antipattern

I am having a chat with a startup CEO, and he casually mentions that he works 80 hours a week. He is a moderately famous person, wealthy, and made his money at the Google rocket ship like many others. He could have stayed at Google forever, but started wondering about the outside world, and now made the jump into the startup world.

I am not sure what to say about his amazing work ethic. I just nod my head as you are supposed to do. This is what everyone knows it takes to make it in Silicon Valley. The conversation goes on to other things.

There has been periods that I really worked a lot too. I've always been a bit afraid to add up how much I work. Just like commuting in the Bay Area, you best should not add up how much you drive, since the numbers are likely to be very depressing.

After the meeting, I start thinking maybe I should talk to the CEO about cutting down on his hours. I am not sure and I think he would probably take it badly.

I want to say to him, even if you could work 1000 hours a week, your startup is still most likely to fail. You will just burn yourself out, as I have done. You end up with no startup, no life, and bad health.

Maybe consider working 10 hours a week instead of 80. Yeah, really do that, just don't tell your investors who will likely fire your ass in five minutes.

The reason is quite simple.

You cannot do everything as a CEO. If you do the same thing 3 times, you have to get someone else to do it for you. It is not worth your time doing the same thing over and over again. So you really have to think hard how to keep on doing different things.

You only need to pack a few different things into a week as a CEO to be quite successful. If you can find 80 hours of different things to do every week, you probably live in some alternate universe.

I want to be a CEO that works 10 hours a week. A lazy but very successful bum.