The Poisonous Myth of Hustle

We’ve all heard the story: two brilliant founders have an idea that will change the world. They gather a dedicated group of early employees/stock option holders around them and, through sheer grit, determination, and HUSTLE, they disrupt an industry and become billionaires in the process. The moral of the story: anyone with a good idea and the willingness to sacrifice everything on the altar of Hustle can become a success and the envy of their graduating class at the next reunion.

Except… that isn’t really true, is it? Every year, hundreds of thousands of technology startups fail, and of those that survive only a tiny percentage ever reach unicorn status. And those hustle-filled origin stories? Well, they’re not 100% factual, either: multiple studies and books have shown that luck plays a significant role in every company’s success, and while some founders are willing to acknowledge that fact, our cognitive biases push us toward crafting a narrative where our success was wholly due to our own hard work and perseverance in the face of adversity. So those founding myths skip the part where the brilliant youngsters met the right people or were born to the right parents and they focus instead on how they did it all themselves. “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity!” they crow. But when that opportunity for the big pitch came, were they sharper for having averaged four hours of sleep a night for the past six months? Of course not.

According to myth, Sergey Brin and Larry Page started out manually answering search queries until they could automate the process (photo credit: William Mercer McLeod)

There’s no question that hard work plays a role in every success story. Otherwise, it would just be boring: “He was born rich, he took over the family business, and he coasted along until he grew bored and went sailing.” The Great Gatsby that isn’t. Entrepreneurs start companies because they’re passionate about their idea and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to bring it to life. We should rightly celebrate that and reward it when the idea is successful. This is the American Dream, that anyone can become a success if they work hard enough.

The problem with the Hustle Myth, though, is that it glorifies one element of the story and ignores the rest. Through the hero-making machines of Silicon Valley and social media, the Hustle Myth has weaponized deeply ingrained elements of American culture — the ideal of rugged individualism and the Protestant work ethic — to the point that the only measure of a human is how hard they work. The results are both insidious and poisonous.

The Hustle Myth has weaponized deeply ingrained elements of American culture… to the point that the only measure of a human is how hard they work.

We want to believe that our efforts matter, so it’s tempting to accept the lie that the harder we work the more our success is assured. The problem for a startup team is that the idea that they can win by hustling harder than the big guys is mathematically false. 100 Amazon employees, even giving a half-assed effort, are going to put out more work than the 20 “hustlers” at TinyCo. If competition heats up and both teams work 20% harder, the startup team burns out and Amazon still coasts to victory. Startup success doesn’t come from bulk effort.

It’s bad enough when founders fall prey to the Hustle Myth and work themselves into the ground. It’s worse, though, when unscrupulous leaders use it to exploit their employees. “Welcome to startup life” becomes the answer to long hours, 24/7 availability, and low salaries, all in service to a massive expected payout when the company becomes a unicorn. Anyone who resists these demands or, worse, tries to meet them until they burn out, “isn’t cut out for a startup” and should go back to a safe corporate job. The tech world is filled with stories of leadership teams churning through staff on an annual basis, pumping up each new hire with tales of the exciting opportunity before them while conveniently ignoring why their predecessor left. I’ve seen it in action and it’s sickening.

Leaders: if you’ve normalized weekend work or your team is fighting fires 24/7, that’s not “life in a startup.” That’s a leadership failure.

Don’t get me wrong: there are times when startup life means working some strange hours. That’s the nature of being on a small team and the price we pay in exchange for the outsized impact on a company that makes working for a startup so appealing. If you’re the only engineer who knows how to fix a production problem, then you’re going to need to work the occasional weekend to keep your product running. But that should be incentive to share your knowledge — and therefore the support load — not a weekly expectation. Leaders: if you’ve normalized weekend work or your team is fighting fires 24/7, that’s not “life in a startup.” That’s a leadership failure.

Perhaps worst of all, buying into the Hustle Myth leads to lazy thinking and, for most startups, failure. Here’s how that works:

1. In HustleLand, time is an infinite resource fueled by the twin magical essences of Passion and Desire. The more we want to succeed, the harder we hustle and the more time we have. Not getting things done in time? Hustle harder!

2. Since time is infinite in this magical place, false starts and wasted effort don’t matter. Planning is for the old-school competition: we’re nimble disruptors! We respond to the market! Hustle overcomes all errors!

3. … Profit?

Companies who buy into this mindset get stuck in a Hustle Loop, where they’re too busy to make good decisions so they just try something because Hustle values activity over outcome. When that doesn’t work, they try something else, then something else, and so on, each effort more desperate than the last. When a leadership team is committed to hustling over thinking, this compounds across the organization as every department and person bceomes so frantic to prove their hustle that they start working at cross-purposes, pulling the company in so many directions that it loses all forward progress.

And then the money runs out.

Here’s the problem: hustle can’t cure dumb, and dumb hustling just accelerates a startup’s death spiral.

In reality, every startup brings extremely limited resources into a market already occupied by well-funded competitors. Even if you have an idea that no one has ever seen before — and therefore no competition — I guarantee that the moment you show any success you’ll see five copycats pop up carrying bags of VC money. Every moment is a precious resource in a startup.

Hustle can’t cure dumb, and dumb hustling just accelerates a startup’s death spiral.

A startup team is like an action hero with only a few bullets. If our hero “sprays and prays” when he faces off against the villains with their magically infinite ammo clips, he’ll be slaughtered. End of movie. Fin. He has to be smarter than his opponents, not louder.

(photo credit: Ilya Varlamov)

To survive, a startup must be efficient above all. Every decision must be treated as though the survival of the company depends upon it, because in some ways it does. Rather than asking, “am I hustling enough?” every team member should be asking, “Is this the best thing that I can be doing right now?” They have to make each shot count, because they might not get any more.

So what can we do?

First, don’t buy into the Hustle Myth and don’t peddle that poison to your team.

• Stop saying, “We’ll win because we want it more than they do!” and start saying, “We’ll win because we understand our market better than anyone else and we know where the pressure points are.”

• Stop glamorizing late nights and 24-hour Slack debates and start making room for rest and refreshment. Value outcomes over effort and quality over quantity.

• If you’re a leader and you just love work and don’t know how to turn it off, it’s time for you to recognize that that’s your problem, not your team’s. Schedule those emails and Slack messages for tomorrow morning and give everyone else a break.

Value outcomes over effort and quality over quantity.

Next, stop hustling and start thinking.

• What’s the highest and best use of your company’s time today? Every company has things that it must do, things it should do, and things it could do. Do you know the difference? If you look at the opportunities in front of you and only see “must dos,” then you aren’t thinking hard enough.

• Where is your company going? It’s almost childishly easy to get lost when you’re only thinking about the next turn. You had an idea once for the company you wanted to build. Is that dream still alive, and is it the right one?

• How do you respond when things go wrong? Even a brilliant plan can be overturned by changing circumstances, so do you keep trying harder or do you pause to reconsider your course? What metrics will you use to validate or invalidate a decision, and do you actually check them? The longer you’re on a false trail, the more precious resources you waste, so check your business map regularly.

Finally, we all need to recognize that we work better when work isn’t the only thing we do. We make better decisions when we’re refreshed and able to think clearly. When we stop living an adrenaline-soaked, lizard-brained, Hustle-bound existence, we’ll build better companies. And survive the process.

Do You Really Want to Be CTO?

"If you could just build the product, hire the team, and prepare an investor presentation by Monday, that'd be great...."

You finally did it: after years of building software for someone else, you took the leap and joined a startup. Now you’re building software for yourself. All the risk (and a 30% stake in the rewards) is yours. Then comes the day when your co-founders ask that fateful question: “What title do you want?”

You’ll be tempted, my friend, to reach for that brass ring, to claim the right of First Techie, to confidently say, “Why, CTO, of course!”

Hold on there, Tiger.

Sure, it looks great on a business card and your mom will be impressed, just as soon as you explain to her, for the hundredth time, what you do. And it will be nice to go to the next tech meetup and tell strangers that you’re the CTO for that tech company that they haven’t heard of (yet). And for a while those will be the only changes. But wait, there’s more.

Do you like meetings? Because you’re going to be attending a lot of them (and even hosting a few yourself!). Investor meetings, strategy meetings, planning sessions, interviews – your day is going to be chock-full of talking, so go buy a notebook and prepare to sit there pretending to take notes just like all the other senior leaders.  You can try to get out of them by being cranky every time someone wants to talk to you or by claiming to be too busy writing code – and I'm sure that’s what you’d rather be doing – but it won’t work. You’re in charge of a whole chunk of the company now, so get ready to represent.

I’m sure that you love problem-solving – you wouldn’t have gone into engineering if you didn't – but how do you feel about people problems? You don’t have to worry about that too much when the development team is you and maybe one other person, but what about after that Series A round? You’re in charge now, so you get to build a team! Interviews, coding tests, career discussions, mediating personal disputes… Remember looking at your Director of Engineering at your old workplace and thinking, “I am so glad that I don’t have her job”? Guess what, now you do, plus your own!

As CTO, you’re in charge of the whole thing: people, processes, and technology! And while code might be complex, at least it’s consistent: the same command will behave the same way today and tomorrow as is did yesterday. People, on the other hand, are messy. They have moods, frustrations, and personal lives that impact how they feel when they come to work. Your best engineer today could be a hot mess tomorrow, and it’s your job to straighten them out. Forget about writing code: you’re a bio-hacker now.

Some people like this kind of thing. They even see it as the next challenge in their careers, an opportunity to step up from “just an engineer” to “an engineering leader.” They don’t mind getting messy and maybe even get excited about measuring their output in terms of the work they do through others rather than what they deliver on their own. They’re ready to stop building code and start building companies. Others, though, fall for the title and look back a year later thinking, “Dear God, what have I done?” They self-destruct.

Are you longing yet for those quiet days where you could just put on your headphones and code? It’s not too late to avoid this trap. This time, when your co-founders come around handing out titles, look at them calmly and say:

“How about Chief Scientist?”

I give this article a 4.5 out of 5

It’s annual review time once again, that precious time of year when every manager gets to say to his underlings, “Remember when you really annoyed me last February? I do!” It’s a time for cheers, tears, and annoyed grunts. Much like Christmas or our wedding day, we enter with big expectations and some of us get lucky, while others end up with cake all over our faces, wondering who all these strangers are and who stole our pants. Maybe that’s just me. Either way, that was one strange review process and I’m glad I only worked there for four years.

Anyway, performance reviews can be extremely valuable if done correctly (and with minimal de-pantsings). They offer an opportunity to step aside from the day-to-day, reflect on how other people are doing their jobs, and then tell them what you think of them. Constructively, of course (or not, if you want them to quit). This process is called “feedback,” and like the screeching sound created by holding an electric guitar too close to a speaker, it’s an acquired taste that can make you look like a genius if you do it correctly. And I want nothing more than to make you look like a genius, especially if you work for me, because then I can take credit for hiring you. Reading this article counts as mentoring, by the way. Without further ado, here are 5 tips for giving the kinds of performance reviews that will have people asking for them every quarter!

1. No surprises

If you spent an entire year working side-by-side with people and none of them ever gave a hint as to how they feel about you and your work, you should check to see if you are invisible or someone’s imaginary friend.

I open every performance conversation with the phrase, “None of this should come as news to you….” This is because, if I’ve waited for a whole year to tell someone what they’re doing well or poorly, then they really shouldn’t have stuck around. We all want to hear praise when we do something well, and people who say, “The work is its own reward” are either liars or living in complete solitude. If you spent an entire year working side-by-side with people and none of them ever gave a hint as to how they feel about you and your work, you should check to see if you are invisible or someone’s imaginary friend. As a manager, you owe it to your people to say, “Good job,” “Thank you,” and “Wow, I never would have thought of that,” especially when it’s true. I’m not talking about fawning over people and telling every one of them what a special, special flower they are. That’s up to their parents. But if they do something well and you want to ever see them do it again, you need to tell them.

If, on the other hand, someone does something that you don’t want them to do, you need to correct them so they don’t keep doing it. I’ve seen managers wait an entire year before telling someone that they had been making obvious mistakes that irritated everyone around them, mainly because the manager wouldn’t have an uncomfortable conversation until they were forced to. By that point, the damage was done and the person was left saying, “Why didn’t you tell me that I was doing that? Everyone hates me now!” That sort of surprise leaves you feeling like you’ve just come home from a cocktail party, only to have your wife tell you that you had a huge piece of spinach in your teeth for the entire night and excuse herself by saying, “I didn’t want to embarrass you.” Man up (or woman up, if you prefer) and have the uncomfortable conversation immediately, so that, at review time, you can say, “I know you’re working on this, and you’re already improving.”

2. Be specific

If you feel like your people are wandering around making terrible decisions, maybe you need to look at the guidance you’re providing.

I once dated a girl who told me, “I need you to make me feel special. And you need to be more attentive.” I had no idea what to do with that guidance. Was I supposed to praise her constantly? Buy her gifts that I couldn’t afford? Stare at her for hours on end? How was I supposed to make her feel anything? Maybe I was supposed to slip Xanax into her drink. Would that make her feel special, or just sleepy? I couldn’t handle the confusion, so I broke up with her. (I feel compelled at this point to state that this was not my wife, because she’s awesome and would never say crazy things like this. Hi, honey!)

Sometimes, while trying to be helpful, we can sound like crazy work girlfriends: “You need to be more motivated!” “I need to see that you really care about your career here at Acme Corp.!” “The client feels that you aren’t really looking out for them. Go fix that. But don’t give anything away for free! Oh, and make them feel special!” General guidance leads to general behavior (also known as “erratic,” “hit-and-miss,” or “spotty improvement”). If you feel like your people are wandering around making terrible decisions, maybe you need to look at the guidance you’re providing. Are you giving them a specific target to hit, or are you just pointing them in the general direction of “better?” Can you remember the last time you pointed out a specific example of something they did well or something that they shouldn’t have done? Human brains can handle abstract concepts, but we’re still wired for narrative. If you can tell me a story with a happy ending, then I can generalize it to bring about other happy endings. If you illustrate my own personal office tragedy for me, then you can help me rewrite it in my head so that the ending is better next time. If you just tell me to be happy, then eventually I’m going to have to break up with you and find someone who can show me how that’s done.

3. You aren’t a mind reader

When you give in to that desire to know why people do things, instead of focusing on what they did, then you brand them in your mind, for good or ill.

Speaking of narrative, we all love to tell ourselves stories about the people around us, and every good story needs motivation and characterization. Jack sold the cow for a handful of beans because he was foolish and a dreamer, but he stole the giant’s treasure because he wanted adventure and he loved his mother very much. He killed the giant because, underneath the foolishness, he was also very clever. This works well when you’re writing fiction, but it can be disastrous when you’re dealing with real people. You can assume that Jack screwed up the budget because he’s lazy and doesn’t pay attention to detail, but what if he’s actually very conscientious and Jill gave him the wrong information? You’ve already decided that Jack is lazy and stupid, so you aren’t going to trust him with important tasks anymore. He gets bored with simple activities, which only reinforces your image, so eventually you fire him. Then he goes on to become the CFO of your competitor, Giant Industries, and crushes you (see what I did there?).

We all want to understand other people’s motivations, especially when they do something we don’t like. We want to know why they did that annoying, hurtful, or dumb thing so that we can make them never do it again. The problem is, unless you ask the person why they’re acting a certain way, you’ll never know for sure. In fact, you really can’t know for sure even if you ask them, because sometimes people lie. And sometimes they don’t even know. And the problem with these assumptions, especially assumptions about a person’s character or capabilities, is that they’re permanent. Jack can’t stop being stupid even if he wants to.

When you give in to that desire to know why people do things, instead of focusing on what they did, then you brand them in your mind, for good or ill. Now, that’s not to say that some people aren’t stupid, careless, or lazy. There are plenty of those people around, and their consistent behavior will show it over time. It just doesn’t do you any good to make that decision for them, because what are you going to do: tell them to stop being lazy? If that was your answer, please reread Tip #2, above. Whatever a person’s inherent character traits or innate capabilities are, they’re beyond your reach. All you can monitor, quantify, or change is their behavior, so that needs to be your focus. Which bring us to…

4. Behavior leads motive

When striving for better performance, the wise manager focuses on behavior first and motive second.

What is performance but behavior over time? Good performance, bad performance, high performance or low, it’s nothing but the sum of our daily activities gathered up into an annual bundle. Do you really need to know that I nailed that client presentation because I want to have your job within three years? Or that I finished that project early because I wanted to take a long weekend? Or that I was late to the big meeting with the Sea World account because I have a crippling, inexplicable fear of dolphins? You don’t really need to know what my motives are as long as you’re getting the behavior that you need. But most of us want to do the right things for the right reasons, and we want the same from the people around us.

So how do we get there? For years, consultants, pastors, life coaches, and motivational speakers have tried to change behavior from the inside out. By changing people’s motives, we hoped to change their behaviors. Motivate the employees and they’ll work harder. Teach the fat people to want to be skinny and they’ll change their eating habits. Tell the criminals that crime is bad and they’ll stop doing it. We thought it would be easier, because once you changed the one thing (motive), then all the other things (behaviors and actions) would naturally follow. One is less than a bunch, so the math seemed easy. There are three problems with this:

1. Internal motives are closely held, often core to a person’s self-image, and really hard to change.
2. Even with the right motives, people often still do the wrong things.
3. Even good motives can conflict and cancel each other out.

I want to lose 25 pounds. I am motivated to do so by all of the pictures on the health magazines that show me what my ripped abs look like, if I can just find them under that layer of extra insulation. I know that I will be healthier if I lose 25 pounds and that being healthier is better. All of my motives are correct. And yet, the 25 pounds remain (year after freaking year). So am I poorly motivated, or am I embracing the wrong behaviors?

Did I mention that I also enjoy food? This is also a good motive, but it conflicts with my desire to lose weight. Given the choice between not eating something delicious and eating it, I will generally choose to follow the motive that puts something delicious in my mouth. I don’t overeat, binge, or try to eat my feelings, so this isn’t an unhealthy motivation, but it’s keeping that 25 pounds hanging around (did I mention year after freaking year?).

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that it isn’t the most motivated (or even talented) players who succeed in professional sports. It’s those who work the hardest, those who have the right behaviors. Whether they’re doing it because they love their Mama and want to buy her a house or because they hate A-Rod (and who doesn’t?) and want to beat him until he cries like a little girl, it’s the actions that they take in response to those motivations that make them successful. In the same way, when striving for better performance, the wise manager focuses on behavior first and motive second. If you tell your people what you want them to do — and make it specific enough for them to take action — then you have a much higher chance of success than if you try to make them feel better about their jobs.

The interesting thing about this is, when the behavior is better, then the job satisfaction and the motivation tend to follow. When I do something well, I’m happy about it, which makes me want to do it more, which makes me better at it. When I do something poorly or I receive negative feedback, I don’t like that feeling, so I don’t want to do that thing again. Proper feedback and guidance on behavior, then, leads to better outcomes, which lead to better motivation. I may still be doing well because I want your job, but if I and my teammates are all doing a great job, then you’re likely to get promoted, so you won’t need that old job anyway. Everyone wins.

5. Don’t forget to dream

Get through the boring stuff... and take advantage of this annual break in the action to think about what might come next.

Let’s face it: unless you enjoy making people uncomfortable or you’re one of those people who offers “constructive criticism” to the wait staff, performance reviews kind of suck. And if you’re following these tips, especially #1, they can start to feel unnecessary as well. So if you’re like me and you can start your reviews with, “This shouldn’t be news to you…” then use this opportunity to dream a little. Get through the boring stuff — “You’re awesome, I helped make you that way, and you’re already improving on that little thing we talked about last week” — and take advantage of this annual break in the action to think about what might come next. What are your dreams for your team, as a group and as individuals? What could they do that would make you stand and proudly watch them like a dad whose kid just hit a home run? What will make them glad to come to work each day, what challenges make their eyes light up? How can you help them be so awesome that they don’t even need you anymore? What do they want to do next? Don’t know the answers? Here’s a thought: ask them. After all, it’s their performance review. Shouldn’t they get a chance to talk, too?

You’re doing a great job. Keep up the good work.

Hacking the startup life

The founder of the first software company that I worked for put his head through a wall. He was upset about someone leaving, but you know, it was a wall. And his head, which was arguably the most important asset in the company’s portfolio.

At that same company, I had to break up a fight between two designers who couldn’t agree on a page layout. I had to pick one of them up and carry him out of the room until he could cool off. Fortunately, his hair was in a ponytail that day or I might have suffocated.

At another company, one of my standard interview questions for potential managers was, “What will you do the first time that someone comes into your office and bursts into tears?” My favorite answer, after a thoughtful pause was, “Well… first I would offer them a tissue.”

After 20 years working in technology startups, I know I’m not the only person who watches HBO’s Silicon Valley and thinks, “Wow, they’re really toning it down for the masses!” Startup life is hard and a little crazy. We tech people, as a rule, bring our own crazy to the office party. Put these things together and you have a volatile mixture. Blend in long hours, high stakes, and a general sense that there are always too many bases to cover, and it’s no wonder that people lose it once in a while. Of course, it’s only a short trip from “once in a while” to “every day, twice on Fridays.”

There’s a conversation going on about mental health and burnout in startups, and we need to keep it going. My friend Dave Mayer shared some of his own experiences as a founder and friend of founders, and I read another powerful view from the trenches by Sarah Jane Coffey last year. There have even been sessions during Boulder and Denver Startup Weeks dedicated to this important topic.

We tend to glamorize the startup life as a place where brilliant, dedicated, and — most of all — energetic people are changing the world, making it a better place and making their first millions in the process. We are the engine of the economy, the force of innovation, the ones who keep America from falling behind the other superpowers through the sheer power of our brilliance and the sweat of our furrowed brows. We tell each other things like, “I wanted to work somewhere that I knew I could make an impact,” and “I don’t want to be a corporate drone, sitting in meetings all day.” We don’t meet, we scrum! We don’t just write code, we sprint! We work all day, take a short keg break on our rooftop deck, and then we work all night, with the occasional foosball game to keep our reflexes sharp and aggravate our carpal tunnel. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? Corporate drones, that’s who!

But there’s a dark side to startup life. Yes, you have a greater impact when you’re one of ten people in the company, but those ten people are usually trying to do the work of 30, so you do the math. You’re never bored, but you’re never offline, either. Office perks are fun until you realize that you can never leave, and it turns out that “dedication” and “passion” can quickly become presenteeism and a grinding competition over “who wants it more.” But on the bright side, the stock options are generous!

The problem for leaders is that these changes usually happen when we aren’t looking. The excitement that you feel for your market-beating/world-changing idea masks the little problems until they become crises. You look around at the tired faces of your team and think, “We’re just in crunch time right now. After this push, we can relax.” But this little push is followed by another little push, and then you land your first big customer and they need “a few small enhancements” to make the product work for them, and then there’s the release for the big industry event, and then you find out that you have competitors…. There are blogs to write about your development philosophy and Medium posts to show how awesome your company culture is. Pretty soon, the rooftop deck is covered with snow and you’re explaining to your wife that you just have to do a little bit of work on Christmas to make sure that the release is ready by the first of the year. Meanwhile, the other startup founders you know are bragging about being able to get by on 3–4 hours of sleep a night, and you start to wonder about how to quantify the Sleep Gap as a measure of your company’s competitiveness. When people quit, they tell you that it’s not because they’re unhappy; they just got another offer that was too good to pass up. You notice that the foosball table is pretty quiet these days, but you don’t hear the grumbling that’s replaced it.

The startup monster will eat everything you put within its reach, including your free time, your health, and your family. As leaders, it’s our job to fence it in and protect both our teams and ourselves.

The startup monster will eat everything you put within its reach, including your free time, your health, and your family. As leaders, it’s our job to fence it in and protect both our teams and ourselves.So how do we do this? There’s always more work to be done, and for every triumphant cry of “inbox zero!” there are a thousand whimpers of “I’ll never get through all of this.” The startup employee who leaves at the end of the day thinking, “I have nothing left on my to-do list” either isn’t paying attention or was just laid off.

So here’s a thought: stop trying to get to the bottom of the pile. One of the worst mistakes that startups make is that they grossly undervalue their own time. Instead, acknowledge that time is a valuable and limited resource and decide how you’re going to invest it. Start saying, “we’re not going to do that right now,” and keep saying it until you find the most important items, then do them. There are probably a few items on your team’s to-do list (and your own) that you can quickly knock off, but this quickly gets difficult as you’re forced to make tradeoffs and give up things that feel really important. Remember, though, that the most successful startups are those that ruthlessly focused on a single goal until they were big enough to diversify. An unfocused startup is one bad decision away from a death spiral. So, focus. Ruthlessly. If that email, phone call, or feature idea doesn’t move your company definitively towards its goal, then it can wait, maybe forever.

Of course, in order to do this, you need to know what that one goal is. You do know what your company’s one goal is, right? If not, stop what you’re doing right now and go find a quiet corner, a mountain cabin, or a dark closet where you can put a towel over your head, and stay there until you do. Until you know why you’re in business and can clearly articulate that vision, you’re going to do more damage than any competitor could possibly do, chasing after bad revenue, distracting your team with useless projects, and generally diluting your valuable efforts. The biggest complaint that I hear from front-line people in startups is “Management doesn’t know what they’re doing.” The key words to note in that sentence are management and doesn’t know. When you start wandering all over the landscape in search of a purpose, you stop being a leader and you become “management.” Find your vision. Test it. Cling to it. Defend it like a loved one, and don’t let anything, even the lure of side money, pull you away. Even if you decide that you need to pivot that vision, do it purposefully and completely. Charlie Brown can be wishy-washy; you can’t if you expect people to follow you.

Setting the proper boundaries is also about more than good intentions and cleverly worded vacation policies (“take what you need, don’t be a dick” is my favorite so far). If you want your team to be healthy, you have to lead by example. I once had a boss who always made sure that he had the first email in everyone’s inbox every morning and the last one every night. If anyone tried to reply, he would send another response, and another, and another, until the conversation petered out in the wee hours of the morning. He wasn’t inspiring us with his work ethic; he was marking his territory, peeing on everyone’s inbox every day to remind us who was top dog. Unsurprisingly, he also spent a lot of time talking about the level of commitment required to make the company successful. We had a lot of turnover at that company.

On the other hand, the kindest words I ever received from a boss came when I was working late and he walked by my desk on his way home. He stopped, stuck his head around the corner, and said, “I love you. Go home.” For the little worker bee me, that was a freeing moment. With five words, he simultaneously recognized my effort and freed me from defining myself solely by it. When he turned and walked out the door a moment later, he set a healthy example as well.

We need to do more than talk about work/life balance: we need to model it. In my experience, “we work hard and we play hard” really translates into:

1. We work hard and we have a ping pong table that everyone’s afraid to use, or
2. We work hard, drink hard, and code drunk.

How about a new mantra: We work hard, get stuff done, and go home.

Working in a startup shouldn’t feel like an extension of dorm life: it’s healthy to take breaks and explore other interests with people who aren’t paid to be near you. Late nights and weekend work are occasionally inevitable in every startup, especially in software, where major releases and critical commitments inevitably create a last-minute crunch. But when this becomes the norm, you’re heading down a bad road. If the gas pedal’s already to the floor, you have no way to get more speed when the real crunch time comes. Plus, having a happy, supportive family life greatly reduces stress and burnout. The thing is, your family has to recognize you before they can support you.

Finally, in order to do all of these things, a startup needs leaders who understand people and what motivates them. Investors look at founders’ technical experience, industry knowledge, and business acumen, but too often they forget to ask whether these founders are capable of building and retaining a great team to bring their idea to life. It’s impossible to build the next killer app if you keep killing your team’s motivation with blockheaded management decisions.

Look around your leadership team. You probably have the business person, the sales person, and the technical person, but who’s the people person? Who among your executives is specifically charged with making sure that the rest of the company moves with purpose and vision? Who has actually built a high-performing team before? Who knows what to do the first time someone bursts into tears in their office? You need one of these, and no, that’s not HR’s job. HR’s job is to keep you from being sued when one of your executives inevitably says something dumb that offends someone. This is a job for your core leadership team. Motivating and caring for your people is as critical to your success as any patent or proprietary technology, because, let’s face it: for most technology companies, our people are our competitive advantage. They’re also our most expensive assets. As the cost of hardware and infrastructure continues to drop through virtualization and distributed computing, we’ve reached the point where replacing an engineer is more expensive than replacing a server. If you can’t find any other reason to protect your people from burnout, at least consider it a prudent financial move. You have a CEO, a CFO, and a CTO. Who’s your Chief People Officer?

The startup life is great. You get to wake up every day feeling like you’re changing the world for the better, or at least building a killer product that will have the world beating a path to your door. You get to have a say in the company direction and have beers with the CEO, all while wearing jeans and a T-shirt. You get to use phrases like, “killing it,” “secret sauce,” and “industry disruption” with perfect seriousness, even after the third beer. You also have a chance to make a genuine difference in the lives of others, even if that impact is limited to the people you work with.

We can do better at this. We need to do better, by recognizing our shortcomings and refusing to let our enthusiasm overshadow our better judgment. We need to recognize that, in this case, passion and ingenuity aren’t enough. They need to be accompanied by vision, focus, and empathy. We need to make our people part of our investment plan and be careful not to burn them out in our race for greatness. In short, we need to do more than build better products.

We need to build better startups.