Ask HN: Is it normal for founders of startups to not sleep?
I am concerned that he is too tired to make decisions effectively and may be making cognitive errors. I have no evidence that this is taking place so far, except some small errors here and there, but where there is smoke there is fire right? I’m usually a pretty direct guy, but I have ruled out talking to him about it because I do not think there is a way to make the conversation productive.
What I am asking is:
Is it normal for founders to send emails at random times all night to the team (most nights)? If it is not normal, have others experience founders that did that and am I overreacting? Are there any examples of people who are successful who exhibit this behavior and are those simply antidotes? Is anyone aware of whether this is a good or bad sign?
61 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadYou are joining a startup. To you it's just a great opportunity at a job that seemed interesting to you. To the founder, it's his life. At 2:30am you might be leaving the bar thinking about whether to call an Uber or a Lyft. Your founders are probably awake thinking about how they're going to get that new feature out the door.
I started my own startup a little over 2 years ago. It's pretty normal every night between 2 and 5am for one of the three founders to send a message to another about something they're freaking out about.
He's not thinking "Oh it's 3am, I shouldn't email my employee this late". He's thinking "There's something on my mind about my company and I need to get it off my chest".
If you start your own company and get a few employees it makes a lot more sense VERY quickly.
Don't worry, he/she's just very invested.
A lot of startup founders don't think much about management principles and the importance of perception in an organization, but these things matter. When founders are emailing around the clock, many employees will come away with the perception that they're expected to be available at all hours of the day and night too. Your employees are never going to be as invested as you, so this typically creates stress and dissatisfaction for employees more than it motivates and impresses them.
As this Ask HN post demonstrates, a workaholic warrior complex is also a great way to convince your employees that you're an "i" word (insane, insensitive, imbalanced, incompetent, etc.).
It simply doesn't work. From my experience it fucks up the company culture when a founder tries to "tone it down", because that's not the quality required to make stuff happen when it's in the beginning stage.
A competent founder should be able to adapt as the company grows, but shouldn't behave like a fortune 500 CEO from the beginning.
Just look at the OP: he left an ostensibly good job to join a YC startup and he's already questioning the founder's behavior and competence. When he starts feeling pressured to work insane hours, or completely loses faith in the founder's sanity and competence, how long do you think it will take him to find a new employer that promises something better?
At the risk of being overly harsh, if you feel you're incapable of making "stuff happen" without sending random emails at 3 am in the morning or acting like you don't have control over your schedule and business or terrorizing your employees into believing that they need to be online at all hours, you're probably out of your depth and should be honest with yourself about your readiness to run a business with employees.
A lot of people in the startup community have deluded themselves into believing that "hard work" is the one and only key to success but by and large, successful businesses are built by doing the right things, not by running around for 18 hours a day like a chicken with its head cut off. Thanks to the funding boom, a lot of chickens with their heads cut off are running companies. Folks like the OP work for them at their own peril.
1. A rockstar developer who wants work-life balance 2. Not famous but passionate junior developer who has potential
I would always pick 2 over 1. I know because I have made exactly that mistake of hiring #1. And the company culture went to shit. If I was the founder of that company and found out about this I would have a talk with OP and if there's disagreement I would rather let him go than trying to tone it down. Company culture is much more important than one or two rockstar developers. Also you don't attract great employees with a promise of work-life balance--you can only attract "good" employees that way. Great employees are attracted to passion.
Go to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and tons of other industry defining founders and ask them if they worked leisurely with work-life balance or ran around like a chicken with its head cut off.
Humans need sleep and whether they sleep 4 or 8 hours doesn't really matter. The work is just always on their minds, 24/7. They are always on call. They are always reachable. They never say no. The passion, focus, and obsession for the business oozes out of them, even when they are ''out of the office''. There is not even a question of work-life balance because work is their life.
Personally I like to invest in and work with people like this because they tend to succeed, make disruption happen at scale, and make lots of money upon exits. A lot of recruits burn out and don't like it, but the ones who survive learn a ton and make a lot of money too.
Without starting a debate about the benefits or perils of work-life balance, most startup employees should recognize the following facts:
1. Startup founders are not created equal. In today's hot market, there are a lot of inexperienced and incompetent people running startups. These people can work as hard as they want and ooze passion from every pore in their bodies but at the end of the day, they're incapable of building successful businesses.
2. Statistically, most startups won't achieve an exit. At those that do, most employees don't "make lots of money."
3. Many startups offer far fewer learning experiences than employees would like to believe because misdirected hustle and hard work are encouraged and rewarded even though they are not correlated with competence and outcomes.
Last night, for example, I had dinner with a super bright scientist friend. Within minutes we were into a detailed discussion of the science of using ultrasound to examine breast tissue. (It was great to watch people crane their necks to find out why somebody was talking animatedly about the racial differences in the tissue composition of women's breasts and what implications that has for frequency choices.) It's clear that when he's on a project, he just thinks about this stuff all the time. But never once did he mention how hard he worked, because he he's far too interested in the work to give a shit what people think about how hard he's working.
One of the thing that really troubles me about the current startup zeitgeist is the extent to which people are here because they want to do a startup, rather than their passion for their particular domain. If I were the OP, I'd really be worried that I had a CEO who was here because it was fashionable, one that focused on the performance of working than who was truly dedicated to making things happen.
1. http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_suc...
The second thing to consider is the use of stimulants like modafinil, apparently quite common in the startup community.
Would not use again unless my life depended on it.
In my opinion, this question is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how the founder's behavior makes you feel.
You say that you have worked with people who are extremely effective but never seen similar behavior. You say you are concerned that the founder is too tired and may be exhibiting poor decision-making. And, perhaps most importantly, you don't feel comfortable broaching the subject with him.
It appears your gut is telling you that something is off here. When it comes to where you invest your time professionally, you can usually do far worse than to follow your intuition.
> "The lead founder of the company sends emails at all hours of the night, even 3 or 4AM and talks about how little sleep he is getting like it is a badge of honor."
and seeing how it connected to your original posting:
I don't get it. YC doesn't guarantee success. From what I read, YC gets the pick of the litter, the rejects either raise money from others or bootstrap or just go back to the workforce. The same thing happens even if you are in YC...You made a decision to leave a stable job to join a YC startup. You realize the founder is not letting you sleep or has some weird ego about being poorly productive (no sleep means you aren't performing 100%), and now you are questioning if you made the right choice, and it seems like you have every right to question your decision based on the environment you are currently in.
A normal and healthy working environment (YC or being a startup is no excuse) doesn't have people sending emails at 4AM and expecting people to read their bragging rights on how shitty their work output will be throughout tomorrow because they didn't sleep. IF I WAS AN INVESTOR AND THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WERE BURNING MY MONEY I WOULD BE FUCKING LIVID AND IMMEDIATELY FIRE WHOEVER IS RUNNING YOUR COMPANY.
The personal sacrifices and risks that founders take on likely changes their personalities and behavior. Once they enter this feedback loop of sleep deprivation, extreme work ethic, and dedication to their startup above all else, it's quite difficult for them to get out of it. And the longer they stay in it, the more likely that things will end badly for them.
The worst part is that these individuals are the least likely to listen to reason and get help.
I have this habit and my sleeping schedule sometimes gets shaky. I am also a founder of a small start-up so all this sounds like me (expect maybe badge of honor thing as I see messed up sleeping schedule as a problem not a thing to brag about). I think that as along is it's understood that those emails are not urgent to respond (or even read) and are there as just "things to look at once you have time" it's all good.
I think it's good to clarify their position on it and what their expectations are for you reacting to those emails.
There's a non-zero chance that the person sending these emails will read this message. There's a very high chance that someone matching the description will read this message, since there's definitely not enough info in the Ask HN here to uniquely identify anyone :)
So, as not a startup founder and likely never will be one, I implore you founders to remember that we are not founders, and you can't expect the rest of us to act like founders without the possible upside. Further, I'd suggest that you should want your first few employees to sleep well, so that they can provide a well-rested analysis of whatever crazy thoughts you had at 3am when you've had 10 hours of sleep in the last four days. That's actually a good thing, something you should seek out, cherish, and listen to.
If he expects you to answer at 3am, it's time to find a new job.
If he's willing to wait to get an answer, then don't worry about it.
I turn of the sound and vibrate on my phone, so I don't get interrupted while I'm sleeping.
He's probably just trying to show off about how dedicated he is. Don't get tricked into overworking yourself to match him.
No.
It's just asynchronous communication in the most speedy way: email as soon as you come up with an idea/solution.
To OP: It's not a question of whether it is normal or not. Every startup is different. Sure, there are some mildly successful companies with founders who have "work-life balance", but the ones that are unusually successful normally have founders who are unusually obsessive.
Somehow he still managed to accrue $660 billion (inflation-adjusted).
Every recipient is in control of the notifications on their phone and can switch them off overnight.
It sounds like you have a different issue with this individual, assuming they're making sleep-deprived errors and reading too much into this? If they were calling you at that hour repeatedly, then that would be a different story but email is more akin to snail mail - the recipient opens it when they choose to open it.
I'm surprised that many commentators here imply that email sent at 3am demands immediate reply.
2. Just cause he can stay up for a long time cause he's young and have no other responsibilities doesn't make him any better than anyone else.
3. Playing at tech startups is just playing a video game. Some people get obsessive over it and some people do it casually and most everyone else is in between those two extremes.
He's trying to motivate his employees by showing his dedication. If he wants to work in the middle of the night, let him do so. It's normal for startup founders to work late or wake up in the middle of the night with random thoughts.
I highly doubt you're expected to respond to it immediately anyway.
Also, it's not really your job to worry about his cognitive capabilities. That's his responsibility, and some people can get away with less sleep than others.
If you don't trust in his ability and the future of the startup, then you should simply leave the company.
As a side story, the first startup I worked for back in the late 90s during the first bubble the CEO was older and well respected among Internet companies. He had just come off the CEO position at one of the biggest data center companies of the time and was well connected. One day not long after I started I had an idea for the company and randomly emailed him at like 10pm. He responded around 3 or 4am. I was working night shift in the data center and emailed him right back (part with a sense of surprise that he answered me and part with a sense of surprise that it was that early in the morning). Long story short, it ended up becoming an open line of communication between us that if I had a question or needed something I would just email him at 3am and usually have an answer within minutes.
As for the other part regarding the bragging, I would just take that in strides. That's just part immaturity and part probably trying to make co-workers feel guilty for only working 10 hours instead of 11 each day. I think it also comes from the accelerator mentality of grind, grind, grind to have a demo product in a short period of time.
Regardless I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you start seeing problems such as him demanding employees do the same (i.e. expecting you to respond to emails at 3am) or having short temper with employees. I wouldn't worry about the little errors either. It is a startup there are going to be missteps along the way. Most likely his sleep habits will change over time as the company gets it feet well planted.
Surround yourself with these guys. You'll get far.
Mistake. Big mistake.
Anyway - there is rock-solid scientific evidence to suggest that sleep deprivation damages cognitive abilities and decision making.
See e.g.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656292/
Depriving yourself of sleep is false heroism. You do not "get more done." All you're doing is increasing internal friction, decreasing personal effectiveness, and making yourself cranky and stupid.
To answer your question, yeah it's normal to send things at odd hours, but immature to constantly talk about it as if you deserve some sort of special treatment for it.