How I Feel as Young Father Involved in Early-stage Startup

Don't live a life of regret. Make do with less. Maybe get there slower, but be a happier person.

I'm in a similar situation in that I have two young children (under 5) and I am the co-founder of a small-ish startup in healthcare. I make sure to leave every day at 5pm so I can be with my kids for a few hours. If I have a busy week, I'll get up earlier (5 or 6am) and get my work done earlier in the day.

If additional work needs to get done, it gets done after they go to bed.

Importantly, my co-founders also have families and value them as I do. If that were not the case, I would not be involved in this company.

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."

and this:

"Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job."

and the reasons why we might want to do a startup:

"For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

That essay can be read both as an inspiration and as a warning. On the positive side, it is good to realize how much you can achieve in a few short years. On the negative side, you must be wholly focused on one thing during those few short years. The rest of your life needs to put on hold.

A personal anecdote: I am a bit of a news junkie, and I typically spend an hour or two a day reading the news, but when I had my own startup, I gave up reading the news. For the years 2003 to 2004, and for most of 2006, I rarely read the news. That was a huge change of personal habits for me. But avoiding the news was important for me to stay focused. I would write code for 12 hours a day, sometimes 14 hours a day. I think one has to have a very narrow focus during the first year or two of a startup.

To each their own, but I would never sacrifice a moment with my daughter unless is was absolutely necessary. As contrary as it might seem to people in the startup bubble, the importance placed on most day-to-day work is an illusion.

Pop the bubble and hug your kids. In the long run, that relationship will mean much, much more to you.

Many years ago, I was working 80+ hour weeks, week after week, and my daughter was very young. Consistently, I would not even SEE her from Thursday morning until Saturday afternoon.

I burned out on that job. I felt shell-shocked. I went to dinner with my wife and realized that we had grown apart. I hated that. I hated missing my daughter growing up.

I hated that my daily thoughts were about work, what was happening with work, and that my interactions with my coworkers had overridden my interaction with my family.

So I decided that my life would revolve around my family, and who I was outside of work, not the other way around. Over the years I have changed jobs, started companies, had wild success, had some failures, but through it all I felt even-keel because it all felt like my LIFE was the same. The cubicles, the coworkers, the employees, those all change but my wife and daughter, the life we share, that has been constant. I actually don't feel like I've changed jobs at all even though in reality I've worked at about 6 different places and started 2 companies.

Don't think that work and success will make it alright in the end. It won't. Don't believe people who think you are slacking because you aren't working 100 hours a week. Those people aren't executing efficiently. I can promise you this is true because I have left a trail of Type A 'go-go-go' personalities in my wake because they couldn't match my output and drive, even though they were burning midnight oil and I was at home watching Jeopardy! with the fam.

I guess what I'm trying to say is don't listen to all of those people who are making horrible mistakes. Work hard, but read 'The Power of Full Engagement' by Tony Shwartz and realize that you can work like mad and relax and you will beat the crap out of everyone around you.