How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
ericfarkas.com
How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
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Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#2Eric: Thanks for sharing, and great tips. As someone who is in the same boat, I'm always curious as to how others handle the situation. I'm assuming your goal is to leverage the success of your startup so that you can leave your day job? If so, how do you keep focused on your day job, when the excitement of your startup keeps pulling more at you, especially if you are as you start to see success? I'm in a day job that I hate (its soul crushing), but that gives me the flexibility to work on my startup. The allure of my startup is always calling, but its going to be a while before we see profit, and I've got a wife and bills waiting for me at home so I do what I can to stay sane. All the best.
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#3Thanks for sharing. There is more than one path.
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#4Eric: Thanks for sharing, and great tips. As someone who is in the same boat, I'm always curious as to how others handle the situation. I'm assuming your goal is to leverage the success of your startup so that you can leave your day job? If so, how do you keep focused on your day job, when the excitement of your startup keeps pulling more at you, especially if you are as you start to see success? I'm in a day job tha…
Growing the startup to the point where I can do it full-time is my ultimate goal. I'll admit, it's not easy to stay focused at my day-job. It's not easy to stay focused anywhere for that matter. But I've had to learn to ignore the voice in my head when it's work/family time. Again, not easy, just one of those things you have to do. Learn to live with the excitement eating away at you. My situation is probably similar to yours; my day job, while not in software development, which I'd prefer, nevertheless gives me a lot of time to work on my startup, since I work close to home and have basically no commute, meaning I get home around 5pm everyday.
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#5Thanks for sharing. I appreciate the part about providing for family. It's never easy when you have other people who depend on you and so it's comforting to hear of others who are in a similar situation.
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#6Nice writeup, but I would think watching Chelsea win the Champions League is the exact opposite of "an emotionally traumatic experience".
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#7Make that N=2. This post is very, very similar to my own experience after launching my "startup on the side" last year (http://www.limelightapp.com/) and the advice closely parallels what I'd give to others as well.
>> Get your spouse or SO's buy-in. Until that happens, I'd suggest not going forward.
Agree completely. I think one key to gaining my wife's incredible support was the understanding we both had that Limelight came after her and the kids. Once we had that discussion, she made time for me to work on it once the kids were in bed.
>> Something has to give, and it's usually your hobbies.
I miss Japanese. :-(
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#8Nice writeup, but I would think watching Chelsea win the Champions League is the exact opposite of "an emotionally traumatic experience".
I was on the edge of my seat for the entire 2nd leg vs. Barcelona, and the final was draining. It's "how" they won it that was traumatic.
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#9As Eric's co-founder, I'm encouraged he put this out there. We have regular conversations about staying focused and not letting the "what if" scenarios rule the tasks at hand. I think there is huge value in constrained resources early in the life of your startup and certainly one of the most scarce is time. This external time constraint has to focus our efforts for maximum ROI. Of course this constraint also keeps us agile as we don't have the luxury of excess anything.
An old, wise chicken restaurant founder (Truett Cathy) said in his book, Eat More Chicken, Inspire More People, (paraphrasing terribly) "Growing slowly allows you to grow into your success and your mistakes.". We still dream about success, about trend lines that go up (and they are), but focusing on the resources at hand to make that dream a reality has been our key to date. I'd love for everything to move faster from a growth perspective of course but keeping priorities straight means speed is exchanged for quality of life, agile and lean growth, and the unsung hero in the startup world, sanity.
Re: How To Do A Startup On The Side And Not Lose Your Family
#10Make that N=2. This post is very, very similar to my own experience after launching my "startup on the side" last year ( http://www.limelightapp.com/ ) and the advice closely parallels what I'd give to others as well. >> Get your spouse or SO's buy-in. Until that happens, I'd suggest not going forward. Agree completely. I think one key to gaining my wife's incredible support was the understanding we both had that Lim…
Do either you or the poster have advice regarding single parenting + full time job + nights/weekends-style startup? Possible? Was unclear if you were saying that spouse + support = okay, or just if spouse, then support = okay. Do you rely on the presence of a spouse who happens to be supporting to be able to even get the part time priority on the list below the rung to family?