Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I am not surprised or in awe that he is putting in 16 hours a day. Every passionate founder would likely be doing it. I am sure most of us have heard Steve Job's on how building a company is usually a 18x7 work-week.

What I am in awe and admiration is that he is managing two companies and in this case two completely different ones by nature! A rule generally accepted in the startup land is that you don't work on multiple ideas, in order to stay focussed on building one thing well. While twitter is not a startup (any longer) and Square is probably a very big/late-phase startup (if we can qualify it as that), they both definitely need the caring and nurturing of a founder (IMO). Given that, it is remarkable he is able to do the context switch needed to run both the companies. I would love to know how effective his leadership is, in both these companies, given that he isn't there longer than a typical day in either of them.

I am so tempted to try doing more than one thing, but then since I am a coder, I guess its not easy to digress daily as he can.




A rule generally accepted in the startup land is that you don't work on multiple ideas

Interesting. I have not heard this before. As it stands, I have always worked on multiple projects for as long as I can remember. My current main company started out as a side project, for example.

Is there a canonical reference or blog post that the startup community refers to, to elucidate the reasons for one-project focus?


The reference I can quote here is from a recent essay PG wrote: http://paulgraham.com/stypi.html. Watch the definition of startup #10 (Avoid Distractions) - http://www.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences

The other source again from PG, that I can infer as not doing too many things/working on too many ideas is: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html Read the #18 (A Half-hearted attempt)

I am sure there are folks who have juggled more than one Idea and succeeded in all of them. Also, I think the relevance of these posts also probably make sense to someone starting out early (like say during building the product/company) and probably not for someone who already is working on established companies (like in Jack's case). IF you see Jack in fact moved out of twitter to completely focus on Square and only when it had hit the road running, did he embark back on twitter.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: