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0 pointscik11y ago0 comments

Bang on - I couldn't agree more. Wish I could +10 this.

My version of that is that there's a difference between living to work and working to live. It's really up to you, how far you allow your business to encroach on your personal life; it's up to you how much of a workaholic you want to be.

I see my kids every morning, have breakfast with them, and drive them to school. I have dinner with them every night, albeit at 2000, and they're very young. There's a (stereotypical) North American mentality that dinner needs to be early for children, that they can't stay up late, and then there's the rest of the world. Kids can nap for an hour or two around 1630/1700, life won't end.

Call me during dinner time, and you're instantly on voicemail. Employees know it, investors know it, business partners know it. Dinner is sacrosanct, I've literally never missed dinner with family.

Some people will leave you, some people can't work that way- but that doesn't mean your company can't. Sometimes that means losing great talent, there's a shocking amount of the world that (currently) NEED their work to be all consuming. That's okay, it just means my companies aren't for them.

A shocking number of investors actually get this, and respect you for it. There's no need to dance around the 'knowing what you will not bend on' phase - because you're up front. Equally, the approach helps you focus on the time you do have. It helps you maximize the time you're using, because of the need to get what's truly important.

Businesses will come and go. Fortunes will be made and lost (hopefully made!). But you only have X years. If you want to spend them engrossed overarchingly in business, there's nothing wrong with that. If you're like @trcollinson, and others like us, then family is the priority.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

001sky11y ago· 2 in thread

This ingores the bias of investors. The original post is quoting investors, so I don't think its a speculative bias. You seem to be suggesting to ignore the wisdom of "know your customer"--and for many founders/ceos investors are as critical a customer as any (equity is just another a value added product).

ryanbrunner11y ago

If we want to look at investors through the lens of a customer, I think that we should also acknowledge that sometimes you need to fire / turn down a customer. Different investors have different expectations, and compromising fundamental beliefs about how you want to run your business in pursuit of cash is going to be a horrible experience for both you and the investor in the long run.

001sky11y ago

People join YC to get the contacts and credibility to implement this strategy. But suggesting that they have the ability to implement such a strategy before having such credibility is flawed. The conditions precedent for it to be a viable ptactical are not in place. That's all I am saying.

Chelsea Clinton or Ronan Farrow doesn't need to do Y combinator if they want to launch a startup, they have their parent's rolodexes as assets on their balance sheets. But most people are looking to "raise social capital" along with raising financial capital. And to do this, other considerations come into play.

Of course, one can always use a calculated social transgression as a form of breaking into the establishment. That's also a proven stragegy, but its not without its own risks and is really beyond the scope of what started this comment thread. But it does need to acknowledged, so that's fair.

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