* Contrary to popular belief, you cannot indefinitely push yourself like an undergrad cramming for finals week. The analogy to sleep deprivation seems telling: everyone thinks they can run on 4 hours a night, because their brain plays tricks on them. Like, "but I love this dorm-room atmosphere, and when I get stressed out I can go play foosball in the corner".

* Your idea is probably going to fail, because statistically most ideas fail. What if what matters is how you handle things when your project blows up? If you kill yourself trying to execute, you impair your judgement, make it harder to get back on the horse; you may even wind up back at a bigco.

* It's ludicrously hard to recruit and retain talent right now. I've spent the better part of two years with that as my number one biz objective. The 10am-10pm work culture is a market inefficiency. It biases recruiting towards people in their twenties, leaving experienced and capable family people on the table.

His diet primarily consists of Ramen Noodles and whatever fruit is on sale

My first thought wasn't "Wow this guy is really committed to his idea and company." it was instead "I hope that's an embellishment and this guy is taking better care of himself than that." Failing to take care of yourself by eating poorly and getting insufficient sleep just compounds your problems.

[1] http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/04/06/love-of-the-game-be-...

I am so glad I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Can you elaborate? I'm a family people; hopefully experienced and capable, but don't feel that I'm being biased against by the 10am-10pm work culture.

If anything, I find the typical late starting hours of twentysomethings (10:30 or 11:00) to be wonderful - I usually spend all morning with my kids.

I did the crazy startup schedule when my kids were that young too. I hope you're handling things with your partner better than I did. It sure seemed like things were going OK at the time! Heh.

Children aren't morning people.

It's a filter. These companies want people who don't have the leverage or skill to push back-- eager beavers who can take on the worst work without complaint. Despite complaints about managing "Millennials", they're actually the easiest to manage because (a) they don't have any leverage, and (b) the job market for college grads was terrible from 2007 to 2010, and the graduation-date effect is formative and lasts for a long time.

Investment banking ("eye-wanking") is the worst in terms of taking advantage of "eager beaver" young people who don't know their rights. The appeal of a student to an I-bank is that a student is coming out of an environment where deadlines are well-tested and the same for everyone in the class, so missing one is a reflection on the student. It makes a "deadlines are deadlines" culture where people will work 120-hour weeks for a month to meet arbitrary milestones palatable. Someone with more work experience would look at the 120-hour schedule and say, "What idiot came up with these deadlines? Hire more people or set a realistic schedule!" That's what I-banks don't want, because one "mole" who knows his rights can "corrupt" everyone.

Here's the eager beaver/eye-wanking timeline:

22-23: work 80-100 hours per week under the assumption that the miserable grunt work being given to you is actually a valuable "learning experience" and not just shit no one else wants to do.

24: burn out. Live with parents if middle-class or higher in origin; drive a cab if working-class or lower.

25-26: re-enter the eager beaver game. Lie about your "gap year" at 24 by filling it with a nonexistent non-profit shell-company charity your parents (if wealthy) or friends (if not) created. You've down-shifted from the extreme culture of entry-level investment banking to the more "professional" environment (i.e. unlike among the IBD analysts, it's no longer acceptable to use "f----t" as an all-purpose insult; "piker" is used instead) like private equity or management consulting, but the hours are just as bad and now there's travel to uninhabitable wastelands like Dallas in August. The upshot is that you've discovered that you can spread 25 hours of work across 100 hours of in-office time and no one knows the difference. Still, you long to see the sun. Same shit, different stink.

27-28: the expensive and intellectually deadening variety of burnout known as "business school".

29-33: still working in soulless white-collar job, now for middling six-figure salary. The work is still awful, and the hours are bad, but you can leave around 8:00 if you check your Blackberry at home. Also, you can delegate the truly punishing work to junior people, and that schadenfreude becomes for you what a calm breakfast is for a lot of people-- a simple joy that keeps you going.

34: start to feel impending signs of burnout, which takes longer to set in, but is more severe if it occurs, as one ages. Assault a stripper because it's more respectable among your peers to go to jail than to down-shift one's career voluntarily.

35-36: Jail, which (thanks to your expensive lawyer and minimum security prison) is really a networking opportunity in disguise. Build the connections that will make you a "made man" when you get out.

37-42: Hired at "Managing Director" level. You've made it! Annual compensation gets into the low 7-figures, which means you can easily afford the ridiculous guilt presents on display at FAO Schwarz for what's-her-name-again that are guaranteed to be age-inappropriate in one direction or the other by at least 3 years. Realize, to your chagrin, that there are levels above MD ("Executive Director", "Principal Managing Director") and that the "up-or-out" rule still applies: if you're not ED by 40, sayonara!

43: "Retire". Massive heart attack on 16th day of retirement. Die alone. Doctors think you're almost 70 when your body comes in.

44+: Realize hell is similar to the pointless office job you had at 23. Walk around hell saying, "This is nothing; when I was at Goldman we...". Become so insufferably annoying that your behavior is judged to be unacceptable even for hell. Your red stapler is thrown into the Ninth Circle and Judas, Cassius, and Brutus use it as a prop for a mean-spirited game of "Monkey in the Middle".

But now I've found working for myself 12 hours per day 5 days per week completely sustainable, enjoyable, and productive.

I certainly never felt this way when working for other people though. I think what makes it work is:

1) No external pressure. I could work 5 hours if I wanted.

2) Comfortable as possible office. I truly can't think of anything to improve.

3) Being able to take a bike ride or walk whenever I want.

4) Probably most important: a deep drive to work on my project. I can't wait to get to work in the morning. This feeling only lasted short times when I worked for other people.

My father and his father have run their own businesses. When I graduated college, I made a strange departure from that norm to get a job. The thought wasn't particularly exciting, but we had medical bills in the family that someone had to handle. I hate it because I feel like I've let that magical time where you have no bills and can live on the cheap pass by.

So I'm playing it the only way I know how. I work at day then come home to work on side projects into the early morning. My hope is that one day these can be used to convince an investor to float my living expenses so I can take a real shot. Until that day, what options do those of us with jobs have?

You can't do that with any given business idea; you have to pick a business idea that is amenable to the approach. But that's not saying much; even with a 7 figure A round, you still have to pick a target you stand a chance against. YC isn't funding a lot of Google killers, either.

For instance:

1) If you live in a big city, live in a very small apartment. Use public transportation and sell your car if you have one. (Yeah, I know this is hard to do in many parts of US).

2) Cut unnecessary recurrent expenses like cable, netflix, gym, etc. You can still buy movies once in a while. If you wanna exercise, just run outside, play sports at public courts, etc.

3) Don't buy the latest gadgets. Unless you're making software for it, you don't need the latest iPhone/android.

And so on. This is essentially how a junior Japanese salaryman lives. They must, because they earn only around $25~30$k. So if you can earn more than that and still keep a low living cost, you could save quite a bit.

Until then, I'm focused on building the resume and resources I will need in the future. In fact, that is part of the reason I'm working on Sparkmuse. Working a day job and at night can be brutal but I have no regrets.

I touch on some of your topics in another 'work-life' thread here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412147 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412029

Having gone through EXACTLY what your trying, I can say it is very hard. How many startup attempts of mine failed because there 'wasn't' enough time in the day? I count 4. How many side projects failed because there 'wasn't' enough time in the day? 35% of them couldn't be completed. At one point I was only sleeping 2 hours a day for MONTHS. Hows that for compression, and stupidity... I learned the hard way.

You pretty much have 4 good and immediate paths: 1.) Pure luck. Need I say more.

OR

2.) Pay off your debt asap, possibly even saving some $$ up, quit and run your startup (bootstrap or incubator, whatever, you get the idea).

3.) PLAN, EXECUTE, REPEAT with a clear portion of time. I recommend 1-4 hours a day (1 and 2 are the magic hours). You plan the day before, write down questions, execute. You want to start off EACH round knowing EXACTLY what you need to do (because obviously you only have a short amount of time). This is how campfire and friends came to be.

4.) #3 + Delegation: Do #3 while sharing the wealth by building a team, and delegating your very carefully planned duties to your team. Keeping in mind that if any of your fellow team-mates are in the same situation as yourself you keep the sub tasks SHORT and _clearly_ defined.

Now I'm heavily compressing (and lossy at that) some of my hard learned experiences, and fireballs of failure.

Personally, I learned #3 and #4 by working too hard and having my health affected. I was able to obtain some cash from projects while working full-time by planning properly and using that money to bootstrap myself into path #2. I keep the same planning ethic even still, which is extremely important.

Hope this helps some poor souls out there.

Also in reference to long hours, you _may_ find yourself constantly battling to stay focused during long hours. It is very hard for any human to concentrate for long periods of time (especially alone). Which is why you should plan. So you may be working 10 hours and feel OK, but you probably aren't getting any work done for a large portion of that time. Take a walk instead of vegging on the computer, as any activity outside is almost 2N more effective than say browsing HN.

As I've said so many times, I've seen such a huge amount of talented people completely leave the industry. Ever watch "Code Rush"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u404SLJj7ig

* Your customers/clients don't care how much you work. The only thing they care about is whether you can help them solve their problems. If you do that consistently, you'll be fine.

* More work =/= more quality output; in fact I'd argue that after a certain amount of work, it is an inverse relationship.

* Find ways to solve more with less: write less code and still have features. Have fewer servers and still handle the traffic. Work less and still get things done. It's incredibly empowering.

* Knowledge, experience and honed intuition more than compensates for fewer hours of work. My suspicion is that a lot the extra work performed at startups is needed because of inexperience. I worked at a very early stage startup and it seems that a lot effort was spent on getting systems to work as they were supposed to (usually bleeding edge systems). We also spent a ton of time learning to deal with the data volumes we handled; in hindsight most solutions we arrived at were known and publicly available at the time, we just didn't know (enough) about them.

Background: I'm currently moonlighting on a startup idea while having a family and working 9-5. It can be done but you need to leverage other people's work as much as possible and need to be very disciplined. I use the best systems/libraries/services I know to basically outsource everything that's not core to my startup idea. I also consciously set aside time to be with my loved ones: dinner, bedtime stories, weekend hikes and trips etc. Being successful is only meaningful to me if my kids know me in person, not just as a distant figure.

This is one of the most important parts of this discussion, and I regret not mentioning it in the post. Your company is a black box which exposes a limited interface to the rest of the world, namely "What you make and what you say." If it doesn't impact making or saying, nothing matters.

The vast majority of efforts in most companies don't matter. It is painful to contemplate how much total waste goes on, and changing even a wee bit of it (like, say, the Lean Startup movement is doing with regards to waste building things that no one actually wants) is a mammoth undertaking.

There are very few ideas around which will be world beating if done for 15 hours a day, but failures if done for 7.5.

I don't come from any kind of start-up background, but I've found that even in regular jobs there is a noticeable productivity cycle that I experience mentally, making the argument for balancing work / life (ie rest).

What I experience is like a life cycle but for my attention span/productivity. I start off fresh, become very creative, critical and able to function at my optimum and then my interest starts to decline. Whenever I would find myself crashing I'd follow my natural instincts and take a break. I'd chat with coworkers or surf the net for something that interested me until I found my interest in these leisure activities start to decline. Then I'd come back to work, refreshed and re-interested. Needless to say that in my department I held the highest amount of workload, I was the most productive and I had by far the best attitude, which was the most important thing of all since those with a bad attitude dragged down everyone else around then, decreasing others' productivity potential, thereby creating compounded productivity problems.

I think this kind of attention-span or mental focus cycle is normal and healthy. It's like our mental microchips over-heat if we dwell on a certain thought train too long. I only wish someone with so-called credentials would "discover" this and bring it to the attention of the human resources corporate-culture gate keepers.

I understand productivity is key in capitalism, but if we're going to make productivity the most important thing, while putting our own human needs aside, then we might as well live in a communist economic system. Whether it's about the "masses" or the "economy" it still all boils down to the same thing: the entity who holds onto the net benefit winds up being the afore mentioned curtains "the masses" or "the economy", not human beings. This inability to enjoy the net benefit is supposedly the reason why we oppose communism as an economic system. And no, stuff is not a net benefit; stuff becomes burdensome due to maintenance needs, gets old and thrown out, and only provides momentary satisfaction anyway. People should ask themselves why China has proven to be the most successful economic power since the birth of capitalism (discounting euro nations & US since they grew only because they siphoned other nation's resources). It's because China fused together two effective resource-allocation systems that are mirror images, complimentary and thus an explosively productive combination: communism and capitalism.