<story><title>Startups, Role Models, Risk, and Y Combinator</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/startups-role-models-risk-and-y-combinator</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Call me cynical, but I tripped over this paragraph:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;For example, when Adora Cheung was starting Homejoy, she would work all day as a cleaner to learn the business, drive an hour back to Mountain View, stay up as late as she could coding, then drive back to San Francisco at ~3am to beat traffic, sleep in her car, and do it again.  She also gave both her apartment and her car to early cleaners so that they could partner up with Homejoy.  We don’t want to delude anyone about what running a startup is like—it’s a rational decision to decide you don’t want to start a startup.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I read here is the idea that the only way to do a startup is no sleep (except a few hours in a car) and no life. 100% of your time is startup, startup, startup.&lt;p&gt;Who profits most from cultivating this image? The startup founder or the VC?&lt;p&gt;I seldomly see current founders &amp;#x2F; executives say that this is how they lead their lives, but somehow, VCs (like Altman) keep squeezing this image into their blog posts somehow.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s some kind of evil plot, and I like the rest of the post: it&amp;#x27;s good to be reminded that everybody started somewhere and nobody&amp;#x27;s great from the start. But I just don&amp;#x27;t believe that you can&amp;#x27;t be a successful founder and still have a life&amp;#x2F;family&amp;#x2F;healthy lifestyle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>birken</author><text>Successful founders certainly have an incentive to make it seem like founding their startup was extremely hard so it seems like their success was more due to skill and less due to luck.  This isn&amp;#x27;t to say the ratio of skill&amp;#x2F;luck is any specific number, just that a founder always has an incentive to tell the history in a way that tilts it more to the &amp;quot;skill&amp;quot; side.&lt;p&gt;Though I think the whole ecosystem (VCs, founders, the press) feed this notion because attributing success to luck isn&amp;#x27;t really interesting to people.  You don&amp;#x27;t see a lot of books by lottery winners about how to succeed in life.&lt;p&gt;Again, this isn&amp;#x27;t to say these stories aren&amp;#x27;t true; founding a startup is extremely difficult.  But then again, so are a lot of things.  If I just selectively picked and exaggerated stories of &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; programmers, I could make them seem like really special people.&lt;p&gt;So basically, my advice is to trust a story of a successful startup&amp;#x27;s founding history with the same grain of salt you would a fisherperson&amp;#x27;s story of how large of a fish they caught on their last vacation.  Some truth, some exaggeration, and without any evidence you have no way to know.</text></comment>
<story><title>Startups, Role Models, Risk, and Y Combinator</title><url>http://blog.samaltman.com/startups-role-models-risk-and-y-combinator</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>Call me cynical, but I tripped over this paragraph:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;For example, when Adora Cheung was starting Homejoy, she would work all day as a cleaner to learn the business, drive an hour back to Mountain View, stay up as late as she could coding, then drive back to San Francisco at ~3am to beat traffic, sleep in her car, and do it again.  She also gave both her apartment and her car to early cleaners so that they could partner up with Homejoy.  We don’t want to delude anyone about what running a startup is like—it’s a rational decision to decide you don’t want to start a startup.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What I read here is the idea that the only way to do a startup is no sleep (except a few hours in a car) and no life. 100% of your time is startup, startup, startup.&lt;p&gt;Who profits most from cultivating this image? The startup founder or the VC?&lt;p&gt;I seldomly see current founders &amp;#x2F; executives say that this is how they lead their lives, but somehow, VCs (like Altman) keep squeezing this image into their blog posts somehow.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s some kind of evil plot, and I like the rest of the post: it&amp;#x27;s good to be reminded that everybody started somewhere and nobody&amp;#x27;s great from the start. But I just don&amp;#x27;t believe that you can&amp;#x27;t be a successful founder and still have a life&amp;#x2F;family&amp;#x2F;healthy lifestyle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>a-priori</author><text>I work for a startup. We&amp;#x27;re 15 people all told, and by all indications we&amp;#x27;re doing great.&lt;p&gt;The entire team shows up by 9:30am every day, and the office is empty again by 5:30pm, almost like clockwork. I exaggerate a bit... every now and then you might have a couple people stay past 6pm, but that&amp;#x27;s about it. Overtime is a very rare thing indeed.&lt;p&gt;I find it absurd this meme that to be successful in a startup, you must work yourself to exhaustion every day, sleep very little, and do it again the next day.&lt;p&gt;Or at least, it&amp;#x27;s not true for any company (startup or otherwise) that I&amp;#x27;d ever want to work for.</text></comment>