[capkutay]

"I was deciding whether this venture was worth committing to another year of 70+ hour weeks. I need a higher level of certainty than investors do because my time is more valuable to me than their money is to them. Investors place bets in a portfolio of companies, but I only have one life."

That's the key quote in the article. It's a fair decision from his standpoint but I wonder if saying that will lead investors to question his determination in the future (if he tries a new venture). I suppose the investors could also appreciate that he didn't want to waste more of their money if he didn't believe in the product.

[onion2k]

If the situation were really "take the money and do 70+ hours a week for a year" versus "shut down the business" then I'd agree, but that's a false dichotomy. You can run a startup putting in far less time than that; putting in long hours is a choice. You can bring in a team or outsource the parts you don't like. It makes it harder to succee but it's an option. You could (depending on lots of caveats) simply hand the business over to someone else.

I respect the author for admitting he didn't want to run the business, and I realise it was his choice to stop in the face of any other options, but I really don't agree with the idea that running a startup requires 70+ hours a week and if you're not willing to put that time in you have to shut down.

[arviewer]

It's not about time or money. It's about wasting time on something while you're not motivated anymore because you know it will fail 99% sure. If you can't commit to it, you make that 100%.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Absolutely. I'm not sure why everyone else in this thread seems to be focussing on the "70+ hours" part specifically. I agree with your interpretation.

[emcrazyone]

"outsource the parts you don't like" This doesn't work from my personal experience and others seem to agree. Myself been apart of a few startups learned you never outsource your core competency and doing so is usually suicide no matter how good you think you are at managing.

It's easy to see when you realize your goals and your outsourcing entity have different objectives which are at odds with one another.

[onion2k]

If your core competency is something you don't like doing then your business is probably going to fail regardless. Keeping that in-house should be obvious.

[nostalgiac]

Although the author phrases it as "70+ hours a week", my assumption is it's not the hours per week that he doesn't want to commit to it, but the total hours involved that it's going to require to solve the situation.

Whether that's 70 per week or 5 hours per month, the total amount of hours needed is going to be x,00 or x,000 - and that's time he simply thinks is not a priority or valuable to him.

[onion2k]

There's a total number of hours of work needed to build something, but they don't all have to be put in by one person. It might be one person doing 70 hours a week, but equally it can be two people doing 35 hours each (probably more like 40 hours actually to account for comms, but still, not even close to 70). The hard part is finding someone who can do the role.

[bkor]

I don't agree on the assumption that the total number of hours is a given. If you're working on something 70+ days per week for an entire year, your productivity is going to drop. If you work less, but are refreshed when you start working, you'll be way more productive. Especially if it requires any amount of thinking.

[mjolk]

I'm building a startup and I wish I could accomplish everything I need in 70 hours a week -- it would give me so much more time to work on the other parts of the startup that I currently don't have time to build out.

[quanticle]

    but that's a false dichotomy

It's a false dichotomy for self-funded/bootstrapped businesses. But if you consider yourself a startup, you have to deliver growth. It's that pressure that leads to the 70+ hour weeks. It's entirely possible to own and run a business while still putting in reasonable hours. But it's unlikely that business is a startup, by Paul Graham's definition of the word.

For reference, Paul Graham defines a startup as:

    A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not 
    in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to 
    work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." 
    The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with 
    startups follows from growth.

[mindcrime]

I personally consider that definition to be bollocks. To me, the defining characteristic is the intent of the company, in terms of it's ultimate size / position. IOW, it's "where you're going", not "how fast you're planning to get there".

I know it goes against the currently accepted groupthink, but I don't believe growing fast is the only way to grow a big company. Or rather, it might be better to say that "at any given point in time, it might or might not be important to be growing fast".

Take establishing a dichotomy between "self-funded/bootstrapped" and "vc funded". I would call that a false dichotomy itself, since it's not an immutable characteristic of a company. You can bootstrap for years, then decide to go chase VC money when/if you need it to achieve your goals.

[jschulenklopper]

There's another definition (or interpretation) of the word "startup" by Steve Blank that I like even better:

"A startup is a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."

The temporary phase ends when the startup evolves into a normal organization that executes on a proven business model (or pivots, or stops).

[j45]

Another dichotomy may also be pursuing the growth at the behest of investor vs doing it on your own. Growth, or adding value too, can have different meanings to the investor vs innovator. Startups that make money become businesses.

[nickbauman]

This idea is key, regardless of what the dictionary definition of startup is. A startup cannot merely be a profitable business. If that were true many more startups would be still running today. But if you take investment of 10 million and you're positive cashflow of, say, 200,000 in your first year with a projection of 1 million / yr in 10 years, you will be shut down and sold off: Investors want AT LEAST a 2x return in that same timeframe otherwise it isn't worth it.

[tedmiston]

Perhaps a confusing example, since that startup isn't profitable during its lifecycle anyway.

[nickbauman]

yeah not a great timeline comparison, but the idea is a Nx growth translates to Nx return on investment at some point.

[camillomiller]

Really? Quoting Paul Graham as you would quote the Gospel? I agree with the comment above, that's the definition of startup according to PG, not THE definition. Especially not a definition carved in stone you can quote to justify a false dichotomy. What about innovation? It's not true that innovation comes only from growth. Geez I don't even think it's true all other startup features come from growth. This is what a VC that needs to grow its money would tend to let you believe. Oh, wait...

[throwanem]

> Quoting Paul Graham as you would quote the Gospel?

Welcome to Hacker News.

[ghrifter]

Next up is praising Javascript as the end-all-tool for everything. The hammer for all the jobs!

[dang]

Please don't make snide generalizations about this community, especially when they're self-refuting. It's a genre of unsubstantive comment we can do without.

[chris_va]

> I suppose the investors could also appreciate that he didn't want to waste more of their money if he didn't believe in the product.

Yes, very much so. Startup investments fail all the time, part of the business. Better a clean shutdown than trying to eak out an exit with money that could be better spent elsewhere.

[trustfundbaby]

especially if your heart's not in it for whatever reason

[kristiandupont]

>I wonder if saying that will lead investors to question his determination in the future

You could also argue that it proves his determination, if he does in fact decide to engage in a new venture.

[tedmiston]

> I suppose the investors could also appreciate that he didn't want to waste more of their money if he didn't believe in the product.

I didn't get the impression that it was more of their money, but rather the first injection, like a seed round.

[daveheq]

If an investor needs 70+ hours a week of work from one person to consider them determined, I'd question their intelligence, commitment, or financial security, because hiring some help seems like the wiser decision.