Reid Hoffman on why the best founders don’t have work-life balance

In the clip below, the founder of LinkedIn addresses the classic question of work-life balance at startups:

“I actually think founders have no balance… If I ever hear a founder talking about how ‘this is how I have a balanced life’ and so forth, they’re not committed to winning… The really great founders are like: ‘I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years… But while I’m doing this, I am unbalanced at this thing.’ It’s not to say that you don’t take breaks or you don’t go on dates or whatever else. But you’re super focused on this because it’s really hard and there’s lots of ways to die.”

Elon Musk emphasizes this as well:

“If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks, and you’re putting in 80-hour work weeks, you will achieve in 6 months what takes them a year to achieve, which will greatly improve your odds of success”

Why make such extreme sacrifices?

Well, as Paul Graham puts it in his essay How To Make Wealth:

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.”

In the early years, you will have to make lots of sacrifices and shouldn’t really expect much work-life balance if you want your startup to be successful.

But you can view it as an opportunity to compress your whole working life into a few years.

And hopefully excitement about what you’re building and the extremely talented team you’re building it with make those long hours way more fun and rewarding than a normal 9-to-5 job.

Full video: Y Combinator “How to Be a Great Founder with Reid Hoffman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 13)” (Oct 2014)