Steve Jobs didn’t work constantly, Bill Gates had lots of hobbies, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t tethered to his laptop, and Tim Ferris really did become a best-seller by writing and then promoting his book only 4 hours a week.
Yeah, but Steve Jobs was kind of a legendary asshole who broke his relationships with his friends and loved ones into tiny little pieces, and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are both talked about by their contemporaries as if they were aliens who'd been deposited on Earth by a wayward space Greyhound.
Is there no way to lead people to success without asking them to check their humanity at the door?
Startups don’t require obsession — that’s an unhealthy rumor perpetrated by all 300 startup founders ever interviewed on Mixergy. They’re all lying — they actually lead healthy, balanced lives. They don’t want you to know their secret, because this keeps potential competition at bay.
Or the startup founders interviewed on Mixergy know that startup culture is macho and youth-oriented, so they tell tales of epic all-night code sprees and laser focus on the business in order to burnish their image as True Startup Heroes among their peers.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't work hard at your business. It just annoys me to see examples like these held up as the One True Way To Success. Some startup founders who cut everything out of their lives but The Work will succeed, but most will fail, because most startup founders of all types fail. Even the Jack Dorsey-style "of course I can work three shifts a day without any negative consequences" übermenschen. And the ones that fail will not only not have a business, they also won't have a life as well, because they threw it away in pursuit of the dream.
Understanding it was sarcasm requires taking the time to do more than just skim the article. Or knowing Jason in particular. I made the same mistake of taking it seriously. The assumption that the overwhelming majority of people seeing this post would assume and know it is sarcasm really detracts from using HN as a useful part of one's day.
People expect a video link to be labeled as such, why not "sarcasm" as part of the subject? (Answer, might not get as many points or people who know it's sarcasm won't be able to laugh at the "fools" who were taken by it?
What if the article had been about best practices in security programming and the person reading it was new to the game? What if it dealt with hashing of passwords and gave the wrong info? How would you expect a beginner to necessarily know that? Where do you draw the line.
A few things:
"Stay in stealth mode until the last minute."
That's his opinion. Nothing screams out if this is his first statement that this is obviously bogus as a strategy.
"You need your sleep!"
That's actually true.
"Steve Jobs didn’t work constantly, Bill Gates had lots of hobbies, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t tethered to his laptop"
From popular culture the above is contradicted.
But how do you expect someone who hasn't been following all of this for many years to know that and how do you know if Jason read something that just recently came out (that you didn't) that claims that Bill Gates had lots of hobbies?
I think YOU missed something. smacktoward understood the sarcasm, translated it, and commented on the message itself. You're the one who did not read or undertand the comment carefully.
Cut some slack - sarcasm leads to some convoluted negation chains based on implicit and idiomatic translations of the sarcasm. It can be difficult for native speakers who are well acclimated culturally to follow, let alone anyone who isn't a native speaker. Doubly so in text without tonal and non-verbal cues of how statements are meant.
I know several people who make a comfortable living working under 10 hours a week. They've done two things: created a self-sustaining business with regularly paying customers, and adjusted their living situation to minimize expenses, by moving to low-cost-of-living areas, eating at home, and making use of the extra time so that it feels worth it.
Sorry if my terse reply wasn't clear. My point wasn't that it could not be done, but rather that if I did it I probably wouldn't share it with a highly motivated, exceptionally creative, and motivated community. Competition isn't a bad thing, but advertising "hey I've got a good market come take my business" isn't a great idea.
If you can figure out how to make a comfortable living working sixty hours a week, I can tell you how to make one working thirty hours a week: take the sixty hour job and work thirty hours on it. Thirty hours of actual productive work instead of staring blearily at your screen, compulsively refreshing e-mail because you're too tired to do anything more useful, and botching work that will have to be redone next week, in between redoing work you botched last week.
Seriously, this should not be a matter for debate anymore. We know humans evolved for something like a twenty hour working week, and cannot productively do more than thirty, maybe forty at most, on any job more demanding than repetitively putting component A into widget B - and those jobs are mostly done by robots nowadays. Useless sacrifice is not cool or heroic. It's just useless.
Your mentioning of epic all-night code sprees, and talk of other 'fun' and weird things startups do reminds me of the old tales of game development, before it became such a huge business. Young males found it cool to hack around on something until odd hours of the night (I know I did), it's just that now it is startups rather than game development that is taking the focus.
Maybe it's not necessarily the startup culture per se, nor even the game development culture, but just some sort of young male energy culture that wants to make all work places fun but also involve some all-night programming/business/development hazing ritual. Others see this enthusiasm and youthful energy and exploit it for their own ends (Publishers in game development, Venture Capitalists in startups), and we see this perpetualisation of exploitation.
I think the essay really lost its place when it brought up working hours and would have been better off without it. Is working "hard" really a "strategy"? There are plenty of people in the non-startup world that blow off vacation and work lots of hours.
I thought it was hilarious. Especially the bit about not talking to anybody about your product, they will know soon enough how great it is :-)
Of course the interesting question is whether or not the sarcasm comes through. Sadly I suspect there are people out there reading the blog and saying "Yeah, this guy really gets it!" In a way this totally screws that up because it might actually reinforce the wrong beliefs.
A startup will for the most part only be successful if...
1) You work 20 hours a day 7 days a week (give or take - the less sleep the better)
2) Release a product immediately (who cares if you end up pissing off early adopters - they'll see it through and be your biggest champions)
3) Ask people if they will pay for your imaginary product (if they tell you it looks great - its a guarantee they'll go right home and sign up for the monthly plan)
Can anyone think of an exception to the stealth mode rule? A company that was actually a big success, but spent the first few months intentionally under wraps? I think in general stealth mode isn't a good strategy, but there must be exceptions to the rule -- I just can't think of any right now.
Not sure if this is true (and not sure if this counts as a big success), but from I've read [1], it appears that Android Inc was in stealth mode when it was acquired by Google in 2005. Would be great to hear more about the early history of Android Inc., if someone here has more insights.
I'm sure there are successes, but it's hard to know whether a given company started out in stealth mode since the whole point is that you wouldn't have heard of them until they were no longer in stealth mode.
I think you could easily tack on "Read more advice rather than execute and try to apply advice." Anecdotally, just about every combination of characteristics has survived / succeeded at least once. This leads to a wide range of maxims being spouted about startups. But, none of it is "worth much" until applied and put into action.
Please don't make comments like this. You haven't made any points about the post itself; you're just trying for a laugh. HN is not meant for that sort of thing; it's a slippery slope that leads to less intellectual discussion on the site.
What kind of sold off the sarcasm for me was this sentence: " Once you launch, then millions of people will know about you, including competitors,"
yea, right, they all wait in line, just one techcrunch article / hacker news front page and the millions will flow.
So being that obviously sarcastic, if someone reads it and doesn't get the sarcasm and follows the "suggestions", then, well, I guess, no harm done and they just deserve it.
Yeah, but Steve Jobs was kind of a legendary asshole who broke his relationships with his friends and loved ones into tiny little pieces, and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are both talked about by their contemporaries as if they were aliens who'd been deposited on Earth by a wayward space Greyhound.
Is there no way to lead people to success without asking them to check their humanity at the door?
Startups don’t require obsession — that’s an unhealthy rumor perpetrated by all 300 startup founders ever interviewed on Mixergy. They’re all lying — they actually lead healthy, balanced lives. They don’t want you to know their secret, because this keeps potential competition at bay.
Or the startup founders interviewed on Mixergy know that startup culture is macho and youth-oriented, so they tell tales of epic all-night code sprees and laser focus on the business in order to burnish their image as True Startup Heroes among their peers.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't work hard at your business. It just annoys me to see examples like these held up as the One True Way To Success. Some startup founders who cut everything out of their lives but The Work will succeed, but most will fail, because most startup founders of all types fail. Even the Jack Dorsey-style "of course I can work three shifts a day without any negative consequences" übermenschen. And the ones that fail will not only not have a business, they also won't have a life as well, because they threw it away in pursuit of the dream.