The “Hard Work” You Really Sign Up For At a Startup
This post is one of a series which covers common questions about where startups come from, how they work, and how to navigate a career in the startup world.
Q. I hear that people at startups work like crazy. Is that true?
Startup teams usually work hard, and if you drop by a typical startup office you’ll see something that looks a lot like it: an office buzzing with activity, energetic young people bouncing between meeting in always-booked conference rooms, and long hours late into the night and over the weekends.
That is not to say that startups work uniquely hard: a typical medical resident, law firm associate, PhD candidate, or Wall Street analyst probably works even more hours and has less day-to-day freedom. But it’s true that startups aren’t a great career for someone who wants an easy nine-to-five existence. Although the kinds of people who start or join early stage companies usually aren’t looking for that anyway.
But what separates startups that succeed versus the rest is not so much the number of hours worked, it’s how those hours are spent. Great startup teams learn to identify the work that really matters and get it done, even when that work is difficult, unpleasant or contentious.
Q. So what is the “hard work” that really matters?
Startup teams are very dedicated and ambitious, but it’s usually easy to sit down with a team and find that they either haven’t identified the work that is important or are finding ways to avoid doing that work. I’ve met founders who will:
- Sit 100 hours a week in front of a computer writing code, but will spend weeks putting off a 10 minute conversation they are dreading where they need to fire someone who works for them who is performing poorly.
- Spend five nights a week at startup meetups and conferences, but haven’t yet flown to Saint Louis to spend a week networking at the “boring” industry conference where their buyers hang out.
- Spend endless hours instrumenting their product and crunching the resulting data looking for insights (which is necessary, of course), but haven’t yet simply picked up the phone and called 20 of their users and ask them why they aren’t buying the product.
- Spend weeks working on the wrong product features because the team is so focused making a deadline that they “didn’t have time” to meet and discuss whether new information has made that product plan obsolete.
- Hire their startup’s first ten team members from their network of college friends instead of spending the time branching out into new networks to bring more experience and diversity onto the team.
- Spend two months dithering about a necessary product strategy pivot because the decision will upset one of the co-founders who is stuck on the initial vision.
- Suffer conflict, politics, and duplicate efforts between groups in the company because everyone is “too busy” to sit down an have a staff meeting every week.
Usually, these kinds of tasks are not getting neglected because they are time consuming. They get neglected because they are difficult, uncomfortable, require hard choices, or require briefly stepping back from the day-to-day work to reflect and make some decisions.
Q. OK, I can see that. But the advice to work on the right things would apply to someone working at a big company, too. Why is this unique to startups?
Focusing on what matters is important no matter what you are doing. It matters at large companies, small companies, and even in your personal life. But it’s especially important at a startup for a few reasons:
Startups have little room for error. The clock starts ticking the day a startup is founded and the team starts scrambling to get enough traction to obtain the revenue or funding to live another day. A single bad hire or delayed decision can put a company out of business when it’s margin for error is just a few month’s cash.
The founders usually are not experienced managers. Bigger companies have management teams whose job it is to identify the right priorities and motivate the team to work on them. Many startups are founded by younger people who haven’t managed before — it takes them some time to realize that they are the management team, and it is entirely up to them what the company works on — no one will come along and do it for them. They also lack the “muscle memory” that experienced managers develop to do the day-to-day tough conversations and decisions needed to manage a team.
The right things aren’t always obvious. Larger companies operate in established markets with established competitors and playbooks for how they execute. A typical big company employee isn’t exposed to decisions that can make or break the company. But startups are constantly stretching to find the right team, product, and customers, which means lots of trial and error and hard decisions.
Most founders identify with a specific discipline. Most founders have a background in coding, product design, growth hacking, business development, or some other specific skill. Like most people, they tend to turn to their strengths to solve problems: the engineer solves problems by writing code, the designer designs, and the deal-maker makes deals. But the work that needs done often falls outside of the comfort zone of the team members. Whoever takes it on will risk failure since they are doing something they aren’t good at, and few people enjoy that, especially the high achievers who are attracted to startups in the first place.
The work changes. When a startup begins to get some traction, it is rewarded by a whole new set of challenges that require the team to start spending their time differently. Inertia and habit often keep teams doubling down on what has worked so far just when they need to rethink how they do things.
Good old fashioned procrastination. Even for experienced managers, it sucks to fire someone. It’s hard to pull the plug on a beloved project. It’s exhausting for introverted founders to spend hours in customer meetings. Great founders find a way to get the hard stuff done. They know there is a reason it’s call “work.”
Q. Got it. So what are some things that startup leaders can do to make sure they are working on the right things?
The best companies seem to:
Pick the right team. Startup team members need to wear many hats and need to rapidly learn skills that they lack. But that being said, no one has the discipline to spend all day every day doing tasks they hate. This is why the first few people at a startup need to have a mix of talents: people who are more extroverted and people who are more introverted. People who love analyzing problems and people who love getting on the road presenting to customers. People who love to to manage others and people who want to be individual contributors. This is why pairing a technical and a business-oriented co-founder is often a recipe for success: each can do what they enjoy and are good at.
Pick the right idea. If a team is passionate about an idea, they’ll break down walls to make it work. Teams should pick an idea that plays to their passions and their strengths. A team who loves sitting in the office writing code probably shouldn’t start a company that rewards enterprise sales skills unless they can find a co-founder who can spend all of his or her time on the road with customers.
Get into a regular cadence. Good teams get into a regular cadence of meetings and decision making: weekly staff meetings, weekly 1–1’s with their team members, regular replanning sessions, and regular check-ins with their board and investors. Getting into a weekly cadence, where the team meets at the same time every week, makes it more likely that a team will spend time talking about the hard decisions that are easy to neglect when things get busy.
Stay healthy. Getting the hard things done often takes energy more than it does time. Firing a poorly-performing employee or breaking bad news to the board might take 10 minutes, but it can take lots of energy to rally oneself to finally take those 10 minutes. Great teams find time for exercise, sleep, vacations, friends and family, which help give them the energy to do hard things.
Embrace the challenge. We all gravitate towards things we like and are good at. We all avoid painful conversations. We all hate risk and failure. Don’t beat yourself up. Accept this as your challenge, and start thinking through some strategies to spend more of your time on what matters.
Good luck!
