How Many Hours Should Your Startup Team Work?
Every year, one of my VC investors would hold a “CEO Summit.” All the of the portfolio company CEOs would gather to network and listen to presentations from various people.
The final speaker on the final day was always Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter fame. Dorsey would walk on stage, without any notes or slides, and he would start extemporaneously speaking.
To be honest, I always found Dorsey’s speeches boring and rambling. Maybe it was the lack of slides. I don’t know.
One year, in one of Dorsey’s rambling speeches that seemed to go nowhere, he said something that made me sit straight up and pay attention. Dorsey said, “I work 16 hours a day.”
Dorsey seemed to be urging all of us, and our teams, to work 16 hours day too. Quite honestly, I thought Dorsey was full of it.
I was working hard enough. Yeah, there were days that I did work 16 hours, but there were days when I worked 8 hours too. And, perish the thought, I actually took vacations.
I noticed something when I worked too many 16 hour days in a row. My productivity went way down.
