WHEN YOU’RE ACCUSED OF WORKING TOO MUCH

Dear Founder,

Work-life balance? As I have often said in response to this question: “Are you friggin’ kidding me?”

It is not that work-life balance is not important—it is—it’s just that if you’re a founder, you’ve already decided that work will take most of your focus for the next several years. I have yet to be pitched by a founder who said having great work-life balance was a prerequisite. I have funded a lot of entrepreneurs who were working long hours to make a difference. I’ll never forget how the founders of Grubwithus, one of the companies in our portfolio (now known as GOAT), slept in a car when they were trying to raise seed funding. That said a lot to me about their focus on the company and the sacrifices they were willing to make to ensure it would be successful. Of course, not every founder has the freedom to take those kinds of risks—and that’s okay, too.

Building a transformative company requires heroics from many people, and particularly from the founders. In starting a company, the unfortunate reality is that there’s no such thing as balance. Taking an idea to greatness requires extreme—Herculean—efforts.

We all know that starting a company is not for the faint of heart. Most startups fail. In the early stages of a startup, you have to be maniacally focused. Startup life is not—and should not be—for everyone. If you want to self-fund your company, you can do whatever you want. However, if you want to take outside money, investors will expect total commitment, as that’s what it takes to break out of the morass. If you want to do something game changing, if you want to grow a thousand times bigger, if you want to transform an industry or change the world, there are likely to be difficult trade-offs.

Sometimes these trade-offs will be worth the cost, and other times they won’t be. If they are not, don’t commit to doing your job halfway. Many years ago, I was recruited to be the number two person at a hot startup. The job was supposed to be in the Bay Area, but then the new CEO, a former Microsoft exec, wanted to relocate the business to Seattle. My wife had zero interest in leaving Silicon Valley for Seattle. She didn’t want to hold me back, though, saying I could commute there and come home on the weekends. “It’s a startup,” I said. “There are no weekends.” (She was familiar with this kind of work schedule; she still enjoys telling people how when I was at Thomas-Conrad when it was a startup in Austin I once called in sick—on a Sunday.) Knowing the amount of time the new post would require, I politely declined the Seattle-based job and went to a company that was in a different phase and allowed me to be with my family.

While building a startup requires many demands and sacrifices, founders must also be mindful of their family situation and take what’s best for their loved ones into careful and constant consideration. Family must not be left behind for the needs of a company. A business succeeding at the expense of family is a failure. If you achieve wild success, but have lost your spouse and your children, what’s the point?

And, a business can never succeed without the support and understanding of a founder’s loved ones. At the start of founding a company, founders should ensure that their partners are fully aware and bought into the challenge. Before starting your business, consider talking to other people—founders and their spouses—about what the real sacrifices are. At the same time, founders need to know when to be there for family regardless of work.

As always, communication on this issue with your loved ones is key. That doesn’t mean that your partner will always understand or that there won’t be tension. There will not always be harmony, but you should always communicate what you are doing and why it’s important. There are certain times, an IPO road show for example, where balance will become even more out of whack and it’s best to highlight what will happen in advance. Companies should also try to bring significant others into the fold and make them feel welcome, which will not eliminate the burden of those left at home, but it will help them to better understand what’s happening and why it’s necessary.

Choosing between work and family demands can ignite hard decisions, but there are right decisions to be made and you can figure out this balancing act. Sometimes it’s painfully obvious. When my daughter was a baby, she contracted E. coli and was gravely ill. She was in intensive care for eight weeks and we weren’t sure she was going to make it. My wife, Irene, took a leave of absence from work. I worked part-time.

Other times, you need a framework to help you with the day-to-day conundrums. Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit who spoke at a WIN Summit, articulated this constant dilemma very well. He describes two categories of moments in life: “rubber ball moments” and “crystal ball moments.” He said of the rubber ball moments, if you drop them, they’ll bounce and come back. With the crystal ball moments, if you let them drop, they shatter and they never come back. “Our key in life is to make sure we know which is which,” Brad said.

He offered examples in his own life with his two daughters. One is a dancer who had fifteen dance recitals last year. She wanted him at every one, but he couldn’t deliver on that. “I knew if I let one dance recital drop it would bounce and next week I’d be at another one. She would be hurt, but it wouldn’t be forever,” he said. Brad defined a crystal ball moment as high school graduation. That happens one time. If dropped, it shatters forever. “I never ever prioritize work over a crystal moment, but I have to make trade-offs at times when it’s rubber. I’m very very clear about which those moments are,” Brad explained.

Technology, and the constant connectivity it offers, has made many of the daily choices both easier and harder. In a world that’s connected 24/7, in which we check email after dinner (and sometimes during dinner), and we can work from home when the kids are off from school, there’s no longer such a thing as on-hours and off-hours. Our work and personal lives often collide, and they will only continue to do so.

The best way to make it all work is not to silo off these distinct parts, but to weave them together into a custom tapestry. If you do that, and if you are truly doing what you love, it trumps the desire for balance and achieves something better, something magical.

All the best,

Maynard