (like reputation, network of colleagues etc.)

~~~
tptacek
Depending on how you count, I'm on my 5th or 6th startup, starting from 1996.
Of the previous 4-5 (ie, not including Starfighter), all but one had good
exits; three of them grossed me a pretty substantial amount of money.

Only one of those companies demanded my evenings and weekends; it did so
because I was a cofounder and I let it do that. And it's the one that failed
catastrophically.

2 startups back for me is Arbor Networks, which I joined in 2001, and which
was acquired in 2010 for a very large amount of money (it had hundreds of
employees at the time). I was hired to take over as lead dev from Dug Song on
their flagship product, which at the time (a) had no major customers and (b)
was locked in an intense dogfight with two other well-funded competitors with
the same small set of customer prospects.

I worked one weekend. Arbor got a deal to monitor the South Korean Winter
Olympics for DDoS attacks and the engineering team took shifts managing the
deployment. A big deal was made over the fact that we were being asked to do
that.

(I later switched from dev to product management, and my schedule got
grueling; in particular, I had the worst travel burden of my career. But I
asked for that.)

No. I don't think I have normal weekends because I'm wealthy enough to thumb
my nose at the startup lifestyle. I thumb my nose at that lifestyle because it
is moronic and doesn't work.

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Tomte
Thanks! I knew you had more than Matasano under your belt, but not how many.

I'm still doubtful if startups can generally work with "sensible hours". It's
probably one of the big reasons why I never thought about joining one (besides
that it's still unusual in Germany).

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bambang150
i like to get more online learning, because these days are busy days and you
only have one time at a time. so yeah, learning while you can ! :p

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sydneyliu
we meet a lot of users during the week (and also sometimes have other
meetings) so weekends are a really great time to focus on the product and
build slightly larger changes to test during the week. fewer distractions and
emails on the weekend

