Ask HN: As a founder how does your weekends look like?
Uhhhh, the usual, restless sleep, wake up at 7am, check email, check bank account balance, silent panic, cold sweats, yesterday's coffee, 2 days ago Pizza, a few dozen rejection emails from assorted VCs and angels, listen to cofounder latest complaints against team he hand picked and trained himself, checks site, checks google analytics, one transaction, a faint smile, a hope of a better future, an attack of naivete, and Monday is here again....
For something everyone is aiming at, sounds terrible. Do you at least get the girl or something in the end?
What are these weekends of which you speak? :)
Just kidding, I'm in an 18 year old company so my weekends are pretty sweet. Driving tractors and stuff.
But when we started, and even now, it is rare that more than 6 hours go by and we haven't checked email. We are weird, we do pretty great support so people check emails on weekends to see if there is a big problem. If there isn't, off we go to some fun. If there is, rally the troops and get it fixed.
We're in the enterprise software space so it's sort of expected that we have some coverage on weekends.
All that said, if we do our job right, weekends are pretty boring. Which is why we peer review everything and regression test everything. Even with that some stuff slips through but not very often. We did a .0 release 6 weeks ago, found one bug, about to push a .0.1 release out the door. Boring. Which is how I like it.
My situation is similar. 18-year old company. At weekends I check email occasionally, but don't reply until Monday unless it's an urgent issue (which it generally isn't).
There generally should never any need to do any work on weekends unless it's an unusual situation. You're just reducing your overall productivity if you work too much. Having said that, sometimes I do work on problems over the weekend just for the fun of it.
Emails are very tempting. I am on the same boat but, I have been working with a remote team and usually happen to work a lot during weekends because of timezone issues. Working with 5 year old company (remote), bootstraped and I recently moved to Bay Area. Was wondering how it goes with other founders here. Thanks for writing.
For me it is mostly support, so it tends to be questions like "how do I do this thing that is explained in the FAQ that I didn't read"?
If it was questions from colleagues then I might reply, although it would probably depend on the situation, and I certainly wouldn't want there to be an expectation that I would reply quickly to any and all emails. (I don't have any colleagues, so it's not an issue for me :)
I'm flying up to Silicon Valley tomorrow (from LA) to host a user group meeting. I don't do that every weekend; usually I try to balance work, family and church. But yeah, there's work. (5 year old bootstrapped company; doing it full-time for the last 4 months only. 1 employee, in training.)
I use weekends to do experimental work ... trying out new frameworks, or different machine learning strategies, which I'm doing right now, 2am Saturday morning :)
Sometimes I take 1 or 2 hours off during the day to play some PS4 ... dont push myself too hard in the weekends
I try to stop work by Friday evening and start up again Monday morning but lately I've been using Sunday nights to get an early start on the work week.
Like a normal person's weekend.
How was it at your first startup? Different, I guess?
If so, do you think your "normal weekend" is mostly related to one of the following points, all of them, or something else entirely?
a) wealthy enough, not needing to make it work to put food on the table
b) old enough to have priorities shifted
c) easier circumstances (like reputation, network of colleagues etc.)
Depending on how you count, I'm on my 5th or 6th startup, starting from 1996. Of the previous 4-5 (ie, not including Starfighter), all but one had good exits; three of them grossed me a pretty substantial amount of money.
Only one of those companies demanded my evenings and weekends; it did so because I was a cofounder and I let it do that. And it's the one that failed catastrophically.
2 startups back for me is Arbor Networks, which I joined in 2001, and which was acquired in 2010 for a very large amount of money (it had hundreds of employees at the time). I was hired to take over as lead dev from Dug Song on their flagship product, which at the time (a) had no major customers and (b) was locked in an intense dogfight with two other well-funded competitors with the same small set of customer prospects.
I worked one weekend. Arbor got a deal to monitor the South Korean Winter Olympics for DDoS attacks and the engineering team took shifts managing the deployment. A big deal was made over the fact that we were being asked to do that.
(I later switched from dev to product management, and my schedule got grueling; in particular, I had the worst travel burden of my career. But I asked for that.)
No. I don't think I have normal weekends because I'm wealthy enough to thumb my nose at the startup lifestyle. I thumb my nose at that lifestyle because it is moronic and doesn't work.
Thanks! I knew you had more than Matasano under your belt, but not how many.
I'm still doubtful if startups can generally work with "sensible hours". It's probably one of the big reasons why I never thought about joining one (besides that it's still unusual in Germany).
Thanks for sharing. Were you ever in a situation where you had to bootstrap while working fulltime?
I'm a great supporter of the lifestyle that we shouldn't have to work and am trying to figure it all out.
i like to get more online learning, because these days are busy days and you only have one time at a time. so yeah, learning while you can ! :p
we meet a lot of users during the week (and also sometimes have other meetings) so weekends are a really great time to focus on the product and build slightly larger changes to test during the week. fewer distractions and emails on the weekend