How many hours should founders work? (part 1)
An analysis of how many hours YCombinator founders work with perspective from YC's CEOs on how to think about this
A few months ago, I posted on YCombinator’s internal forum asking YC founders how many hours they work. I cut the results by stage of company below. The genesis of this poll came from repeated conversations I’ve had with founders around hours worked, and I wanted more data.
Here are the results of that poll:
Founders who are pre-product market fit work the most. That makes a lot of sense. In the early days, you have a lot of energy. You don't really know what you're doing. You spend a lot of time on things that probably aren't worth doing, but you don't really know what's worth doing yet. In the early days, when it's one or two founders, every incremental hour you work feels like it could be the difference between success and failure. Once you achieve product market fit and are post-series A, you have a lot more idea where the value is, and you have a much bigger team to provide leverage. By the time you have a team of twenty people, every incremental hour you work is unlikely to change the trajectory of the business as much, particularly if they are hours when you're already exhausted and you're not doing your best work.
Recently, this topic came up again in one of the YCombinator CEO WhatsApp threads, and I wanted to share some of the highlights here. The essence of the question posed was: I’m working 14 hours a day (post-product market fit, team of 20), and a younger founder I know is working 18 hours a day – am I doing enough?
In the WhatsApp thread, many founders offered helpful perspective on this, and I’ll be quoting them here with their permission. The responses centered around three themes:
Productivity vs hours (this post)
Tips for optimizing your time (next post)
The deeper meaning (next post)
I’ll now dive into each of these.
Productivity vs hours
The biggest unlock for founders is when they figure out how to manage themselves. A lot of the advice offered in the thread centered on this topic: do you manage your time well?
If you’re using hours as a proxy for productivity, you’re looking at the wrong thing. Hours are not productivity. I don't need to argue this with you. You already know this to be true. There are some days when you when you spend 8 hours working and you get a crap ton done, and there are some days when you spend 12 hours working and all you've done is answered a couple emails, answered some slack messages, and completed a hodge podge of low-value tasks. On those days, it doesn’t feel like you’ve done anything of significance because you haven’t. When I talk to founders about hours the conversation really needs to be about productivity. How are you setting goals for yourself? How are you achieving those goals on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? How are you making sure that your most productive hours of the day are used to accomplish the most important things?
Yaseer Sheriff said this well in the YC CEO WhatsApp thread:
“As CEO our main job is decision-making. It's not like working in a factory making socks, where every additional hour means you made more socks. If you work more hours, do you make better decisions? You can certainly make more decisions, of poorer quality, the more tired you are. It's probably more important to sleep well and take care of your mental and physical health (whatever that means for you), and make better decisions every day, and set yourself up to run the marathon, than it is to burn out.
Like your friend, I bought into the grind more in my 20s, and honestly it was the folly of youth. I am more effective with 9 hour days in my 30s than with 18 hour days back then.”
And from Pradeep Elankumaran:
“Personally, I found in my 20s (without kids) for my first company that it was much easier to lose track of time and not take care of my own personal requirements. Once I had kids (2nd company), my work hours were limited to <10 hours by family routines. I feel much more productive nowadays, and am able to make the hard calls on what I spend my time on.
The time constraint forced me to inspect my own beliefs and thought patterns to understand the root causes of why I am sometimes unproductive across multiple days, which led me into a rabbit hole of self-improvement.”
Another founder shared their perspective on getting into flow state:
“It seems to be the case that limiting your work hours leads to exponentially better performance. Some people are thousands of times more productive than others. They don’t have thousands of times more hours. Thus, hours are not the leverage point.
Working strictly limited hours forces you to find the highest-leverage solutions fast. It forces you to work on the most valuable tasks. It allows you to rapidly access a sweet spot in terms of challenge-skills balance where you’re stretched just beyond your capacity and push through frustration in a distraction-clear environment — which is the recipe for flow state: a productivity multiplier and a highly enjoyable way to work. And the downtime allows you to recover, which is part of the flow cycle which enables you to get into flow again.”
Next up: Part 2: Optimizing Your Time
Luna Ray works with post-PMF founders as an executive coach. She is the founder and Chair of YCombinator-backed Plura and ex-Meta, Instagram, Faire, and Bain & Company.