
Don't Fall Asleep at the Wheel: Successful Entrepreneurs Have Lives - mijustin
http://www.good.is/posts/don-t-fall-asleep-at-the-wheel-successful-entrepreneurs-have-lives/
======
pg
I almost wish now that I hadn't cut this footnote from Startup = Growth:

    
    
       Failure to distinguish between startups and ordinary
       companies is the source of the news stories we see 
       every six months or so announcing the discovery that, 
       contrary to popular belief, most entrepreneurs are in 
       their forties.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
While I can appreciate the difference in definition between a made-to-scale
startup and a more traditional business, I disagree that the former is "an
entrepreneur" and the latter isn't. In fact, I'd argue that, if anything, it's
the opposite. An entrepreneur builds a sustainable business. A "startup
founder" is trying to strike oil.

These are very different things with different skills required, but, as the
startup founder is the new thing here, it should get a new word instead of
trying to force an existing, understood term to have a new meaning and just
causing a lot of confusion as a result.

~~~
mgummelt
He never said the latter isn't an entrepreneur.

~~~
tedunangst
If ordinary company founders are not excluded, then distinguishing between
startups and ordinary companies would not change the fact that most
entrepreneurs are in their forties. If it's a distinction without a
difference, why distinguish?

~~~
mgummelt
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but he's saying that startup founders
tend to be young, probably due to the risk profile of startups vs small
businesses. Entrepreneurs as a whole (a much larger group) may well be in
their forties on average, though.

Edit: Does anyone happen to know the success rate (for some definition of
success) for restaurants?

~~~
reissbaker
According to this[1] Bloomberg article, failure rate is roughly 60%. Failure
rate is defined as changing ownership within three years of founding.

Pretty low failure rate, compared to a startup.

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-
restauran...](http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-04-16/the-restaurant-
failure-mythbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice)

~~~
mgummelt
Funny that ownership change is usually considered a startup success.

------
jwwest
Long hours != Productivity

There's a huge myth about Japan in that many people believe that salary men
work insane hours out of dedication to their jobs. In reality, there is very
little productivity in Japanese corporate offices. While the salaryman might
stay for 12 to 13 hours a day, only 4 or 5 is spent actually working -- the
other half is spent dicking around. They stay out of a social contract, a
culture of not being the first to leave.

I think the kind of startups that we talk about here have a lot in common with
the traditional Japanese corporate office culture.

~~~
wilfra
"I think the kind of startups that we talk about here have a lot in common
with the traditional Japanese corporate office culture."

You think the startup founders working 18 hour days are dicking around for
most of that time? I'd say you're almost certainly wrong.

I'm not saying the post is wrong either, a good work/life balance might be the
path to success. But the people who don't have that are not playing WoW all
day at work.

~~~
nostrademons
The data doesn't support this. RescueTime did a study on the time that their
YCombinator class spent "actually working" (their software tracks which window
on your computer screen has focus, and how much time you spend interacting
with it):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195>

Barely anybody hit 10 hour days of solid productivity; typically, people can
manage about 7ish hours of actual work, only 3-4 of which is coding or other
heavily intellectually demanding tasks. This squares with several worker-
productivity studies done around WW2 (when major corporations were deciding
whether to move to the 8-hour workday; the standard at the turn of the century
was 14 hours), which found that productivity _decreases_ after 8 hours, and
the time spent dealing with mistakes eats up any marginal increase in output.
Having worked in one startup where much of the eng team seemed to work 12-14
hour days, I can anecdotally confirm that.

It's not that they're dicking around, it's more that they are probably staring
at their computer screen cursing or berating themselves. Or feeling despondent
and miserable about their chance of ever shipping product. Or writing code,
but writing _the wrong_ code which will just have to be ripped out once they
think about the product again.

~~~
bokonist
I have wondered if the 5 hours of heavy coding maximum is psychological or
physiological. Does productivity drop because your mind rebels against itself?
Prolonged mental focus is an unnatural thing to do in the scheme of evolution.
There might be some mental mechanism that automatically triggers feelings of
despondency in order to make you do something else. Alternatively, hitting the
wall might be an actual physical problem - the brain might be overheating, or
have some build of chemicals, or something, that requires a recovery time.

~~~
nostrademons
I suspect that when you're dealing with the brain there's little difference
between physical and psychological: if the brain's hitting a wall physically
it will unconsciously invent some explanation. I suspect that's what's
happening with these startup founders who think they are working 18 hour days;
anecdotally, when I've pushed myself to work 12-14 hour days, I haven't felt
unproductive, I suspect my brain just shut down so that it couldn't register
all the time I was wasting. If I look at my actual changelist history, I'd
find that the first 3 changes of the day would take a total of about 3-4 hours
and then the last one would take 7+.

There's been a lot of research done into "ego depletion" - basically, 100+
studies have found evidence that the ability to focus and make yourself get
things done is an exhaustible resource, and then recent studies by Carol Dweck
have indicated that your abilities to do so, in some sense, depend upon your
mindset going in and whether you embrace the task to begin with. The logical
place to answer this would be with an fMRI study, and the first such study was
just published a week and a half ago. The abstract indicates they found
something, but the article itself is paywalled:

[http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/20/scan...](http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/20/scan.nss111.abstract)

~~~
bokonist
If the phenomena was purely psychological, then it might be possible to
overcome it. Possibly, rotating the specific task you are working on, or
changing locations, or taking shorter but very intensive breaks (like playing
street hocky for 30 minutes), might be enough to prevent the brain from
switching into despondency mode and allow a few more hours of high
productivity. But if the limit is physical, then switching locations or
activities won't help much, the brain simply needs to rest (although perhaps a
cooling helmet would work - [http://www.news-gazette.com/news/health/health-
care/2011-03-...](http://www.news-gazette.com/news/health/health-
care/2011-03-27/doctors-move-forward-research-brain-cooling.html) \- I can't
wait for magazine articles with trendy startup engineers at their standing
desks all wearing brain cooling headgear).

~~~
nostrademons
I think recent science is discovering that even physical problems with the
brain can be overcome. Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, but
talk therapy has been shown to be effective for it. The act of thinking
certain thoughts changes the brain's chemistry in ways that can be either
positive or negative.

Say that we find that ego depletion comes from a shortage of blood glucose in
the brain. If that's the case, the cure could be as simple as stocking the
microkitchens with M&Ms (man, maybe Craig Silverstein had the right idea 14
years ago). It's also known that certain stimulants like caffeine and
amphetamines help you overcome your normal mental fatigue limits - the problem
is that they often tend to create dependency and lose their effect if you
chronically overuse them. The reason for looking into the physical mechanism
is that we might then be able to find simple solutions that work and don't
have long-term side-effects.

------
moocow01
"venture capitalists and the tech media began to debate whether there is an
optimal age for an entrepreneur to start a company .... The pundits proposed
the mid-20s as the optimal age to start a company"

May I point out that this is the best age -FOR- venture capitalists to fund
and -FOR- the tech media to write about but not for entrepreneurship in
general. VC and the tech media focus on the same thing... businesses that are
in essence experimental rocketships. Most will implode fantastically but there
will always be a few that go to the moon. Thats only one form of venture -
even in tech.

------
columbo
It is really difficult to look into the tea leaves and find an answer to why
things happen.

After spending the entirety of my twenties working on failed startup after
failed startup I finally reached something that actually is turning a profit.

Now that I'm well past my twenties I no longer have interest in working those
extreme hours but I'm not sure if I would have had enough experience to make
some of the decisions I do today had I not invested all that time in failed
businesses. It's a catch-22. I feel that my time spent against the grindstone
was beneficial in my experience but I'm loathe to suggest anyone else go
through the same process.

I think the only advice that is worthwhile is "you need a rock outside your
company" you need something that isn't subject to the whims of the market that
you can rely on. If the company is your rock then failure is going to hit you
very hard; you'll be cleaning up your office with nothing - no life, no
family, no friends.

Everything else is subject to how you operate.

------
karamazov
If you weight companies by their market value, rather than a binary successful
vs. unsuccessful[1] outcome, you'll come to a different conclusion. This is
just a rationalization to avoid working hard.

[1] What's a "successful" company, by the standards of this and similar
article? I don't want to inform my decisions with a study that considers
Dropbox, on the one hand, and any sustainable small business, on the other, to
be equally successful. There'll always be more of the latter.

~~~
chill1
Seems to me that you don't fully understand the point of this article. The
author is suggesting that taking some time for yourself personally will make
you more productive, not less. Pushing yourself to the breaking point just so
you can say that you worked as hard as you could is a losing strategy. Let's
not look to give ourselves a convenient excuse for when things don't work out.
Instead, let's try to make it work out :)

------
jusben1369
One other way to look at this. When you think you'll do a 12-14 hour day you
often waste a lot of time during the that day. Why? Because you don't treat
time like a valued resource. Tell yourself you're leaving at 4pm no matter
what and you'll find you get almost as much done.

------
gaborcselle
"The Kauffman Foundation surveyed 550 successful entrepreneurs across multiple
sectors, determined by profitability and being named a “high-valued” business
by their peers. Their data suggests that most successful founders are in their
mid-30s and married with children."

Why are these entrepreneurs named "high-valued" by their peers? Because they
worked their butts off in their 20s and early 30s. Being named "high-valued"
is a reverse-looking statement based on the entrepreneur's past achievements.

------
orangethirty
I spent my teens and 20s building business after business (and failed for the
most part). I had _no_ life. Now that I am older and do have a life (family),
I succesfully run one business, and am working on building another. Less time
to work on things means I have to produce higher quality. So the waste in
process factor is reduced significantly. Before I would just amass a bunch of
stuff to test. Now, I do quick/short tests and move on. No sense to waste
anytime. After all, I only have so many heart beats left.

------
jakobe
I assume articles covered by a popover are not worth my time and just click
back.

~~~
wilfra
Fortune does this too and their articles are typically quite good, as was this
one. People gotta monetize somehow.

------
sagan
This may be an entrepreneurial Freudian slip, but the sentence "It is okay to
spend people you love." should probably be revised.

~~~
joshliptzin
If I could monetize them I would!!

------
elliott99
Good article, thanks. I just want to make a caveat.

In my job, if I worked as efficiently and quickly as possible, I would not be
able to go out to lunch with coworkers, chat with people around the office
about if we're getting iphone 5, etc,, or take time to go to the tap room on
Thursday afternoons for a quick beer break and chat with coworkers. So I would
essentially be more boring than the computer I sit at. When I first started
working, I would eat at my desk, bringing all my food from home, not go out
for coffee breaks, so that I could have time to go the gym after work, talk to
my family, etc. When my friend called me a monk I started to reconsider the
value of being social and "wasting time."

I guess all I'm saying is that if working insanely long hours is partly due to
comraderie-building or "messing around," boosting morale for all, laughing,
than I think that sort of activity is worth it.

~~~
lubujackson
I would consider that effective downtime. It doesn't HAVE to be going home to
kids or whatever, but I think the point is that there is no value sitting at
your monitor for 12 hours half-zoning out staring at code when your tank is
empty.

------
mijustin
Most significant quote for me:

“Founders tended to be middle-aged—40 years old on average—when they started
their first companies. Nearly 70 percent were married when they became
entrepreneurs, and nearly 60 percent had at least one child, challenging the
stereotype of the entrepreneurial workaholic with no time for a family.”

------
reso
>On average, these [violin] masters practiced in 90-minute spurts, three times
a week

There must be a lot of context missing from this statistic, or it is simply
untrue. The suggestion that one can master a classical instrument with only
4.5 hours of focused practice a week is absurd.

I've spent most of my life playing the Violin, alongside many different levels
of professional musicians. Low- Mid-level professionals _start_ at 3 hours a
day of solo practice, not including group rehearsals. Most prodigies, those
that go on to be soloists, are practicing 6-10 hours a day by their teen
years. Without fail, the people that put in more effort, both in focus and in
hours, are better players.

Maybe Pinkus Zuckerman or Itzahk Perlman only practice 4.5 hours a week these
days, but they certainly didn't in their prime.

~~~
nostrademons
He misquoted. The linked article says:

"The best typically worked in stretches of no longer than 90 minutes, three
times daily."

So 4.5 hours a _day_ , not 4.5 hours a _week_. That makes a lot more sense.

(Interestingly, this is about the same as the amount of focused coding time I
can get in a day, and I structure it similarly: 3 intense periods of about 90
minutes.)

------
OldSchool
By all means do your heavy startup/entrepreneur stuff when you're as young as
possible. In your 20's you can work hard and play hard. Most people have
little or nothing to lose at that age. It's easy to end up in an ordinary job
with a boss that's just as demanding anyway. In a startup, with hard work and
a healthy dose of luck, later (which will arrive sooner than you think) by the
time you have children you'll be set up well enough financially to do less
intensive work and be able to be present and be a successful spouse/parent.
You really can't ace both a career and family at the same time. Starting in
your 40's sounds like the worst possible time to me.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Most people have little or nothing to lose at that age.

This is no longer true. A couple of years ago, college seniors graduated with
an average of $25,000 in debt. And that number is growing. What this means is
that the percentage of people who have "nothing to lose" in their 20s is
shrinking rapidly. Instead people are seeking "safe" corporate jobs in order
to be able to pay off their debts. Working in a risky startup is not a
realistic option for them.

~~~
nostrademons
A safe corporate job in a high-wage field can easily pay off $25K in debt in a
couple years.

~~~
OldSchool
I tend to agree - $25K is only about the cost of a very average new vehicle.
Don't ruin your 20's obsessing on that amount of money. (I'm aware that "new"
cars provide less utility for your money than 3-5 y/o cars.) Bottom line is
that keeping your overhead low gives you more freedom. Generally speaking your
overhead will probably never again be as low as it is in your 20's and you may
have a lot more people who need your time later too.

