[minimax]

A few (dissenting) points:

If you want to eat healthy at O'Hare, you can find a salad or sandwich in any terminal. If you really want to blow your calorie budget, go find one of the Goose Island bars in terminal 1 or 3. Have a Matilda. It's fantastic.

Next point: I really dislike working for bosses with a misplaced sense of paternalism. If there are risks or uncertainties facing the business, don't hide them from your employees. Transparency breeds trust, which you'll need if you expect your engineers to put in the kind of hard work that's required when a company is starting up.

Last point: look, if a life of flying around the country and working long hours is your idea of a tortured life only a special breed of men known as "entrepreneurs" can bear, then you need to pull your head out of your ass. That life is stressful and that it takes hard work to get ahead are universal truths. The rest of us aren't just coasting along in a risk-free world.

Double secret bonus last point: why all the cussing?

[lsc]

>Last point: look, if a life of flying around the country and working long hours is your idea of a tortured life only a special breed of men known as "entrepreneurs" can bear, then you need to pull your head out of your ass. That life is stressful and that it takes hard work to get ahead are universal truths. The rest of us aren't just coasting along in a risk-free world.

What I find especially amusing is that it seems to be the entrepreneurs that are doing it with other people's money that complain so much about stress. the "crazy people" that do it with our own money generally don't go in for that kind of chest pounding.

The real problem here, I think, isn't the chest pounding, but the fact that they really believe that depriving themselves of sleep is somehow helping the company, and that sometimes they actually do it.

You can argue all day about the optimal number of work hours, and maybe have a point that some people can effectively work more than the 35-40 hours a week of "real work" that I advocate.

But sleep? Study after study has shown that shorting yourself on sleep does horrible things to your performance, no matter how you measure performance. If your performance really is critical to the performance of the company? the most important thing for you to do is to get adequate sleep each and every night.

[mdda]

If you're gambling with other people's money, it's in your interest to keep complaining about how hard you're working, and how stressed out you are : It's a positive signal to the people funding you.

If it's all your own money you're gambling with, complaining about the stress might be taken as indicating you bit off more than you can chew : A negative signal for employees.

[lsc]

That is also what I think is going on. However:

>If you're gambling with other people's money, it's in your interest to keep complaining about how hard you're working, and how stressed out you are : It's a positive signal to the people funding you.

This assumes that the people who are funding you are primarily evaluating you on how hard you are working, and in this case, that they don't understand the correlation between performance and sleep.

Now, I think, in most cases, you are right.

>If it's all your own money you're gambling with, complaining about the stress might be taken as indicating you bit off more than you can chew : A negative signal for employees.

Hm. I think the "bit off more than you can chew" applies as much to investors as to employees.

Also, I've seen many, many middle managers pretend to work harder in an effort to 'lead from the front' and get underlings to work harder. It works; as they say, "it doesn't matter how early you show up, as long as you show up before the boss. It doesn't matter how late you leave, as long as you leave after the boss."

But this works on metrics that matter, too, not just on but-in-seat time. My experience has been that if you publish any performance metric, your employees will try to come close[1]. It's kindof irritating, sometimes; I mean, if I wanted to do it, I wouldn't have hired you to do it, right? I need you to pick up the slack precisely when I'm falling down. When I'm doing well? you can slack off a bit. But eh, that seems to be how people work.

But those things apply to the people that the workers see as their direct leaders, regardless of ownership structure.

I think the primary difference here is that when you work with someone else's money, the goal is to get big, fast, or to die fast. What do they say? Fail early?

If you are working with your own money, you usually have less to start with, and because of that you usually are playing a much longer game. (I think that most of the problems with having partners also come out in the 'long game' - to the point where I think a solo founder actually has a advantage in the long game, assuming that he or she has the personal earning power to keep the company in business.)

[1]" it was shameful for the chief to be surpassed in valor by his companions; shameful for the companions not to equal the valor of their chief. To survive his fall in battle, was indelible infamy. To protect his person, and to adorn his glory with the trophies of their own exploits, were the most sacred of their duties."

Man, I love Gibbon. I mean, on a conscious level, I'm embarrassed to use sweaty combat metaphors, but I do admit that it calls out to something buried deep within the obsolete portions of my hind brain.

[derwiki]

Gambling with others' money might be more stressful than gambling with your own.

[ahoyhere]

You may be right… for a certain kind of person, dealing with other people's money increases the feel of personal responsibility (which is a good thing!)

I don't believe that's what's at work most of the time, though. It seems like there is a kind of person who wants to imbue every action, every day, with a kind of Life or Death drama. (Related drama: Everything I Do Is Hugely Important.) Getting the other people's money plays into this sense of self nicely.

[mrkurt]

Your first point is dead on, although I'm lazy and just go to XOCO in terminal 1 most of the time ...

I think, perhaps, you interpreted him differently than I did on your other points:

2. I don't think he's talking about paternalism, I think he's talking about dealing with very intense, private insecurity about the state of a company. There is something not quite unlike doom facing company nearly every day, and it's incredibly hard to filter actual uncertainties that companies should account for. It's important to be both transparent and conservative with negativity, but not for paternalistic reasons.

3. There's not a special type of person that handles stress better, exactly, there's a special type of stress that comes with trying to start/run a company. And it's not really worth it if you're thinking in pure outcome based terms. As an example, I picked my family up (we have 4 kids) and moved them cross country in August because it seemed like the best decision for my company. It was an excruciating choice in a way that a normal, career based moves haven't been. I suspect anyone could have handled that flavor of stress since I'm not uniquely stress resilient.

x. I think intense word choice can occasionally reflect the intensity of what you're talking about in a way that forced mildness undermines. So why not?

[minimax]

2. I was thinking in particular about this particular paragraph from the OP:

"Early on in my first company I had an employee ask if it was a good time to buy a home. We had less than 6 months’ cash in the bank. I was pretty sure we were going to raise another round of capital. But not sure, sure. I mean you never know if your investors are REALLY going to keep backing you. And you can’t go around telling all of your employees your deepest insecurities about it or you’ll soon have no more of said employees."

He never actually completes the thought (what did he actually tell the guy?), but this isn't some vague insecurity we're talking about. If the runway ends in 6 months without more funding, you owe it to your employees to be honest about it. It sounds to me like he witheld the information because he was worried his employees would leave if he didn't.

3. I think there's a lot of substance and humility in what you've said and I appreciate that. What I meant is more that the OP just smacks of self-congratulations. "Look at me. Look at all this bullshit I put up with. Be like me... if you dare."

x. I think it makes him sound childish rather than intense.

[thisone]

>If the runway ends in 6 months without more funding, you owe it to your employees to be honest about it. It sounds to me like he witheld the information because he was worried his employees would leave if he didn't.

I was in that situation, as the employee. Had a bonus contractually promised to me and a jump in salary, bought the house (luckily it was the house we needed, not the house we wanted). Bonus never materialized, salary bump was less than half of what we had agreed.

Why yes, I am looking.

[nitrogen]

x. I think it makes him sound childish rather than intense.

The definition of what sounds childish and what sounds intense is largely cultural and situational. When you realize that all words are just words, and it's people that ascribe meaning to them, you and your social group can mutually decide exactly what meaning you want to assign to each word.

What makes some words special? Why is it not okay to say some words, but okay to say fun? Truck? Luck? Ship? Brit? Shiitake? Shih Tzu? Witch? Bishop? Custard? Bass? Crass? Aspect? Would you be offended if you heard someone say merde but didn't know what it meant?

[chernevik]

"why all the cussing?"

The OP may have exhausted his verbal capacity constructing warnings to co-workers about buying houses while depending on any start-up, without suggesting _his_ startup was in any difficulty. Then pondering this additional reminder of how many people depended on him. Maybe while deeply discouraged, still called on to project confidence, reassured only by the knowledge that deep discouragement happens in any project of real uncertainty.

Then he thought about folks like yourself dismissing the stress of working at the confluence of Transparency and Confidence. At which point he started swearing.

[randomafk]

I think there tends to be a problem with a many who label themselves as "entrepreneurial" to distinguish themselves from every body else. Some go a step further and say that only what they do entails unparalleled stress and pressure. As if they need to announce to the world that they're that bit bolder and harder working than everyone else.

[jessedhillon]

What the fuck.

You're flaming Mark Suster -- that's what it means when you tell him he has his head up his ass -- because you don't like some of the conclusions he's drawn from his experience. His experience as a successful entrepreneur, investor and mentor.

Essentially, from what I can tell, you have a problem with tone -- the guy uploads his brain and you slam him for his choice of words. He's not telling you that you're stupid or inferior, he just used a tone you didn't like. And for this reason, you're blasting a guy who just dumped a wealth of valuable experience into a coherent, emotionally relatable stream of consciousness. A humble and gracious thing to do, by any standard.

But no, you're totally right -- let's get mad and tell him to fuck off for his style.

Instead of blasting a guy for having an amazing career and sharing life lessons which you find personally inconvenient: go do something amazing and then come back and let us all know how it felt.

[polyfractal]

Umm, woah there buddy?

The parent poster presented disagreements in a rational, calm manner that facilitates discussion. Everyone is entitled to opinions, and he made his points in a rather respectful manner.

You, on the other hand, exploded like a bomb. Why the need to lash out so violently? You've been around HN for a long time so you should know that this kind of discourse is not really desired.

[jessedhillon]

Are we reading the same posts? Is it calm and rational to tell someone their head is up their ass?

[polyfractal]

Ah, fair enough, I did glance over that particular verbage in his post. Cursing aside, the overall tone of his post was pretty level-headed.

I think people can and should disagree with opinions, including opinions of someone as well known as Mr. Suster. And you can and should be able to disagree with someone disagreeing with said opinions.

But do it nicely, yeah?

[jessedhillon]

Apart from being a little sarcastic I think I was generally respectful. I basically said that it was overkill to flame him so harshly when the only argument appears to be based with Suster's style. It's certainly fine to disagree with anyone, just why so harshly, and especially over such a minor point. Why not more respectfully?

[minimax]

I've never heard of Mark Suster before today and I'm sorry if I offended you by criticizing one of your role models. Though if you reread his post, he does mention impertinence as being a characteristic of entrepreneurs. Maybe Mark Suster and I have more in common than I initially thought.

[jessedhillon]

You didn't offend me by criticizing him. You went, in my mind, totally nuts on him because you didn't like his tone. You said his head is up his ass for giving his POV on entrepreneurship. You were sarcastic and snarky and for no substantive reason.

Impertinence is also a common characteristic for a lot of other people, many of whom neither you nor I would like to be compared to.

[001sky]

As of this writing: ~225 upvotes for artcle and only 25 comments. Just something to note. A 9:1 ratio signals a pretty strong submission, IMHO.