Stop the Insanity!

Of course, flextime, telecommuting, and part-time schedules are nothing new. Many "Fortune" 500 companies have embraced such alternatives for years, primarily as staff-retention tools. And study after study has shown that flexibility in the workplace is key to work-life balance. But most Web startups -- despite operating on the cutting edge of technology -- continue to be almost pathologically primitive when it comes to face time. Nobody blinks if programmers and engineers come and go at odd hours, but a senior executive at a young Net company leaving at midday? For Chang, that request was so unusual that he checked with his board of directors before hiring Loh.

Today, flextime is the norm at seeUthere.com. To avoid a torturous rush-hour commute -- two hours each way for many employees -- some top managers work from home until about 11 AM, while others come in early and leave at 3 PM or 4 PM. But few employees are on a set schedule. "I can't promise people that they'll only have to work a 40-hour week here, but at least I can give them flexibility so they can balance their lives better," Chang says.

More and more startups are adopting that mind-set. Sure, Internet time is real, and meeting deadlines matters. But results are what count, not crowded cubicles and obsolete rituals. By working flexibly, people can work fast -- without working themselves to the bone. And at saner startups, the commitment to flexibility extends to all employees, not just to those at the top or to parents with young children. At RocketCash, for example, one marketing manager negotiated a four-day week (with 20% less pay). And it's not unusual for an employee to leave a meeting early to attend "a book-club gathering or a wine-tasting class," says marketing VP Kruse.

A wine-tasting class? "We think it's good for people to have lives outside of work," says Kruse, who, as a mother of two young children, has plenty to do outside of work. And anyway, what counts is not the schedule people keep but the results they produce. "We're not clock-watchers here," she adds. "We know people are professionals and that they'll do what they need to do."

Don't Cover Up Pressures; Cover for One Another

Last year, Marianne Cooper, a graduate student studying sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, began interviewing male Silicon Valley software engineers to find out how they balance fatherhood and work. She noticed a disturbing pattern: At work, hardly anyone ever spoke truthfully about family responsibilities.

One engineer told Cooper that when his boss told him he had to attend a meeting in New York on the same day that he was scheduled to meet with his priest about his son's christening, he barely uttered a word of protest. (Later, he secretly appealed to his boss's secretary to change the date of the meeting.) "While it was acceptable to bring work to the home," Cooper says, "it was not acceptable to bring home to the work."

But at saner startups, attending to family needs is not considered a sign of disloyalty to the company or a lack of commitment to the job. "If I want to help out at my son's school, I say, 'I've got to run. I'm going to my son's school,' " says RocketCash's Kruse. "I don't apologize. It's not a big deal."

At the same time, respecting outside priorities eliminates the need for cover-ups. Instead, people cover for one another. Recently, when a major client asked Kruse to fly to Chicago to hammer out a partnership agreement, she was up-front: She wouldn't be able to make the meeting because she was on single-parent duty while her husband was out of town. She called RocketCash's vice president of business development, who immediately agreed to fill in for her at the Chicago meeting. "I didn't give it a second thought to ask her," says Kruse, who herself has pinch-hit for coworkers. "We try to be team players here."

Some Internet entrepreneurs are taking their commitment to work-family balance a step further by launching Net companies with their spouses. After all, one way to spend lots of time at the office without neglecting your partner is to work with your partner. Plenty of people are "married to their jobs" in a figurative sense. For some Internet entrepreneurs, that idea has taken on a whole new meaning.