How I Feel as Young Father Involved in Early-stage Startup
I think Paul Graham summed up the situation fairly well when he wrote:<p>"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."<p>and this:<p>"Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job."<p>and the reasons why we might want to do a startup:<p>"For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it."<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html</a><p>That essay can be read both as an inspiration and as a warning. On the positive side, it is good to realize how much you can achieve in a few short years. On the negative side, you must be wholly focused on one thing during those few short years. The rest of your life needs to put on hold.<p>A personal anecdote: I am a bit of a news junkie, and I typically spend an hour or two a day reading the news, but when I had my own startup, I gave up reading the news. For the years 2003 to 2004, and for most of 2006, I rarely read the news. That was a huge change of personal habits for me. But avoiding the news was important for me to stay focused. I would write code for 12 hours a day, sometimes 14 hours a day. I think one has to have a very narrow focus during the first year or two of a startup.