Starting something from nothing and running it yourself, this agency, is a reason in itself to start something. I think it shouldn't be understated that many of us start things because we want to, not because we want to become billionaires of have convenient lifestyles.

I agree but it's actually a Swedish company so the comment is a bit misleading. Parental leave with 80% salary is paid for by the government up to 1.5 years.

That’s not the complete picture though. The government pay you in parental leave up to a limit. The most anyone can get is more or less about 2900USD/month for full parental leave. All of our employees make more than that limit, most a lot more. We pay them the difference between what they can get from the government insurance policy up to 80% of their normal salary.

We also keep paying for their pension. There we also pay about 80% of what we would otherwise.

I don't think many who starts a company stops at 40h though.

I think there is a lot of confirmation bias on these sorts of discussions on places like HN.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the number of companies started as lifestyle businesses, freelancing, etc. far outweigh what we think of as "startups" here. Many of them are very explicitly targeting number of hours - I know a bunch of people who went freelance mostly because they can target 30h/wk that way a lot more easily than in traditional employment.

Freelancing is one thing but a comparing it to owning a company with employees is very different.

I have no numbers but what I've seen from people owning businesses with employees (or even alone) in various fields none are stopping at 40 hours a week. That is in Sweden.

EDIT: Just for fun I googled some and found an article where they had made a poll in a magazine about small business owners. The distribution was:

Less than 30h 7,5% 31-35h 2,3% 36-40h 6,5% 41-45h 10,5% 46-50h 14,9% 51-55h 13,9% 56-60h 15,8% 61-65h 8,0% 66-70h 7,1% 71-75h 3,4% 76-80h 3,9% More than 80h 6,2%

https://www.foretagande.se/nyheter/sa-manga-timmar-jobbar-eg...

> Freelancing is one thing but a comparing it to owning a company with employees is very different.

Yes of course, but I did not mean to do that. I don't know what the relative distribution is, but think HN readership plausibly has a particular view of "starting a company" which is not very reflective of that distribution...