[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.