Can a business take over your life? Absolutely not! Can you allow a business to take over your like? Absolutely!

I have been involved in and started a number of successful businesses. I am also actively involved in my marriage (I have had exactly 1 wife, we've been together for just a bit). I have 6 kids. I go to birthday parties, soccer games, teachers meetings, and camp outs. I even volunteer at the schools.

What happens when someone wants to schedule a meeting when my wife has dinner ready? I tell them to move it.

What happens when an investor flies in and wants me to take them out for a night on the town when it's the choir performance night at the elementary school? I tell them I can't.

Have I had investors leave me because I would not play their social games? Absolutely! And I was glad that I didn't have to deal with them again.

Now, have I missed things? Yes. But I have gotten pretty good at looking at a schedule and planning around things. I want a close personal relationship with my wife and kids, so I have made that my priority.

When people ask me how I do it, I tell them honestly. I am the CEO/CTO/CIO, I make the rules for me. I am not a slave to my company nor its success.

My version of that is that there's a difference between living to work and working to live. It's really up to you, how far you allow your business to encroach on your personal life; it's up to you how much of a workaholic you want to be.

I see my kids every morning, have breakfast with them, and drive them to school. I have dinner with them every night, albeit at 2000, and they're very young. There's a (stereotypical) North American mentality that dinner needs to be early for children, that they can't stay up late, and then there's the rest of the world. Kids can nap for an hour or two around 1630/1700, life won't end.

Call me during dinner time, and you're instantly on voicemail. Employees know it, investors know it, business partners know it. Dinner is sacrosanct, I've literally never missed dinner with family.

Some people will leave you, some people can't work that way- but that doesn't mean your company can't. Sometimes that means losing great talent, there's a shocking amount of the world that (currently) NEED their work to be all consuming. That's okay, it just means my companies aren't for them.

A shocking number of investors actually get this, and respect you for it. There's no need to dance around the 'knowing what you will not bend on' phase - because you're up front. Equally, the approach helps you focus on the time you do have. It helps you maximize the time you're using, because of the need to get what's truly important.

Businesses will come and go. Fortunes will be made and lost (hopefully made!). But you only have X years. If you want to spend them engrossed overarchingly in business, there's nothing wrong with that. If you're like @trcollinson, and others like us, then family is the priority.

Chelsea Clinton or Ronan Farrow doesn't need to do Y combinator if they want to launch a startup, they have their parent's rolodexes as assets on their balance sheets. But most people are looking to "raise social capital" along with raising financial capital. And to do this, other considerations come into play.

Of course, one can always use a calculated social transgression as a form of breaking into the establishment. That's also a proven stragegy, but its not without its own risks and is really beyond the scope of what started this comment thread. But it does need to acknowledged, so that's fair.

You can't "miss things" in that context - especially strategic investments - because they will be picked up by competitors who will "out hustle" you.

I feel like the YC folks either haven't done a good enough job clarifying that they don't speak for "all businesses generally" or the community is assuming that they are.

I don't think he's missing the context, he's explicitly rejecting the assumptions behind this position.

They are specifically and narrowly focused on trying to build $1BN+ dollar companies that have insane growth rates in competitive markets.

Altman and PG and Andreesen are not building anything, they're focussed on investing in companies which have insane growth rates. That is not a fatuous cavil - that's a very different thing and sometimes puts their motivations at odds with those of company founders. An investor does not have the same incentives as someone building a company, and it's little wonder they want as many people as possible to grow fast or burn out trying.

You can't "miss things" in that context - especially strategic investments - because they will be picked up by competitors who will "out hustle" you.

Is hard work always rewarded? Is giving your life over to your company going to make it succeed? I'd argue there is a far more complex interplay of forces in the success or failure of companies - often it'll come down far more to who they know, or who their investors know, and whether they can come to the attention of the right people in order to have an exit (which just happens to be a great outcome for investors).

Founding a company is extremely hard work, often underestimated, and often all-consuming, but it doesn't have to take over your life completely, and I'm not sure it's healthy if it does. Success has many different definitions, and there are many routes to it.

A good friend of mine owns a very successful real estate software company. At last estimate he is worth ~$300M. He started the company without traditional investors (his father did put in $10,000 to be fair), he owns the entire business himself. He has many "things"; cars, vacation homes, an island. He also has a wife and has very successfully raised 4 kids while building up his business.

The point I hope a few people can take away from all of this is that investors like YC and the like have one way of starting a business. It is successful for some, life changing for others, and entirely the wrong approach to business for yet a different group. There are many other ways to start a business, technical or not. grey-area, I am with you. It is not healthy to have a company consume you completely, and it is not necessary for a business to succeed. Work hard, understand your market and most importantly your customers, build a product your customers enjoy and need, and you will find success, possibly the variety that makes you $100M+.

[1] http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats

If YC and their competitors want to maintain their pace they have to have everybody aim to swing as hard and as high as they can otherwise those successes won't be there either. If they knew up front who will succeed they would not be using this model.

Agreed on the building vs investing - however my point stands, they are pushing forward the mantra of MASSIVE disruptive companies.

To the rest of your points, in my opinion those factors are held ceteris paribus compared to how hard you hustle - largely because they are generally out of your control, that is unless you are hustling.

As an example, I had NO (as in zero) network in the Angel/VC startup world in D.C. 2 years ago. Now I have quite a robust network and it wasn't because I knew someone, it was because we were building something great and I went out found who was who and talked to them. It didn't take over my life, and still doesn't but it does take up as much as possible. I am after all typing on here.

I'm curious if when you tell them to move it how you say that and if you give them a reason why?

In other words do you tell them "sorry I can't because that's when I eat dinner with the family" or "sorry I can't I have my kids soccer game" or just "that time doesn't work for me" etc?

It sounds incredibly self-serving for VCs to be pushing that cultural expectation. It sounds out-right unhealthy. It sounds like a great after-the-fact excuse to make workaholics feel less bad.

I know it's hyper competitive landscape out there, but it's unreasonable. If Mark Zuckerberg found a way to learn Mandarin, then the rest of us should be able to go home at a reasonable hour.

I kind of wonder if the current startup scene of chatty app clones and services for asshats etc. is partially a result of the startup landscape being oversaturated with individuals who meet the young, kidless and immature crowd precisely because they're the only ones who are perceived as being capable to "give what it takes" to start a startup...

And maybe it was. I wasn't there; I can't say.

Please understand, I'm not moralizing here. I'm not saying you were wrong. I'm aware there are consequences to any of the choices one might make in these situations. I'm merely pointing out the demonstrable fact, by virtue of your self-reported behavior, that you chose your business over your family in each of these cases you're lamenting.

Own it. Don't point at something else, all, "But that thing over there." You made a choice that was unequivocally yours and yours alone to make.

Each person should decide what they feel is best for their situation and understand the tradeoffs their making.

My comment was directed at its parent.

You could have said you were busy that day to either of them. For the 2nd one you even could have hired another sales guy and you wouldn't have even been in that situation.

But you didn't.

And in the end, this guy's got a time tracking/invoicing app he sells to small businesses, his scenario is completely different. I don't want to be too dismissive, but it seems more suited for the Amy Hoy/patio11 route rather than the YC one, it's not a pants on fire, runaway scaling startup.

But most of life is lived in a more mundane day-to-day way. Those days are filled with your choices about where and how you spend your time.

I wrote this post to detail how I go about making these decisions because I know there are others out there in a similar position. Just hearing another perspective is helpful.

Someone just pointed me to this post from Change.org's COO and I greatly appreciated her take: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141022041002-407452...

On the scalable startup or not...we wouldn't have gotten into YC if we didn't have a plan.

My wife is expecting our first child soon and one thing it has really done is change my perspective. I've actually become a more dedicated employee and have also realized the glass and rubber ball metaphors.

There's bugs that have to be fixed right now and projects that have to be completed on time -- but there's also a personal life.

I'm no longer killing myself because of some minor bug that can wait, but at the same time I'm finding that when I am "on," I'm actually "on" instead of the half-on all the time.

It's been a life changing experience and it's very hard to describe in an understandable way to people who haven't gone through it, but this article is coming close.

Post-kid, there's far more meaning to whether you're at work or not. All of the sudden, I was getting done in 8 hours what I used to do in 10 or 12 (or in 12 hour what used to be 16).

Congrats on the upcoming child! Best of luck!

I think there are lots of things that affect the quality of a relationship, celebrating birthdays and showing up for holidays are likely not high on the list.

But, the one difference I'd call out with doing a startup (or owning any small business), is that you're responsible for whether that business fails or not and any of the jobs that are attached to it.

So you feel an intense responsibility to those other coworkers and their families.

You also have this if you're a manager in a larger company, but I think the intensity with which you feel it is a lesser degree (you messing up is still not good, but the company may still survive).

You don't get paid anything to do a startup, you might even do it for 2 years and NOTHING will come out of it.

Balancing things that are urgent now vs things that are important is very difficult in practice. Long term having a good relationship with your spouse and kids is much more important than fixing that bug for customer, but that bug may be very urgent so you stay later to fix it tonight.

Trying to keep the urgent from trumping the important in the priority queue is a constant challenge in my life as I now have more important things.

I completely agree with Tad on the over communicating.

The only other things I have found helpful are to: 1) Set expectations realistically - people can be ecstatic or completely disappointed with the same result depending on what you tell them to expect. 2) I don't scale very well, focus on measuring metrics rather than micromanaging and then delegate to others.

This seems to imply the only way to out work 20 or 40 year olds is with time and because of your family you won't have time but that's not true. Hard work is only part of it. It sucks in your situation you had to chose and sacrifice your family but I do not believe that has to be typical of all Y Combinator applicants.

As a dad (son just turned two, daughter's 8 month old) in a similar situation, family wise, it's nice to read about other people being successful (and less risk averse..) in their professional life.

Granted, your story sounds more realistic. That's what I think whenever the 'Could I do something like this' wish comes up. But for now I'll choose to believe that Tad can make it work. Both for him and because I'd love to be able to do the same thing..

I was inpsired by his story.

And my experience is my own.

As others have said in this thread "I could have made other choices"

But when you are way down the river, playing with other people's money, and with dozens of employees counting on you these "choices" starts feeling like foregone conclusions.

If you want to be a start-up guy, if you want to build a large business, prepare yourself for the realities that are going to come with that.

I have been lucky enough to change my situation over the past 2-years, but there would be no business today to "hire sales guys" etc if I hadn't done the work myself when it counted.