Stop the Insanity!

I Feel So Broke Up, I Wanna Go Home

With apologies to the Beach Boys, this is the first rule of life at saner startups: If you want to do truly great work, then you can't spend every waking hour of every day at the office. "You can't make good strategic decisions if you're exhausted," declares Charlie Kim. "Sooner or later, working 24-7 ends up burning you out."

Kim certainly understands the necessity of putting in an occasional late night or even pulling an all-nighter. But this kind of punishing schedule, he urges, should be a last resort, not part of everyday life. That's why he has banned sleeping at the office, and why there are absolutely no beds, cots, or futons allowed. "If you need to sleep, you should go home," says Kim, who has been known to shoo employees out of the office if he thinks they are working too much. "I don't want people here on weekends."

"It was a little strange to me at first," admits Alice Park, 26, Next Jump's director of product development. Park remembers being "kicked out of the office" by her boss on more than one occasion last summer, when she joined Next Jump. "I had come from an investment bank, where it seemed normal to work until 9 or 10 at night," she says. "But people here have a different style of working."

Park has since learned a lesson that seems obvious in retrospect but that is less obvious when you're in the middle of another 12-hour day: If she stays extremely focused, she can get her work done and still manage to leave the office by 7 PM. "At my old job, I'd take more breaks and procrastinate, because I knew I was going to be there all day," she says.

Equally important, the leaders of saner startups don't run what Carol Kruse calls "fire drills" -- those last-minute, do-or-die rush jobs ordered up by the brass. Kruse, 37, cofounder and vice president of marketing at RocketCash Corp., a shopping site for teens based in Mountain View, California, says that when she was a brand manager at a Fortune 500 company in the early 1990s, fire drills were the cause of many late nights, missed birthdays, and canceled vacations. "It was terrible and unnecessary," she says.

At RocketCash, Kruse and other executives try to give plenty of notice about deadlines, and they don't expect employees to work through the night to meet them. "The fact is, there is almost nothing that can't wait a day," Kruse says. "People think the whole world will collapse, but it never does."

Rather than stocking up on caffeine, urge saner CEOs, stock up on your self-worth. Pulling an all-nighter won't make you a hero at their startups; it will just make you a goat at home.

Justin Kitch agrees. In 1994, Kitch, then 21, founded a Menlo Park, California-based educational-software company called KartoffelSoft, which has since evolved into Homestead.com. Back in the early days, he recalls, he would work 100 hours a week -- and let everyone know about it. "I made sure I was visibly working all the time," he says. But in the summer of 1998, Kitch got married and realized that working round-the-clock was "just stupid." So he cut back on his hours, working 60 a week at the office and 20 more at home. (Kitch begged Fast Company to write that it's more like 10 hours at home. Sorry, Justin.) "I just don't want people to think that I expect them to work those idiotic hours," he says.

If You Want to Stay Fast, Let People Be Flexible

Last February, John Chang, 36, CEO of Mountain View-based seeUthere.com, pulled VP of marketing Helen Loh into a private meeting and gave her one of her most important assignments to date at the online events-services firm: MP3.com, the high-profile online music company, was about to become a major investor, and Chang wanted Loh to write the press announcement. Since MP3.com had initially been in talks to acquire seeUthere.com, it was critical from a marketing and investor-relations standpoint that the announcement be handled deftly, "because it definitely was good news," says Loh, 37. And it needed to be completed that day, so that it could go out on the morning news wires -- before word leaked out to the trade press.

At most any other Internet firm, that would have meant Loh staying glued to her desk until the press release was finished. But she had struck an agreement with Chang when she was hired: Loh, a mother of two, had to leave work at 2:30 PM a few days a week to pick up her 5-year-old daughter from school and get her settled at home. She would make up the hours by working at home before dinner and after she put her kids to bed.

So on the day of the big MP3.com news, Loh left the office on schedule, put on her car-phone headset, and, while driving her daughter home from school, fielded calls from Chang, MP3.com, and seeUthere's publicist. She finished the press release that night -- at home. "It all comes down to trust," says Chang, who spent five years as an executive at Hewlett-Packard, an early proponent of flexible schedules. "Do you trust that people will get the job done, even if you're not around? I do."