In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about hobbies for founders.
The life of a founder, and entrepreneurship, in general, can be very stressful. In order to avoid burnout and stress-related illness, it’s important for founders to disconnect from work and do other non-work related activities, and picking up a hobby is a great way to do this.
In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about whether having a hobby is a good idea, why you should decide if you’re a marathon runner and a sprinter, the benefits of hobbies and much more.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
00:00 About today’s topic.
00:23 Why this topic was chosen.
03:06 Whether having a hobby is a good idea.
04:11 Why you should decide if you’re a marathon runner and a sprinter.
06:20 How most people go through different phases.
07:03 What Hiten hobbies are.
08:00 Why Hiten’s hobbies are not seen as traditional hobbies.
09:52 What Steli’s hobbies are.
10:29 The benefits of martial arts to Steli.
11:23 How Steli views his hobby.
3 Key Points:
Are you a marathon runner or do you like to sprint?Some people might operate best in certain situations.I don’t particularly have any hobbies at the moment.
[0:00:01]
Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti.
[0:00:03]
Hiten Shah.: And this is Hiten Shah.
[0:00:05]
Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat we’re going to talk about hobbies for founders. Should founders have hobbies and a life? Should they not have them? Are there good hobbies and bad hobbies? Let’s just quickly talk about this and kind of unpack it for our listeners from our perspective. So I want to set this up with a story. Many, many years ago and I’m going to have to be careful, I can’t use real names, but I remember being at an event where one of our angel investors had invited us to, this is 2011 so long time ago, we had raised a small seed round back then and for what we were doing, and this is like a legendary [Angelo Messi 00:00:00:57] or somebody, everybody really knows in the start-up world, and I remember sitting in the audience, he was giving a talk and one of my co-founders is a super passionate skier. He loves the outdoors in general. He loves hiking, but he especially loves skiing. And remember at some point of the presentation of that angel investor, an angel investor going on on a rant that if you want to be a founder and now that it’s great skiing season, every weekend you want to go hit the snow and ski, then you know you need to figure out your priorities. He would never invest in people that waste their weekends for lifestyle instead of putting focused effort into their work and outworking their competition. I remember looking over at my co-founder, this angel just had invested in us. He just didn’t know that my co-founder was a passionate skier at the time and so we looked at each other and we both had to smile and laugh so much. And then Anthony, my co-founder, whispered in my ear, “Let’s not mention to him that I’m going skiing this weekend,” and we had a laugh about this and that stuck in my head. The is it a good idea or a bad idea to have hobbies? I feel since 2011 in the last nine years, a lot has changed and I don’t think that that same angel investor would be on stage telling the same story again and telling people that founders with hobbies or with interests out of work are not fundable. But I’m pretty sure he still holds the belief, but I think it’s not as politically correct to voice those. And a lot of people’s minds have changed over the years. So I wanted to unpack this for the founders, especially the earlier founders that are listening to us and are wondering, is it a good idea for me to have a hobby? Is it a waste of time? Should all my free time be dedicated to the company that I’m starting to get off the ground and if I have a hobby,
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