
Ask HN: Is sadism / masochism required for successful startup CEOs? - startupsbecrazy
I&#x27;m reading &quot;The Hard Thing About Hard Things&quot; by Ben Horowitz and he just described the period of Opsware where they had a 60-day period of all-hands-on-deck, working 90 hours a week to try and save the company. And apparently all the employees were all for it, no one left, etc!<p>I can&#x27;t see myself doing that. Yeah, maybe it works out and your 0.5% equity turns into millions, but that&#x27;s a slim chance, and you can do consulting, or work at a BigCo, or start your own company and probably have a statistically better chance of getting rich.<p>I&#x27;m left feeling that startup CEOs are just taking advantage of their employees and sacrificing health and sanity for little reward. Which I guess I knew (HN talks about it all the time), but I think I was hoping that it&#x27;s not required.<p>But maybe it is?<p>Or maybe those situations just reflect really poor management. But these stories are so widespread in startup-land that I&#x27;d want to see some examples of successful startups that have good work &#x2F; life balance to think that that&#x27;s the case.<p>In my 20s I dabbled in startups a bit, and I spent a lot of late nights and weekends working. But now I&#x27;m in my 30s with a kid and I&#x27;m much less interested in working 90 hours a week.<p>I&#x27;ve been consulting for years, and the money is great, but there&#x27;s a ceiling there in terms of income. More than that, I really am missing some sense of significance in my work. I&#x27;ve always kind of assumed I&#x27;d start a company at some point, but now I&#x27;m wondering if I&#x27;m not cut out for it. Partly because I don&#x27;t want to work 90 hours a week, and partly because I don&#x27;t want to take advantage of naive employees and ask them to do the same.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear people&#x27;s thoughts on whether you can be a sane, reasonable startup CEO that works 40-50 hours a week and asks your employees to do the same, and still succeed. Maybe that kind of sanity is only for linear growth companies? Or maybe I&#x27;m really just better-suited for another line of work :(
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smt88
You can succeed with fewer hours, but you may need more cash to burn. It's a
tradeoff.

