A Pulse

The most critical resource of startup is time. Time is always against startup because startup always runs out of time. That’s why when you work in a startup you hate weekends.
Well, it’s more like a love-hate relationship: from one side weekends are great to spend a time with the family, but from another they are the slowest business days in the week, which is really tough.

It seems that only you work on a weekend and the rest of the world is frozen. Emails are slow, conference calls do not happen, the response that’s so important to you just does not arrive.
It’s all about the pulse. Some companies have a pulse of once a week. Take VCs. Their heartbeat happens on their partners meeting. How many times have you heard, we will discuss it on our next partners meeting and I will let you know.

Others have a pulse of once a month or quarter. Whatever these periods are, a normal startup pulse is hundreds times faster. And it does not stop on weekends. It’s 24/7 as opposite to 24/5. This misalignment is the source of great frustration.

Coming to a weekend and waiting 2 full days is an awful a lot of time, and time is your most critical resource.

You cannot change other pulses; neither can you change yours, so the best thing to do is to plan activities that are input-free: write a document, code, debug, plan or write a blog. One blog post suggestion – why you hate startup weekends.