When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn’t stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee — 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t — and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.

Caterina Fake - Working hard is overrated - Sept 25, 2009

Startups are hard. They require an insane amount of hard work and stress. But I like how Caterina calls out the difference between freaking out vs working hard.

71 Notes/ Hide

  1. thesedarkcorners reblogged this from bijan
  2. sourcepig reblogged this from bijan
  3. juancarlosgolindano reblogged this from bijan
  4. sturmundreyne reblogged this from bijan
  5. jonathan-deamer reblogged this from mikehudack
  6. mikehudack reblogged this from saadiq
  7. bsiscovick reblogged this from bijan
  8. nabeel reblogged this from bijan
  9. hiten reblogged this from siminoff
  10. viiv reblogged this from femmebot
  11. tylerweir reblogged this from siminoff
  12. siminoff reblogged this from bijan
  13. saadiq reblogged this from bijan
  14. femmebot reblogged this from bijan

Recent comments

Blog comments powered by Disqus