

Why 37signals style of work might not apply to early startups? - rvivek
http://rvivek.com/2011/06/why-the-37signals-style-of-work-dont-apply-to-startups/

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SeoxyS
You are wrong. Work-life balance is extremely important, and suggesting
otherwise is dangerous. First of all, health and well-being should always be
your primary concern, and forcing your employees to throw that off balance is
close to criminal.

Anecdote from past experience: Last year I worked at a successful startup,
seeing it through an acquisition by a Fortune 50 company. At first, the
startup was great… it pushed its employees to their very limits and shipped
some pretty cool software. But one-by-one, the employees could not take it any
longer, and pretty much the entire original team is gone. In its now almost 5
years of existence, very few people stayed for more than a year.

Personally, I'm a pretty good developer. I've done some very cool shit, and I
love what I do. But if you expect me to be all work and no play, the quality
of my work is going to start to decline very quickly, and I'm going to stop
having fun and quit very soon. I live by the motto "work hard, play harder." I
have no problem fixing the servers on a weekend, or staying at work late. But
if you expect me to consistently work more than is fair, or are gonna give me
shit for arrive late or leaving early, then it's not gonna work out.

~~~
axiom
The reality is that the vast majority of successful startups do work very long
hours and push themselves to the limit.

Only once a company is established and has a successful product can you begin
to see huge leverage off of every hour of work, so that working crazy hours
becomes optional (e.g. you have 10,000 customers and a proven sales model, so
a 0.1% improvement is worth a lot.) The fact is that it's really really hard
to build something from the ground up.

If you want nice confortable work/life balance and 40 hour work weeks, you
need to go work at Google or IBM etc. The startup world is not for you.

~~~
enjo
I'm not sure that's true. It certainly isn't in my case. Most of the
successful startups I've been around actually have done quite the opposite
(including my own.. I'm comfortable calling us "successful" now).

While there are _periods_ of insanity, the overall cadence of a successful
startup (again in my experience) trends towards sanity. Very people in the
world have the mental endurance to keep a super intense level up for a long
period of time. The founders who recognize that (again, in my experience) tend
to have better outcomes.

One thing to note: there is a curious thing about startup founders. I've
always found it interesting that when they draw up the narrative of their
startups path they tend to emphasize those long periods of work while
minimizing the (more common) periods of relative calm. As an outsider you
think everyone is working 80-100 hour weeks. From their stories, you'd believe
it too. The reality doesn't always match the narrative tho. Just ask the
social network.

~~~
jswinghammer
Well it makes success seem more like the result of hard work and not dumb
luck-which seems to very often factor into things.

~~~
saool
hard work can be achieved in a reasonable amount of hours, not only by
"keeping your chair warm" for 100 not-so-productive hours a week.

you wouldn't say a smart student aces tests out of dumb luck since he doesn't
do much work.

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jonkelly
Regarding both work/life balance and remote teams, I would say that it
depends. We all see fairly small sample sizes in our working lives, but I've
had much more success with a team that worked 8hrs/5days than the crazy 90/100
hour weeks. I think there is huge value in downtime, both to keep at-work
productivity high and sustainable, but also to provide time to reflect on what
we are doing.

~~~
keiferski
From Will Durant's _The Heroes of History_ , on da Vinci's work style:

"Leonardo had no trouble explaining...that an artist's most important work
lies in conception rather than in execution, and (as Vasari put it) 'men of
genius do most when they work least.'"

