Awesome article.
Defining a start-up culture to include healthy boundaries, including time expectations is more important than fund-raising.
Investors are well served to ask about the technical culture and product engineering methodology of any company they invest in. If an investor gets a blank stare from an entrepreneur when asked about technical culture then they should be concerned. If they get a long list of technical jargon and then the word Agile or Extreme or some other buzzword they should worry too.
If instead an investor hears about the importance of transparency, sane work hours and respect of employee time and growth AND a specific creative plan to protect these they may have a team that “gets it”.
My background is engineering, and I often try and focus early start-up work on defining technical culture and spending a lot of time on the “What” of a project (versus the “How” and even worse the “How Long”). From there its a few hours to a product engineering methodology and storyboards which can serve as the basis of how the team works and what they are building while also serving as a mechanism to protect engineering time and mental health as things invariably get rocky.
