I wonder if you might have skipped or didn't relate to the 50% - 75% travel part.

In my experience it's not the travel, per se, even though the jet lag can be killer. It means being On 100% of the time you're away. The raw number of hours of being Always On for your company--around the world, with different people in different contexts--creates an emotional distance to one's family, because your mental world becomes intensely focused and 100% only on work, and work issues. Product issues, team, management, all that you can balance, but being on the road is the chaos of (enterprise) customers. They may love you, but they're needy. And all the time you're together, you're considering every word, and interaction to drive to a preferred outcome. It's never a "dinner". It's part of a never-ending orchestration to achieve specific outcomes.

Coming off of /those/ trips, he should have re-engaged with his family, but the challenge is the trips exhaust your mental and (jet lag) physical energy. Re-engaging with family means another "on" time, but it also means the expensive context switch from being able to talk business any time any where, in any state--leaving that mental zone-- to talk about family issues.

No, I don't get the sense he meant only engineers should work hard and CEOs should play with their kids.

I think the message is CEO's should consider forcing family-life onto their schedule, instead of being 100% consumed by work.

Yes, there are other pressing issues, and you might not be able to predict the value, but Scott says take it from someone who has gone though the struggle--it pays dividends at home, and at work.

I can relate.

I'm just surprised he didn't say anything about making his subordinates work less. He said the company had a work life balance policy, then talked about how the engineers were always in on the weekends.

PS-- I'm on the road every Mon thru Thursday and pretty much live in a hotel. I didn't relate to this pierce. It's. Rey possible, then, I don't have the skills to be a CEO.

It's just lip service. The impression I get from reading Hacker News is that practically no SV company has anything resembling a work-life balance. And the "choose your own vacation time" companies are in reality anything but. It's completely disingenious.

I like it a lot better when people say it like it is. Makes me better aware of the situation I'm in and the expectations on me.

I believe you guys misunderstood him. I think he is not saying he should not have done those 100 plus hour weeks as a CEO necessarily, but that he was simultaneously being a dick to his wife and eventually this probably had some negative impact on his CEO performance, not just on his personal life. What I got out of this is his advice is, try to the extent possible to be present for your family and get rid of "I am a CEO, bitch" attitude when you get home because your wife/husband may not appreciate it very much

No, they got it right. The #1 advice he should have given his former self was to ensure that the company DNA had proper work life/balance at its core. Once that culture was in place, the other things would have pretty much taken care of themselves.

I agree with your statement. He said the company had a great work life balance policy, but his descriptions of it contradicted that.

I agree with you vasilipupkin... It is very hard for both employee and CEO to manage their work and Family Life Balance. But, we do not forget that CEO is the commanding officer of his army and It takes lot of stress and thinking to take a right step for his company future...

But, I have a solution for these as well... Give some of the responsibility to your co-founders means they can take the final decision in that particular area. Through that, CEO can save himself from lot of stress and also can make some time to share with his family...