> Sacrificing your personal life for your employer is pathological, not heroic
This isn't an article about heroism. Keith Teare claims he co-founded TechCrunch. Arrington says "no" and then details why.
One part of the "why" is about value-adding output. Arrington "could never get [Teare] to write anything, or help pay any bills." Co-founders add value; Keith didn't do that.
The second part of the "why" is about input. Output requires input. But it's fair to highlight both, in part to block claims of unappreciated work. In highlighting Heather's "20 hour days" and "sacrificing [of] her personal life," Arrington draws into contrast the difference between someone he considers a co-founder and someone he doesn't.
> 20-hour days are not actually worked
Founded a company. Worked twenty-hour days. Deceptively easy to do if you're chasing a short-term deliverable across multiple time zones. (Short-term because this tactic is obviously unsustainable.)
The first 80 hours of a work week seem the hardest... the next 60 fly by in a daze of mania. It's hard to remember how to sleep and not think about work all the time, but your productivity is constantly falling. It works best for projects you can literally do in your sleep and anything requiring decision making, detail, or creativity should be done in the first day. If mistakes aren't very obvious when assembling the final blocks at the end, you'll miss them. Camaraderie is important too!
I've been a lot of places, and I have some experience with sleep deprivation. One ought not assume too much.
If you're regularly working 20-hour days, as opposed to the occasional all-nighter, then you're not doing anyone any favors -- not your company, not your friends/spouses/children, not yourself.
But anyway I was alluding to the tendency to boast about how little one sleeps...
I wish companies understood this. Part of my boring non-startup job consists of occasional weeklong sprees of 20+ hours/day, staying on the jobsite the entire week, with no additional compensation.
I'm definitely dead inside by the weekend, and noticeably affected after the first day. The logistics of what I do probably really does make it somewhat of a necessity, but I wish there was at least provisions for comp time afterwards or at least some kind of bonus pay.
So have I, but not as a regular thing. Working "20-hour days" implies it's regular, and that means -- assuming no commute -- you're sleeping max 3 hours a night, which is pretty messed up.
o/t but I'm surprised this random comment touched a nerve here...
I think you just read it differently than the rest of us. I read Arrington as saying she worked the occasional 20-hr day regularly. In other words, during particularly bad stretches, which were fairly frequent, but not every day.
I agree that almost nobody could actually sustain working 20-hr days every single day.
I agree on both. Honestly, much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity. If I were to do the same work with what I know now, I'd do it very differently with far fewer hours (probably).
That said, the point OP was making is that in a startup origin story, there's a significant perception gap between those who actually moved the needle and those who claim to have done so. Those who actually drove the bus and those who rode it. Time and again, I've seen the latter people take advantage of the relative reticence of the former.
It's probably more like, "relative to this guy who tried to kill my company early on and later claimed undue credit for its founding, this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days and sacrificed everything for me."
> ... much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity.
It takes a fair bit of experience with long days to know that the feeling of doing work and doing 'stuff' pales in comparison with the productivity of doing that work well while rested and focused...
Overtime creates 'undertime', cleaning up tired mistakes takes longer than doing them, and when it comes to coding nothing is worse than wasting 15+ hours implementing something you didn't think clearly enough about to start with, and realizing it was all wasted/could have been done in 1.
> this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days
I feel the discussion of this line is perhaps conflating "worked 20 hour days [on the rare occasion something crazy was happening]", vs "worked 20 hour days [from 0400 hours to midnight every day]". Just because someone worked some 20 hour days does not mean they worked 20 hours every day :)
When I was in startup-land, if we had a big deliverable we'd work until we couldn't work, which usually was about noon to 8am. Then everyone would go home and sleep it off, and the next day we'd try to not do that again... sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
Now that I have a "normal" job, I still occasionally do a big coding sprint of 20 hours or more, but I don't do it day after day.
In startup land, when the CEO came in at 7am and saw us frenetically coding away in the Nerd Loft, I sure hope he told everyone we all worked 20-hour days. :-)
This isn't an article about heroism. Keith Teare claims he co-founded TechCrunch. Arrington says "no" and then details why.
One part of the "why" is about value-adding output. Arrington "could never get [Teare] to write anything, or help pay any bills." Co-founders add value; Keith didn't do that.
The second part of the "why" is about input. Output requires input. But it's fair to highlight both, in part to block claims of unappreciated work. In highlighting Heather's "20 hour days" and "sacrificing [of] her personal life," Arrington draws into contrast the difference between someone he considers a co-founder and someone he doesn't.
> 20-hour days are not actually worked
Founded a company. Worked twenty-hour days. Deceptively easy to do if you're chasing a short-term deliverable across multiple time zones. (Short-term because this tactic is obviously unsustainable.)