Part Time Entrepreneur, Full-time Employee

Most startups seem to embrace 60-80 hour weeks, you keep reading about them and begin to believe that this is normal. After 12 hour marathon coding sessions ‘typical entrepreneurs’ walk 10 metres from desk to bed and collapse in their shared accommodations. Living in such lean conditions makes those crucial first months of business far cheaper. This work ethic and minimial living costs maximises the runway before the seed money runs out.

Paul Graham is one of my favourite bloggers, and his essay entitled The Other Road Ahead he paints a clear picture of how lean a start-up can be, stating “You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a server collocated at an ISP. We did.”

No matter how much I’d love to take the lean ramen noodle approach it’s simply not practical for me. I’m a father of two, a husband of one, and an employee. I’ve got a beautiful family with young children, a modest house with a mortgage, and a full-time job to pay the bills. In short, I have a standard existence that I imagine many of my readers share. Living off noodles in a cheap apartment with my co-founders is not the only way that start-ups are built. I’ve taken an alternative route that involves just as much hard graft (harder maybe?) and allows me to remain employed full-time. The food sure is better!

I simply have to fit Gridspy into the gaps between the hours at work outside of the home and the start-up and the time put into fatherhood and being an available partner. It is a compromise position that I have had to maintain for the last year until Gridspy was ready. Along with the mandatory overtime, maintaining a full-time job limits my flexibility. I cannot travel to meet potential clients as easily or pick up the phone to talk to them. It markedly slows down progress. However, without the job there would possibly be no Gridspy, or less so than there is now, as there would be no base to develop from.

Despite my full-time commitments I still consistently work on Gridspy. As I mentioned in Selling the Dream I spend four evenings a week working on Gridspy (3-4 hours each one) plus all of Sunday and manage to make a lot of progress. Sometimes I spend my four hours on a blog entry, sometimes on some firmware or a little bit of Django code. Lately I have been creating the setup process for new users. There is a ton of documentation to do on our website – it all takes so much time.

Since my baseline existence is ‘family-man’ and a full-time job, I have had to pace myself with Gridspy. If I am not careful I will burn myself or my loved ones out (and trust me, we’ve been close at times) so I have to be the tortoise rather than the hare. At least doing a small chunk every night gives me a lot of time to think through technology decisions and plan my development.

Of course Gridspy is all that I want to work on and all that I can think about. This creates constant tension/wishful thinking in wanting to jump in both feet first and get everything up and running now, yesterday! It doesn’t help that this fully dedicated full-time start-up founder is also a widely published expectation.

But there are no savings to live off, and even though the almost three year old in my life would like to live on noodles for a bit, I don’t think I could for long. Being employed isn’t as simple as just turning up to my ‘day job’ and punching keys so I can pay the bills. I want, need, to be a ‘good employee.’ It takes conscious effort to honour my commitment to my employer. I remind myself everyday to focus on the work I do for them and to leave Gridspy at home. I’m sure you can see how after a long day at the office and after the chaos of the early evening with the kids, it can take a while to get down to the business of Gridspy. Sometimes all I want to do is grab a beer and turn on the TV.

I like my job, it has loads of benefits. Not least that I can afford to buy beer and have nice dinners and provide my wife and children with all the comforts of home. I have been given some great introductions to potential business partners through my well connected colleagues. I’ve had a group of fellow engineers to discuss my ideas with and sound out my features. Plus I’ve had lots of free coffee and idle banter around the water cooler to enjoy. The benefits of a stable routine and a reliable injection of cash into our bank account each month are not to be frittered away lightly.

But when it comes to developing my own gig, it is a chicken and egg problem. The sooner I take the leap and go fulltime with Gridspy, the sooner we can complete the features that are preventing us from doing a large scale release. But the moment I take that leap, the clock (and the bank account) starts ticking down. I have an extremely short runway and I worry that I could scuttle this opportunity before it has had a chance to take off.

Reading entrepreneurial blogs such as Paul Graham’s can make you think that you have to go fulltime or give up. I am taking an alternative route. By creating Gridspy part-time I have been able to give it the time and breathing room required to succeed. I’m starting to think that this path is the most courageous since it requires serious commitment to devote all your free time to your startup. In the end, I am sure that my compromises will pay off.

Further reading:

• Selling the Dream, putting Sales before Software
• Introducing the Nexus

I’d love to hear more about what you are all doing in your valuable free time and how it is going.

Thanks Eben for the chance to share this blog entry.