[jmtame]

"If you're going to half-ass your startup because of some 'work-life balance,' you're going to lose." - Michael Arrington

Mark Cuban was known for working 7 years straight on Broadcast.com (originally known as AudioNet) and that was at the time the largest IPO in history, sold to Yahoo for $6 billion in stock. He didn't take vacations, holidays, or leave work during these 7 years.

It depends on what you want out of life. I think too many people get into entrepreneurship because they think it sounds fun, but they don't realize it requires everything of you. If you're the CEO or President of your startup, you set the example. Every single person on your team will only work as hard as you will.

If you're unwilling to sacrifice friendships, family, weekends, holidays, then you're not very competitive to others who are. I'm not trying to say that in a sleezy way, I'm just stating the facts. A lot of people are willing to sacrifice everything to be successful, so if you only want to be self-employed and do your own self-startup, then you can probably get away with as much or little work-life balance as you want.

[kapitti]

Considering one of the first rounds of money that a startup takes is usually friends & family, I would suggest not sacrificing them.

You can maintain a healthy social life, or marriage, or keeping in touch with family, and still succeed. Read Balsamiq's story: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=79 - It's not the largest sample size, but he's not the only one doing it.

Your family and friends should support you. My wife understands the life, she understands that when I'm in "the zone" to put my dinner in the fridge and I'll reheat it later. I gave my wife 12 hours notice that 3 other rails hackers would be in our house for a weekend for RailsRumble - she went out and bought groceries and cooked for us. When the internet went down that weekend, her father came to our rescue and opened his lawfirm's office for us to work from - the end result, we won RailsRumble 2008 - and we did it with the support of our families.

The fact that I have obligations (Mortgage, Student Loans, Car Payment) keeps me focused.

[mattmaroon]

That's so wrong in every way. A proper work-life balance makes you more effective at both. Hours worked is shown very strongly in studies to follow the law of diminishing returns, to the point of even turning negative.

If you're sacrificing friendships and family, you're not doing it right. And not only that, even if you succeed you'll end up wishing you didn't. I've seen this happen.

For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week.

[nostrademons]

I found it wasn't really the time that was a problem, it was attention. Even when I was at parties or with my families, I wasn't really mentally there, since there was always this cool algorithm or new approach that I was turning over in my head and wanted to try out. That tended to make parties not all that much fun for me, and me not all that much fun for the party. So even though I was only working 5-6 hours/day of actual coding, the mental effort spent thinking things through was all-consuming. It was depressing enough that I'm going back into the corporate world again - I'm not much of a work/life balance guy by nature, but I'd like more work/life balance than I had as a founder.

FWIW, none of the startup founders I know have much in the way of work/life balance, at least for the first 5 years or so of the company's life. It was not uncommon for them to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and take their first vacation when the company was about 4 years old. This doesn't mean it was a daily grind - just that their life became the company, and that's what they wanted to be working on even when they weren't officially at work.

Edit: I should make a distinction here between startups (organizations that are intended to grow really fast) and small businesses. I know several small business owners with good work/life balance: you kinda need it, since a small business is a long haul that'll consume you if you don't have some other sort of life. I don't know any startup founders with a life, during the startup phase.

Know what sort of business you want and be honest up-front with family, friends, investors, employees, and yourself. You aren't going to get rich in 4 years with a small business. But you can make a good living for yourself, sacrificing less of your personal life, with significantly less risk. If you're going to shoot for the moon, figure out what it would take to prove that you're aiming right, and bail out before you sacrifice too much if you're not.

[mattmaroon]

I know a lot of startup founders. Most of them work hard, for sure, but also have some balance. Some more than others. The two aren't incompatible, but it takes some work to make them otherwise.

[gamache]

Not to mention that most of those Type A busybees' startups will fail. All the hours in the world can't erase the fact that even good startups often tank, and most startups are founded on pretty cockamamie ideas anyway.

Equating hours-per-week with value is naive at best.

[jamesbritt]

"For every Mark Cuban there are 1,000 entrepreneurs who succeed without working 90 hours a week."

Is there are tangible evidence for this? I agree with the idea of diminishing returns, but also think that one needs to put in more than 40 hours a week. But so far, the arguments are anecdotal.

[mattmaroon]

I certainly haven't done a study, no. I'd love to see one too.

I believe there has been some evidence that supports the ~40 hour work week. I suppose 40 exactly is a tad arbitrary, optimal number is probably some strange decimal, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't really close to 40 for the average person.

Perhaps it depends on the individual, perhaps for some its 40 and for some its 50, etc. Maybe the latter group succeeds more. I feel like this is untrue, but certainly can't prove it.

[PStamatiou]

right on.

[Harj]

that's a very narrow and unrealistic view of a startup. some of the most phenomenally productive people i've known and worked with don't pretend to be working every hour of the day. they work in short intense bursts in the knowledge that they'll still get more done than the people who kid themselves into thinking that sacrificing everything so they can be staring at their screens for 12 hours a day is the only way to be productive.

the best blog post i've found on this is from naval ravikant, http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2005/11/29/the-80-hour-myt...

[taylan]

jmtame is right; work-life balance shouldn't be your top priority, it shouldn't make you question the time you are investing in your startup. as you make progress opportunity cost of your time increases, i.e. an hour of your time when you got funded is a lot more precious than an hour when you were just starting out. also, an hour you spend on the "life" side is an hour NOT spent on your startup, and the cost for this increases as you make progress.

luckily, things are dynamic and you don't have to choose between work and life or some arbitrary balance point and then live with your decision forever. rather, depending on your time constraints your radius of interaction widens or shortens. while working hectically on some feature you'll only interact with very few close friends or no one at all, and when things are going slow or when you need support, emotional or otherwise, you'll simply reach out to more people. thus, be flexible in terms of how you allocate your time but always with an eye on the prize.

[nailer]

I'd class myself as a early adopter and I've been using the internet for a really long time.

I've never heard of broadcast.com.

Mark Cuban might have made a lot of money, but did he create something good that people know, love, and use?

Because I want to do the latter.

[fallentimes]

Broadcast.com, Dallas Mavericks, HD Net, MicroSolutions, a hedge fund, a movie distributor, a movie production business, angel investments...and they all weren't done after Broadcast.com either.

[nailer]

Never heard of HD Net or Microsolutions either (and I'm fairly sure Cuban didn't create the Dallas Mavericks). I'd rather be the guy/gal who created one well loved household name - say lastminute.com - than who made a mint on a lot of not well known known companies.

[fallentimes]

HD Net was the first all high definition television network, and is what helped spur all the mainstream networks (due to competition and audience response) to go HD. Cuban was on the HD bandwagon when it was empty. Haha he certainly didn't invent the Mavericks, but he completely transformed them & more importantly, made them a contender - much to the admiration of hundreds of thousands of Dallas Mavericks fans.

MicroSolutions was bought by CompuServe who you may or may not be familiar with. Have you heard the movies titled: The Smartest Guys in The Room or Good Night, and Good Luck? He was behind them.

I certainly get what you're saying, it's just that sometimes Cuban is wrongly portrayed as a one-trick pony. Also of note, I had never heard of lastminute.com until today. And even if i had, I doubt I'd know the person behind it.

[nailer]

Aren't they shutting down the analog TV network in the US and re-using the spectrum elsewhere, per the rest of the world? And aren't most networks happy with more channels and more chances to grab ad-revenue? Surely that would spurn the adoption of HD more than a particular competitor being first of the boat.

But I have heard of Good Night, and Good Luck, and perhaps the other film, if you mean the Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room). Those, and reinventing a sports team would be achievements of which I would be very proud.

[Raphael]

Digital broadcast has a shorter range and is more finicky. If an analog signal is not the clearest, you just see or hear a slight interference, but you can still follow the program continuously. I watch the digital broadcast now, and it is common for it to drop out when I move around the room. The digital mandate was a ploy for the cable providers to grab more market share.

But I'll be glad when the freed up bandwidth can be used for internet.

[fallentimes]

The move to shut down analog TV was made well after the networks had already began deploying it. Initially, there was actually a big opposition to HD TV (very costly, have to using separate cables, etc) that many people forget. And yes I meant the Enron documentary; I added an "s".

[mapleoin]

sounds like Sparta to me