Startups are intense

It's general knowledge that founders work harder than most employees. How much harder, though? 50% more? Twice as much?

Let’s calculate the number of work hours per year.

Assumptions:

• typical European 4 weeks paid time off

• 10 public holidays excluding weekends

• and 5 sick days per year

A typical employee in a corporate job putting in 6 work hours per day in a ‘chill mode’ clocks about 1,356 hours per year.

What about others?

With vacations being ‘an email with a view', working on the weekends, public holidays, and Christmas Eve, founders put in 3-4x more work hours per year than the average corporate employee.

Essentially doing the work of at least 4 corporate employees.

“Ok Juraj, but I work smart, I don’t need to work hard”

Imagine a competitor of yours somewhere in the world who’s exactly like you.
But they operate in ‘Founder mode’ while you’re working on your business in ‘Chill mode’.
They’ll run twice as many experiments per year as you will! How will you win?

“That just makes you a workaholic”

Sort of. Think of startups as a high-performance sport. Would you tell an Olympian chasing a gold medal “chill out you’re training too much!”. Most people wouldn’t.

“Ok, but input ≠ output. You can’t be productive if you work for 12-16 hours a day” [*]

It’s the output of your effort that counts.

The more hours you put in, the faster you learn. The faster you see what works and what doesn’t. The faster you master a skill.

The effort compounds. Since you’re a lot more experienced because of working more, you’re able to get *more* done in a single hour of work over time, not less.

It’s a marathon, but you sprint the entire time

YC preaches ‘eat, sleep, build product and talk to your users’. This is fun for 3 months, but imagine keeping this up for 10 years straight. You have to love the game, otherwise any sensible person would quit.

It’s actually good news: this is how you start

Do you want to start a business, but you don’t have savings?

This is how you get your break: “Work 9-5, spend a couple hours with the family, and 7pm to 2am in the morning is plenty of time to do the damage. […] Everybody has time. Stop watching fucking Lost.”

Just be self-aware and understand what it takes.

[*] the Better Stack team works regular hours