I got a chuckle out of that too, but then I thought: Wait--why do we simply accept that starting a business should mean sacrificing one's family or freedom? I mean, if it's an actual, viable business, shouldn't one be able to just do it from 9 to 5 like it's a normal job? Why does every startup have to be this heroic herculean effort against all odds that requires 140 hour work weeks and employees with no lives? Maybe a startup that requires that much effort is really not a viable business and requires that much just to prop it up and keep it going? But, then I can't find any examples of startups that just operated as normal, chill businesses from day one. So, maybe it just does have to be that way.
I work in one of those. Straight from the beginning it’s been pretty standard 9-5 and decent salary. Slow and steady growth for half a decade and now it’s turning a profit.
But here are the things that are different:
* Nobody is earning millions here. The salary is roughly at market rate, if not slightly below.
* The funding is a parent-corporation sort of relationship that plays the long game and doesn’t expect to sell after 5 years. But it also means people are paid entirely in real money.
* We only hire as many as we need and not entire divisions to simultaneously re-invent deep learning, target the whole world, and bleed billions of investor dollars in the process.
Finally, this startup (well, scale-up I suppose) is European, and not US-based, and I think the whole unicorn-based way of running things is slightly foreign around here.
So is it a “startup” or just a business growing its customer base with a successful product?
It's easy to lash out against the VC culture, but the problem is us. We're the ones who dream of building a billion-dollar unicorn in two years - and that means entirely unsustainable efforts to build products and grow by burning heaps of VC money while constantly pitching for more.
How many founders move to the Bay Area thinking "you know, what I really want to build is a small business?" And how many HN techies would enthusiastically join a project like that?
I don't get it. My experience is that techies in the original sensor of the word have always enthusiastically joined companies where they thought the technology was profoundly cool. Business size or profits have little to do with it as it is how interesting or transformational the tech is. Most of us just want to get paid to do the thing we're passionate about, and have no particular interest in entering the world of personal yachts.
In fact the desire of people to "just work on really neat tech" and have some creative influence and work outside of a big boring company is exactly what has allowed many startups to underpay and play carrot-on-stick with stock options for years.
Almost nobody is getting rich inside these "tech" startups, the options agreements are written to prevent it. Maybe the founding engineers, but nobody after that.
I feel like what has happened is that the words "startup" and "tech" have been redefined by a small segment of the population who are interested in one particular thing being described here in this thread.
But I've been around long enough to remember when it meant "a group of people getting together to make some really neat tech."
Honestly the motivations of people who started a bunch of the foundational SV ecosystem were exactly that and not "let's be billionaires" That is very much a post-Y2k mentality.
It’s the same principle as investing in retirement. The heavier investments you make early, the greater impact they’ll have down the line. Only with a startup it often ends up being your time instead of money that is sacrificed.
Think about it: if you can gain 1 customer through every 40 hours of work, then by working 80 hours per week you can essentially double the early size of your business. Hire twice as many employees, which can introduce exponential scaling opportunities. Make double the bets on new ideas. It’s a huge boost. After 1 month you could have sold just 4 customers working 40 per week, or closer to 10 and be writing job ads already by working extra.
It is a trap, though. Your health will suffer, your relationships will suffer, you’ll become completely self-absorbed. Some things just aren’t worth it in my opinion.
Startups work this way because they are operating in an economy dominated by financial fraud and enormous monopolistic incumbents. Without the need to impress investors who expect endless unrealistic projections of growth supported by unsustainable amounts of labor, or worse, to compete in a landscape where giant firms might just decide to compete with you or destroy you because you proved there was a market for something, a small business is hard work
This- the barriers to solo founding and funding a brand new business working with physical assets are insane in much of the US.
For the most part you’re required to deal with all the same laws that a multi billion dollar incumbent is, and often times even more (zoning, permitting that are hard law for small players and easily flexed by local government for dubious jobs claims by large players). Many areas charge fixed annual fees for incorporation that are notable for an individual but irrelevant at scale. Rigorous accounting and record keeping standards. High salaries even for uneducated manual labor work. Building any modest physical structure requires what amounts to most middle class individuals entire expected lifetime earnings and you largely aren’t able to legally do any of that work yourself.
There’s a good reason California startups exist in the way they do, and if you aren’t doing software or running an unlicensed pop up fruit stand or flower shop you often look elsewhere.
> I mean, if it's an actual, viable business, shouldn't one be able to just do it from 9 to 5 like it's a normal job?
Do you have an example of a reasonably successful business that's a 9-5 job when getting started? Forget startups... let's say you want to open a dry cleaners, bakery or hardware store... none of those seem like they'd be 9-5 jobs. The one exception might be a consulting business if you already have lots of relationships in a space, although most independent consultants who I know tend to have periods of feast and famine.
The issue is that getting your first customers is hard. And then once you have traction, but don't have enough money to hire people, that's hard again. And then once you grow larger, you have more responsibility yet again. At some point, the gears start turning themselves and I've seen many owners who can take a step back, but at that point it's no longer a "startup" but a "business".
Feats and famine is actually not that bad. When I did freelance I had high intensity periods and then low intensity periods. I found that much healthier than the constant never ending medium effort often meaningless grind in the corporate world.
This to me feels like the natural rhythm of productive work, meaning: if money is no object and you’re working on something that you are intrinsically interested in, you will naturally work in a feats-and-famine pattern. There will be weeks where you don’t take a day off because you are working at peak capacity. Then you reach a logical break in the work and decompress for a little while, doing barely anything.
I think the highly-regularized pattern of the 40-hour work week, 9-5, is not a natural rhythm. I think it kills the human spirit with its unnatural regularity and monotony.
Depending on who you ask, a "9 to 5 normal job" is sacrificing family and freedom. Women in particular hate this diverging life path because they can't have both career and marriage/kids, but everyone both men and women ultimately have to find a compromise that works for them.
Well, between a 9 to 5 and a 9 to 9 (including the weekend) many would prefer the former. The latter is risky and may not pay in the end or it could pay a lot. Many people who have families can’t afford that risk.
There is a huge range of profitability that would be incredible for a founder who owns all our the best majority of the company, but a failure for most VCs. I don't know VC finance enough to say where the upper limit is, but I'm pretty sure several million $ profit per year still is in that range.
You can start pretty much any business and be successful with a small group of founders and no VC money (from experience, this can be anything from a wholesale flower business to a WordPress plugin to a hosting provider). The problem is that VCs push you to grow too fast and too hard, then pull funding when it "fails" and you've got an entire staff to feed, pay, and manage. Thus, you go bankrupt.
If you choose to play a long game, you can have a nice stable-ish income for 2-3 people after 5-ish years.
As a solo-entrepreneur with no VC money, I work 12 hour days way more often than I should. I work weekends. I even made a bunch of commits on Christmas eve. Big reason is honestly that it's just that much fun. It's hard to put down the work and take time off because I want to do more. It's the same stupid reason I've poured 1200 hours into Factorio. Building stuff is fun.
Took last week off from work. Just did nothing. Slacked off. This is the first vacation I've had for over a year. According to my fibit, my resting heart rate went down 12 points. I have so many new ideas and plans for what to do next. I feel more inspired and honestly like a new person.
I think a lot of small startups and entrepreneurs work too much. Working 12 hour days is strictly worse than 8 hour days over time. If you skimp on rest and recovery, you gradually transform into an idiot. Do you want an uninsipired idiot for a CEO for your tenuous new business? Because that's what you're turning yourself into.
That's the thing that needs to be taken into account during these discussions. 12 hours grinding away at a steel mill? Hard. 12 hours at my computer having fun writing code, cracking bugs, listening to good music, and eating tasty food throughout the day? Pretty neat.
> This is the first vacation I've had for over a year.
This is the tough part, though, and I admire you for that. I've always been perfectly happy to work 12+ hour days without days off, but only as long as I know that if I need a break, I -can- take a break, go off for a week or whatever. Knowing that I -can- tap out whenever I want is the key to stopping burnout, for me. If I couldn't, I'd have to be much more restrained.
> But, then I can't find any examples of startups that just operated as normal, chill businesses from day one.
They wouldn’t grow big. But there are plenty, from the neighbourhood plumber to the daycare to the modest insurance outfit that keeps being sold from person to person as they retire.
High demand, so little initial grinding for clients. High demand also means standards aren’t high. People can’t be that picky about daycare or plumbers these days.
What if I told you that 10 other people had the same idea as you and are willing to work 9 to 6? Or 9 to 9 even?
The reason most successful startups take tons of work is that they are competing against peers willing to put in tons of work. If the whole ecosystem decided 9 to 5, 5 days a week was the effort cap, then sure, but game theory tells us that won't happen.
Seems like a psyop to me. The work is important, but not the most important part. Execution is vital, but if you're executing on a shit idea and are not able to reorient plans quickly and deftly, you'll likely end up wasting an enormous amount of time going down the wrong alleys.
A real example is a friend of mine that only sleeps an hour or so every few days. Yes, his work output is fantastic, but his planning, decision-making, and "big picture" foresight are nil.
He is grinding out tried-and-true business models, but is unable to take it to the next level because he simply does not have the creativity, free time, or the wandering mind to make those leaps.
Sure, he makes a very good amount of money, but he's been hit in the past with having to shutter businesses due to completely foreseeable potholes.
When you focus completely on getting to your destination, you never stop and ask yourself if that's really where you need to go.
I will also note that the people that "work" 9 to 9 and so on are very rarely doing non-delegateable work or working on high-intensity "important" problems for the entire duration. That sort of thing is simply impossible, because you lose your consciousness after a short bit, and end up running on intuition and learned movements, i.e. a robot.
There is something to be said about working hard, but there is a lot of nuance lost in most discussions (dare I say, because most people that survived this game did so with a huge dash of luck, and are not cognizant of what really moved the needle).
I've been working on startups for over 20 years. Some have sold, some haven't. None have become household names.
In order to support this life, I had to provide consulting services for other companies. Many of them are startups themselves. In any case, this meant I worked at least three full-time jobs. I would work to find clients, work to provide services to those clients, and work to build my startup.
In one case, the startup would take off and pay all of my bills so I could focus on it. In another case, we raised money from investors to focus on it.
In any case, if you want a 9-5 gig contract and don't want to find the work, you can try and use recruiters if you are a knowledge worker. If you aren't a knowledge worker, then you probably will be relying on gig work like Uber/DoorDash. In the case of the latter, you better have a lot of roommates since those pay so poorly.
“Startups” doesn’t mean “starting up a new business”, it means a company that is capable of hyperscaling. It’s shorthand for growth, per one of pg’s essays.
Lots of people start “normal, chill” lifestyle businesses. But nothing about a successful startup is “normal” in the traditional sense of the term.
BTW, I think all but one of my startups would fit the pg essay, but when you read articles like this one, the evidence is not that pg style startups are going crazy, but rather self-employment and small business is growing... mostly self-employment.
If it's an startup, AKA a business built to grow at a huge rate and become a giant from nothing, then it's necessarily risky and anything you do in it has a larger than linear impact. So the one startup where the owners put an extra hour/day will probably win the market and the others will fail.
If it's a business built to be sustainable, sure, you should be able to run it 9 to 5.
I can't actually see what the article is claiming, due to the paywall.
Does it need to become a giant though? If I don't sell large portions to investors, I'd be thrilled with something that makes in profit roughly what a good tech salary pays.
