Are You Sure You're Working Enough?

got to be right. I mean, that's what I hope, that's the dream. By all accounts, Americans in particular, we work a lot. Depending on the study, it's about an hour more day than our European counterparts. And for full time workers, so people and jobs like ores, Americans work something around average forty seven hours a week. And I think if you're in a job like working at a big corporate law firm or a medicine it's way more

than that. Yeah. And what I'm wondering and what we're going to get into and this conversation is do those long hours mean we're working harder or working better or do. They just mean we're getting more tired and burning out fast and more signaling hard work. That is a thing. When I was a blogger, my first job, I had a job where I worked ten hour days, no lunch break, completely like working all the way through, and that felt crazy unsustainable and every single person burned out with writing.

That's something that I guess you might imagine A boss might imagine that you can sit and do it endlessly without a break because it's not like manual labor. But actually you're going to see really diminishing returns I think when you're doing something creative or doing something that requires any brain power, because your brain, like any other organ, needs a rest. And this is a very American thing. It came up in our show last week, which was

about working abroad and Mom. We talked to our colleagues who were not born here about work here. Now all of them we're both shocked at the work culture but also really liked it. The most surprising thing about the work culture in the US is how much time we spent working over here. And I tell people as maybe to the US, they were very afraid for me. We thought that Americans only got two weeks a year of lave.

I'm from England and to me, the most surprising thing about working in the US is how willing people out to work on their weekends. The most surprising thing about working in the US to me is the lack of

consecutive weeks of vacation. Yeah, this is an American cliche that we are all obsessed with work and logging hours, but increasingly companies are moving away from this idea that just putting in hours is the best way to get work done, both because employees millennials especially do want work life balance, but also because they're not sure that just working twelve hours in a row leads to the best product, right.

I feel as a manager, I feel this way. I could not care less what time people get into work if they're meeting their deadlines and getting work done on time. And I think most people have experienced that, Like, when you're given a chance to manage your own time, you can get a lot done in a really short period of time if you're focused enough, And you can get nothing done in twelve hours, So the hours are not a good way to measure how much work you're getting done.

I do feel like sometimes if you know you have to stay at the office until seven pm, you will procrastinate and just stretch out the work until seven pm. Yeah. And on the other hand, if you're like me and you have to leave it five every day, otherwise you pick up your kid late. That endpoint is a nice kick in the butt to really consolidate your efforts and be more efficient about getting your work done right. It

doesn't make you any worth have an employee, I hope not. Anyway, this whole top bait was reignited recently when a venture capitalist Keith Rabboy, got into a Twitter war Blake Robbins, another tech investor, made the case for working smarter, not harder. So he was on team, you can do it on your own time. It's hours logg don't matter. Like working on the weekends as no one. Yeah, he said something like, it's not cool. It doesn't make you cool to say

you worked through your weekend. That thing you were talking about earlier about like performing work, because that's part of it. It's like, oh, I've luked a twelve hour day. Oh my god, I'm so busy. Rabbo I see him was tweet disagreed, and he tweeted those words totally false, and then he went into why he thinks working hard is the key to success. He pointed to people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg who all put

in the time and they're very successful. So obviously you have to be a workaholic to succeed, was his point. They also have another thing in common. They're all men, and a lot of the people who end up having personal obligations and family obligations on the weekends and at night our women. We'll hear more from a boy later, but his tweets started a huge debate until I've Gone Valley.

There are people writing blog post responses and tweets all over the place, and one of those people was Sarah Moscoff, who took to linked In to write her rebuttal and Sarah's joining us now to explain how she feels about work life balance. Sarah Muscoff is the founder of Winning, which is a start up for parents, and she was also an engineer at Twitter, YouTube, and Google. So what was your reaction when you saw Keith's tweets about putting in hours and working yourself to death as the key

to succeeding. I was very turned off by the statement. Initially, um and and you know, as as a founder with children and my co founder also as children, we really advocate for building a family friendly work environment that allows people to have time to do things outside of work, like spend time with their children. Um But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I might actually be aligned with what Keith is saying or is

underlying message. Um and. And the reason I think we're actually more on the same page than not is because Whinnie, we know it. It's going to take many, many years to build a really lasting brand for parents. That's part of this standard toolkit for every parent. It's not going to happen overnight. We're not going to be an overnight viral app. And so we're building the company in a way that allows us to work on it for many,

many years. We want to build a culture that's really sustainable, not just for us, but also for our employees, so that we can spend a really long time on the problem. And I think the number one reason startups fail is because the founders quit, they burn out, they don't want to work on the problem anymore. And we realized by building a company where we can have lexibility, and we can have breaks and and spend time outside of work. It will allow us to really withstand even the toughest

of times. And his tweets, Keith mentioned a bunch of visionaries and really successful people as examples of how you have to really work hard and sacrifice everything else in order to be successful. What do you say to the idea that that's a necessary ingredient for success. I definitely think you really have to work hard, and certainly there are sacrifices to be made. I think there's a couple

of things though, that are important to point out. First of all, when you're building a technology company, Um, you're hiring engineers who are using their brain to solve problems. Uh. And when you work on really hard problems that require your brain to be operating at like the top capacity, you need rest and you need time when you're not thinking about the problem to function at the highest level.

And I think this is maybe something that investors don't understand, or some investors don't under stand, because investing in companies is very different from writing code. And and when you were a team of six engineers, so we're all writing code all day, you know, I have a computer science degree from m I T. I've worked at top technology companies, so I understand what it's like to work work on hard problems, uh, and you need rest and you need

a break. So I think working hard does not mean working twelve hours a day, because you cannot work on a hard problem for twelve hours and be working at the top capacity. What are your hours like, They're like kind of the engineer version of nine to five, So I would sit around ten to six is when everyone is pretty much in the office. You know, we like to see our kids off for the day in the morning, and then we like to come home and have family dinners.

And I think, you know, not even all of our employees don't even have kids, but they still enjoy that flexibility to have a life outside of work and have time when they and focus on other things. So you have this culture set up at WINNIE that that allows that flexibility. But would you say it's difficult in general for parents who want to be founders or who work in the valley to contend with the expectation or the culture around working really long hours at the expense of

everything else. Yeah, And I think a lot of times, you know, even these companies that claim to be very family friendly because they have great maternity leaves and they may have a awesome lactation room, and those things are important, don't get me wrong, but I think a lot of it too is the culture that you have for the parents that are are working there, not when they're taking time off for maternity or paternity leave, but when they're

actually working day to day. You know, do you have late night events that require you to be away from your family and drinking, which is not practical for new parents. Do you require a lot of travel and long offsite where you have to be away from your family. These things really lead to a unfamily friendly work environment. I think they're often not talked about, but they make a bigger impact for working parents than having an extra month

of maternity or paternity leave. And wondering if you think that attitude of someone like Keith is gendered in any way. Oh? Absolutely, I mean, I think the idea that you can't possibly have a family and spend time with that family and have a successful startup is coming from just a lack of experience doing both. Uh, And I think you absolutely can, and we're sort of here to prove that. Why did you feel like it was important to write a response to these ideas and put them out there in a

LinkedIn post. First of all, I think in general, I want to see more women start companies, and this idea that you can't start a company when you have a child, or can't have a family and have a company, I think is completely false. Like I I actually think it's one of the best jobs you can have when you have a family, because you get to set the rules and you get to create this culture that can be extremely family friendly that you may not find at your

average tech company. So I think that's that's one reason I like to speak out and encourage other women to start companies and families. But I think also, you know, I want to make sure that people understand that working hard isn't just putting in twelve plus hour days every day and then burning out. It's working on it for a very long time. Uh. You know, Keith mentioned Kobe Bryant, who I'm a big fan of. He went to my high school, and Kobe Bryant, you know, played basketball forever

for for his entire life for many many years. Um, And that's what it takes to build a successful company. It's not just for one year of your life working your butt off, it's for every year again and again getting up and working on the same thing. And it's this endurance that I think he forgot to mention that's really critical. So if you set up your your company in a way that you can't have endurance over a ten year period, then you're just setting yourself up for failure. Yeah,

to use the cliche, it's a marathon. Yes, it's not a sprint. Well, this was really great, Um, thanks so much for talking to us about working hard. Thanks so much for having me. That was Sarah's perspective. But now that all the takes have come in, we wanted to see where Keith Radboy, who started this entire conversation, stands on the issue. Has he changed his point of view or is he standing firm? So to find out we brought him on the show. Keith Rabboi is a venture

capitalist at Coast Aventures. He was also a former executive at PayPal, Lincoln and Square. Thanks for coming on, Keith, it's pleasure to be with you. So you recently got involved in a Twitter conversation about working hard. Do you want to tell us what happened. Well, I think some young VC junior VC uh sort of advise people on Twitter that they don't have to work very hard, that they should just work smarter, and so I sort of

rejected that. I think it's kind of ridiculous for a junior associated to be giving anybody career advice, but certainly bad career advice is destructive. And what was it about what he said that you felt the need to respond to. Well, the idea that there's a substitute for hard work, especially

early in your career. Uh, the one thing you can control is the effort in the initiative and the tenacity that you have, and if you want to be successful professionally, the effort is the single thing that's under your control. There's a lot of other variables that you may or may not be able to influence, but how how much you care and how hard you work to pursue an objective and to be excellent at your craft is completely under your control. So is that your theory on working

that you just log the hours? Well, I think that the people who really care about being successful and highly competitive industries have to be both talented and have a lot of grit and determination and at the end of the day, there's not a lot of substitutes for that effort. So is that how you approach work? Are you just constantly logging hours? Well, not necessarily logging. I would reject

the concept of logging hours. I think it's more of a mental obsession, like how how how often is your brain tuned into a particular problem and being obsessed about improving the world and solving the problem. So it doesn't mean necessarily literally typing or literally sitting at a desk, but it's how how consciously you're aware of what you're trying to do, how you prioritize your time and energies

around that problem versus other distractions. So some people in the some of the reactions to what you said on Twitter suggested that for people who want to have families, this can be a really problematic approach because you you naturally have to give over a certain amount of time in order to be good at having a family, and that would naturally push women out of the workforce more.

If everybody was subject to these standards, What do you say to that, Well, I think, like, there are only twenty four hours in a day, and you know, seven days in a week, and everybody confronts that constraint, and everybody has priorities and competing sort of things they care about. It can be everything from family to kids, to spouses,

two boyfriends or girlfriends, um to parents, um. But fundamentally, if you're going to be one of the best at anything in the world that's hyper competitive, there is a sacrifice at the end of the day, at the marginal hour, the marginal minute, the marginal attention, and it's very difficult to be excellent and everything, and so you have to decide. I'm not I'm not choosing for people, recommending for people

what they should decide to be their priorities. But if they say I want to be the best in the world that a particular sport, at a particular discipline, whether it's law or technology or investing, there is into a lot of substitute for making that a primary focus of your life. It just doesn't work. It'd be nice if you could do three things simultaneously and be awesome at

all of them, but usually there's tradeoffs. The world is the world has tradeoffs in your in your company, in your life, and you have to decide what's most important to you. But pretending that there are in trade offs is just insane. I think that's the startup founder that we talked to believed that it wasn't really sustainable to be obsessed with one thing and that she wanted to build a sustainable company where yeah, she could be obsessed with the problem she was working on. But um, that's

radic that's just totally false. Like so Jeff Bezos, like if you read his annual letter from says explicitly you have to work hard to be at Amazon and be successful. Amazon is the most important company in the planet right now, probably and he's been doing it for twenty years and his most of his executive team has been around forever. Um,

So that's clearly false. Test is another good example, Ellen Comparers starting a company, running a company, teachewing Glass, and Tesla's, you know, probably the most sustainable future company in the automotive industry. Um. So, I just think that that's just false and there's no evidence of that. It's completely made up fiction that people like to tell themselves to comfort themselves. So do you think it's even possible to work smart?

It is possible to work smart, So I don't reject the idea that you should, of course be smart in leverage your time. I talk a lot about and teach a lot of classes UM and mentor people on focus, and I think that stuff is very very important. But at the end of the day, most of the people you compete with who are pretty damn good are working smart by definition, and they work hard. And I'm not

saying that there's a work dumb and work more. But most of the people who are pretty talented and get to a certain level in life are pretty smart and are working pretty smartly, And then it's still the question of how do you compete with even them? So it's like to be the best of the best at any feel old requires more than just the talent and being pretty good at leveraging your time. If you can't leverage your time successfully and smartly, you're probably not going to

be in a good place anyway. But then you still have to put in the effort. I learned this mostly as a lawyer UM when I joined Solving the Cromwell back in the nineties, which is like the canonical, the paradigmatic Wall Street law firm. I was very smart and talented as a lawyer, but there's people that were colleagues and competitors, meaning people we competed against litigation that we're

just working harder than I was. And it became pretty clear pretty quickly that if I didn't keep up with them, not not only would I lose cases, but I would lose internal promotions unless I could both be as smart or smarter than them and put in the same level of effort. So your tweet has started a discussion and Silicon Valley about this, and there vcs who even disagree with you. Has anything you've heard changed your mind at all? No, I don't believe that there's any founders who really disagree.

I'd say it's plus of people who have actually accomplished anything UM that agree with me. UM. I think there's people who would aspirationally want to achieve things, but they may not be willing to make the trade offs in life to achieve a certain objective. You know, as I said, I think there are lots of people who want things, but there's real trade offs to get from point A to point B in life. And you can decide point B is not worth it or not interesting to you.

That's perfectly fine and a valid decision. But pretending that there's not tradeoffs to get to point B is just fooling yourself. So would you say your work life balance

is pretty good or okay, yeah right? A venture capital definitely gives you more control of your life UM than some other jobs, mostly because I really only have fifteen or twenty customers, and that there's entrepreneurs I work with and only have about four to six partners, So the number of people that UM can sort of interrupt my days is a lot more limited when I was running a company and had teams of tends to hundreds of people.

If you just assume that one percent of everybody that works with you UM is going to have a question or challenge, you have a very unpredictable life. Every day.

When I was running you know, entrepreneurial startups, every day something would go wrong literally every day, and the question is just the magnitude and what direction it would come from UM, And you get used to that at some point, like it becomes part of your d n A. And part of what makes the role challenging and rewarding and exciting is that there's always something new and there's always some new kind of mass to help fix and problem solved.

But you can't control it, so there was no predictability. Adventure it tends to be a lot more predictable. So, for example, if I think this weekend, you know I want to attend a wedding, there's only one percent chance that something so urgent occurs that I couldn't attend it, Whereas when I was running a company, it might be ten or twenty percent chance that something would spike and be so important um that it would really disrupt pre existing plans. Since you work with founders, do you ever

worry about them burning out? Um? Generally I don't, So I don't believe, and I think there's a lot of search that you know I started someone twitter back. It's anymore that burnout doesn't come from work effort. Burnout comes from something different. Burnout comes from banging your head against the law without progress, and which very natural. I would

say the same thing would occur to me. If you tackle a problem and can't make incremental progress on it, and can't conquer the problem and the challenge it dry, it can drive you to burnout. I think when you push yourself really hard, but you're making progress and you can see improvement, whether it's personal improvement, professional improvement and reflective and metrics. You don't tend to get burned out.

It's like it's sort of there's a sports metaphor is when your team's winning, people like to go to practice. They don't they don't complain about practice, they practice really well. The team gets a losing streak, you know, people's enthusiasm tends to wane and it feels more like labor to

go to practice. So the best way to avoid burnout is just to be working on the best startups, but working on challenges that UM you feel are important, making progress against the challenges so that the application of your skills and efforts are making a difference. And if not, find a different set of challenges or a different company could be either UM that's more likely to provide motivation. Like,

for example, let me give you a contrast. I could work twenty hours a week, which isn't that much by American standards at all. But if I wasn't making progress, if I didn't think what I was doing was making a difference, I'd be frustrated. Well, if there's one thing that you want people to get from this conversation, what would it be? Figure out what's most important to you and the rank creative set of priorities, and then allocate your time against those priorities. And to what we teach

to managers. You know, when I first have to help train a new manager, we do this thing called the calendar audit. And the way the calendar audit works is I first asked the person to go to the whiteboard and identify their top three priorities, and then we go pull out their Google calendar usually and map their time against the parties and look for disconnect. So I think in life, you generally want to map your time against

your priorities. I can't tell people what their parties should be, um, but if they tell me what their parties can be are what they've decided their parties should be and they wanted to be, I can help them get there. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. It's been really interesting to hear both sides of this conversation.

It's a pleasure to be with you. One criticism that popped up during this whole firestorm was that it's easy enough for a VC to say that startup founders need to basically grind themselves down to the bone, creating a product that then benefits said vcs. UM and even other vcs made this point. Ban Sabbat had a whole blog post that basically said, show a little more empathy to

the founders that are making your job possible. And there is a certain fetishization in the valley of this hard work at kind of like a front line low level where you know, it's almost celebrated if people are totally sacrificing their life at the expense of their work. Yeah, there was that story of the lift driver who she

was taking left rides basically as she was going into labor. Yeah, and lift was using this example as like a great shining moment for them, like showing how wonderful it was that lift drivers were so dedicated instead of being like, this is the health risk you should be in the hospital if you're going into labor, and like maybe you should have a job that makes it such that you don't have to work so much that you must work until the moment you're going into labor, which I think

is the dark side of this ethos. It's like, at whose expense are we making people work hard? Rights like the vcs at the top want everyone below them to work really hard, but it's kind of ridiculous. I do think that there is a shift happening. Like I said that, there are companies offering more flexibility to workers, mostly brought on by millennials who are demanding these things, but because it's seen as a perk, and like many perks, it's

very uneven. So the people who are getting work life balance and flexibility happen to be in competitive white collar fields and they're the ones who are getting this work life balance of flexibility, where the people at the bottom, like the lift driver, who barely have worker protections, they're

the ones who happened to be putting in all these hours. Right, It's very possible to be one of those people that works really long hours and not be getting a great product or a company you founded, or around a VC funding at the end of it. You could just be working those hours in order to maintain your daily life. And look, sometimes there will be a big project or product or startup idea that you do need to throw yourselves into and you have to put in the long hours.

But I think you just have to realize that you're sacrificing not just your work life balance, but maybe the sustainability of your employees and your company. Yeah, and those intense times where you're putting in sixteen hour days and everything's nuts like should probably be your whole career. But I think to be able to say that you did put in a lot of hours when it really counted is important. Sometimes you just have to back up and then look at what you lost and make sure that

you're getting it back. And now it's time for half big takes, half fake takes. You can call in with your half bake takes at our hotline which totally works at two on two six seven zero one six six. We have a caller half bag take this week. Hi, I'll listen to you guys talk this week about text messaging. Now. I have to say I'm writing a book about how test how we can vey affect in text messaging essentially, and I the question mark exclamation point thing. I don't

think it's psychological. I can't weigh in on that at all, but I will say that you are not being Lucy goosey with anything that you write on to messaging. In fact, I think that we put more effort and energy into how we construct the text message than a lot of other platforms one because we don't have a rule book, so we don't have anybody saying, oh, you should write

it this way or we should write it that way. Instead, we have to come up with it all of our own and figure out how we're going to debate the challenge. If you were being loosey goosey with it, then it wouldn't bother you so much when you accidentally put in the question mark for the explition point, you just send a little asterisks and sun and back and be like, all right, all is well. But we can't go back in time and take back what we said. So that's

why it matters so much. Anyhow, we have a great day. Bye. I just want to say, this is my ideal listener writing a book about text messages. It sounds I want to read this book. I want it. This is a

good audience for us. Okay. I have to say when I heard this kind of blew my mind, Like I did not realize that there was another level of half bigness to my half big take about tech Switch, if you don't remember, was basically about how this error is really common where you can transpose the exclamation point in the question mark, and that just totally screws up the meaning. And I don't know why everybody does it, and I

wish we could stop it. But she's totally right, like that will ruin your day because we don't have rules around this, and so we can't fix these problems. We can't fix these text mess ups. I was, yeah, I like the lesson of like texting is a real way of communicating, kind of like the internet's real. Like just because it's over text doesn't mean you're not putting any thought into it, Like text are real. Yeah, you know you're putting more thought into it than you realize. Yeah,

what is your not fully formed idea for this week? Francesca, Well, this is another example of me standing up against the practice. That's something I actually do, but I'm realizing the error of my ways. A lot of people try to save time in the morning by brushing their teeth in the shower. I've been doing this for years. Um, there's no point in doing it this way. Also, you're there's like at chance you're gonna end up spitting out toothpaste on yourself,

which is gross. I honestly had no idea why people did it in the first place, Like you blew my mind when you said it was to save time, because I just didn't understand how that even could possibly save time. Okay, I will give you my ration. You still have to brush your teeth, right, you still have to use that time.

So my rationale originally was, I believe that when you get in the shower, there's like a ten second period of just kind of like staring into space as the water warms up and you kind of soak your whole body and water before you really start your shower routine. So my genius idea was to combine that time with the toothbrushing time and not lounge around in front of the mirror like some sort of lady of leisure who can just stare at herself and toothbrush the morning away.

But even if it does save time, it's a its ten seconds, and and that ten seconds is not going to be like, no one's gonna notice that you got to work ten seconds earlier. It shouldn't surprise you that I'm a very efficient shower and there's there's no ten second waiting around time. You just get in and start scrubbing. Didn't get in, he rance down, Get with it, get on with it. All right, I'm very impressed. I'm gonna try to improve. I'm gonna I'm gonna improve my shower

life balance. That's right. Give myself some time to brush my teeth and really devote myself to just doing that. That's right, Becca. What is your heath big take this week? It's air conditioning related, which is a huge topic in the summer. I a C unit broke at home at home, and so it was a whole regummar roll to get it back. In the meantime, though, I was relying on a ceiling fan and other fans, and I kind of realized that fans are awesome. That's what you say, you're

a fan. I'm a fan of fans. Air Conditioning is very irritating to me. Too cold. I don't like it. It is nice when you sleep. It can get very hot New York City. I understand, very privileged blah blah blah. But fans are just they blow the warm air around so it's more soothing. I think you're talking about a ceiling fan or some kind of like stand up. I now bought a new AC unit while I got it replaced because bathermom broke, so it was free and honestly,

last night, I just put it on fan mode. I basically plan a lot of money for a fan, but a huge fan of fans fans fan mode on the A C Unit. I don't mind because they can get too cold and sometimes that kind of creeps in on you in the middle of the night and you wake up freezing and it's weird. Artificial gold air. It's not nice. However, actual fans and I have mentioned this on the podcast before they tickle my skin. Yeah, I also don't like to feel the air, which I've mentioned on the show

before too, so I get it. But when it's really hot, you you know, trade offs. I think what we're learning is that both of us have complicated relationships with air yes and temperatures yea, as as many women I hate to gender as they do, though they do struggle as real. And that was half Bake Takes, Half Baked Takes, Thanks so much for listening to another episode of Game Plan. You can find me on Twitter at RZ Greenfield and

I'm at Francesca today. You can tweet your half Bake takes at us, or you can leave us a voicemail at our half bag Take Hotline two one to six one seven zero one six six. If you'd like to hear from us even more, sign up for our newsletter at bloomberg dot com Slash Newsletters. You just check the game Plan box. If you like the show, head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and rate and review. We like all of your feedback. This show

was produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Henderson. Head of Podcasts is Alec McCabe and we will see you next week. Good bye. I'm totally with it.