Startups don't have to burn you out

If you work like a crazy person, eventually you go crazy.

In the last few weeks I had several conversations with people I’d be happy to have working with me. They said they’re afraid to make the move, mainly because of what it would do to their work-life balance. So here’s how we see it, and why I think it doesn’t have to be that way.

How I burned out

Let’s start many years ago. Around 2012 I joined a startup as the first employee, in my twenties and with no kids. I basically had nothing much to do in life other than go to a Maccabi game once a week. The two founders had already been working for about half a year without salaries, and I joined right after the fundraise.

It was a great time. I learned a ton and grew professionally in an exceptional way. On the other hand, work was my life. I worked something like 12 hours a day and didn’t have much room for anything else.

It’s important to say that nobody told me to stay, and nobody made a face when I left at 5 (for a Maccabi game). It just worked that way, by inertia.

This also wasn’t a two-week crunch before a release, or a month for some event. We ran like that for more than three years. I didn’t feel it was bad (I’m learning and growing!), and nobody was there to tell me to stop. Even when my eldest daughter was born it didn’t change. A few days at home and, hop, back to it.

Half a year later everything started to collapse. A chain of unrelated events, a family crisis, health problems with my daughter and a deal that fell through, all drained together, and I simply crashed.

I couldn’t get out of bed. I spent whole months either at playgrounds or in hospitals. In hindsight I understood it was burnout. In real time it was just 0% energy.

It was a formative event for me. Since then I’ve been very careful about a few rules to protect this, and more than that, it’s important for me to pass it on to the people working with me and to create a balanced work environment.

Because that’s the thing about work-life balance: it’s like sand, and it will easily slip through your fingers if you don’t pay attention.

What I do now

Since then I make sure to have at least one short day, and the vast majority of the time I close the computer at 6pm. Even in more stressful periods. Even when I was in leadership positions.

I can do that because the group plans ahead, understands that resources are limited, and tries to get the most out of them assuming people work 8 hours a day (or even less).

There’s a lot to say about how you do each thing: good communication, pedantic planning, the ability to adjust while moving, people raising flags often. But it starts with the basic constraint. We have X person-hours, and that won’t move, no matter what. You can’t play with those numbers. Now let’s see what we can do, and when.

That conversation is what we started from as founders. The three of us left very comfortable (and well-paid) jobs, we all have kids, we all have hobbies, and we knew we weren’t going to hurt that. We say it out loud to investors too: we’re going to kill ourselves for this every day, and then we’re going to go help with bath time.

How it usually happens

What usually happens in startups looks like this. The founders, who are very invested, work very hard. The beginning of a company is chaotic and there’s always something to do. More people join and carry on the same way, by inertia.

Then the first version comes out, not exactly on time of course (that’s software projects for you), and everyone works very hard on it, and that’s how the snowball grows. More employees join an existing reality, see that this is how things work here and that you can’t get ahead without working 12 hours a day. And nobody stops to think.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

That’s why I struggle when people say you can’t do a startup without working like crazy. If you work like crazy, eventually you go crazy. If you own 40% of the company, fine, you’re the one who went all in. But if you own 0.04%? I don’t expect you to go crazy. We’re in a marathon here, and everyone has to save their breath.

People need to care: about the company, the customers, the people, the product. In a startup especially, I think that’s a must. But you can’t exploit it. And it can’t be that if someone goes on a three-day vacation, everything collapses. If that’s the situation, the company has much bigger problems and it’s an unhealthy work environment. In the long run, I have to solve that.

I’m not fooling myself. A startup is much more stressful and demanding than a big company. In a big company, when balls get dropped, there’s often a support network that catches them (or nobody cares that the ball fell). The challenge is to create an environment where even in a startup, when balls fall (and they will), it isn’t a catastrophe.

Is it possible? I think (and hope) so.

What I do know is that this time I’ll take a step back if I see us starting to slide down that slope, and for that we’ve set up a support network of people who will say “stop” in time.

This post started as a thread on X.