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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

Not all, but almost all of the successful founders I know are obsessively focused on their startups and they don't put much time into other areas of their lives (family, social life, etc).

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.

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You're missing a key point: it is possible for a founder to be obsessively focused on a business without engaging in behavior that causes employees severe agita.

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.

I mainly agree, but I think there's a big difference between focus, which is good, and "talks about how little sleep he is getting like it is a badge of honor". A lot of great people I know are very dedicated, but I think that's very different than performing dedication.

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.

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