Startup founder success is sometimes winner-take-all (Facebook valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, Myspace at ~$0).
If that’s true in your market, then the question reduces to how likely that additional 20% is to make you better than your competitor. My guess is that you will be competing against people who are ~equally talented and working at 100%, so the final 20% of your work effort is relatively likely to push you into being more productive than them (meaning that ~100% of the value is lost by you cutting your work hours 20%).
I’d guess that quite often you’d either win anyway or lose anyway, and that the 20% don’t make the difference. There are so many factors that matter for startup founder success (talent, hard-workingness, network, credentials, luck) that it would be surprising if the competition was often so close that a 20% reduction in working time changes things.
Another way to put this: it seems likely that Facebook would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and Myspace ~$0, had the Facebook founders worked 20% less).
Startup founder success is sometimes winner-take-all (Facebook valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, Myspace at ~$0).
If that’s true in your market, then the question reduces to how likely that additional 20% is to make you better than your competitor. My guess is that you will be competing against people who are ~equally talented and working at 100%, so the final 20% of your work effort is relatively likely to push you into being more productive than them (meaning that ~100% of the value is lost by you cutting your work hours 20%).
I assume this is less true in academia.
I’d guess that quite often you’d either win anyway or lose anyway, and that the 20% don’t make the difference. There are so many factors that matter for startup founder success (talent, hard-workingness, network, credentials, luck) that it would be surprising if the competition was often so close that a 20% reduction in working time changes things.
Another way to put this: it seems likely that Facebook would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and Myspace ~$0, had the Facebook founders worked 20% less).