The bus factor, startups, and holidays
The challenge of relaxing over the holidays when you work at a startup.
Hi, I’m Russell and this is issue #5 of Russell’s Index, where I write about the lessons I’ve learned—and continue to learn—as a founding employee at SharpestMinds. Subscribe for a new issue every week(ish).
The bus factor
An early-stage startup with a handful of employees (like SharpestMinds) will have a low bus factor—the number of people that have to get hit by a bus for a project to fail.
A low bus factor adds risk and can make work more stressful. If just one key person does not show up, the startup could fail. If you happen to be that key person, well, that’s a lot of pressure. But, as Byrne Hobart notes in The Diff, it can also be a competitive advantage because a team with a low bus factor has more operating leverage:
[A] team that’s dependent on one person, or a handful of people, is also a team that’s disproportionately made up of high-impact people. It will get a lot more done for a given number of worker-days (as long as the bus doesn’t come). The Bus Factor is a good way to understand why companies seem to ship a lot less per employee as they grow. Once the core product works, the most important thing is to reduce the risk of it breaking, and that means layering on redundancy.
This is the double-edged sword of working at a startup. On one hand, your work has an outsized impact on the company—leading to a greater sense of autonomy and ownership. On the other hand, a lot rests on your shoulders. The increased responsibility can be a burden. The more essential you are to the functioning of the company, the harder it will be to take a vacation.
Startups and holidays
A low bus factor becomes especially obvious during the holidays. For most of the year, I’m fine with the trade-off of less vacation time for more ownership. But this trade-off gets harder to swallow when Christmas rolls around. [1]
Professional success shouldn’t be everything. Time off to rest and recharge is important and time spent with loved ones even more so—especially during the holidays. If your job prevents you from and spending time with family and friends, it can be a recipe for resentment.
I think it’s worth prioritizing down-time over the holidays. A low bus factor will put constraints on that down-time—someone always has to be manning the ship—but you can still create space for relaxation by lowering expectations.
This is exactly what we did at SharpestMinds this past Christmas. We put a pause on major projects, canceled meetings, and reduced expectations to “keep the company running”. [2] I still had to check my inboxes every day and fix the odd, small fire. But I was able to relax and shake off some burnout that had been building up towards the end of the year.
Perhaps this comes from a place of startup privilege. After all, SharpestMinds—though still small and loaded with uncertainty—is currently stable and profitable. And the end-of-year holidays tend to be the slowest time of the year for our business.
Pausing projects and lowering expectations can be a hard pill to swallow—it certainly was for SharpestMinds in the past. Startups get their advantage by being more agile than incumbents; by launching early and iterating quickly. I still remember a Christmas just two years ago, where I was in my parents’ basement sending cold emails to data scientists—trying to bootstrap our network of mentors.
Reducing expectations around the holidays requires going against the grain of conventional startup wisdom and slowing down. But the alternative fosters a culture that says, “work is more important than everything else.” That’s not sustainable. It increases the risk of burnout. It increases the risk that you and your teammates will start to resent the company.
Some startups can work non-stop for a short period and see great success, but many have to grind away for years. That’s hard to do without sustainable work habits that allow you to enjoy your life.
Happy new year!
-Russell
[1] When I was growing up, the Christmas holidays were the biggest vacation of the year—jam-packed with quality time with family and friends.
[2] Of great importance was setting clear expectations. In past years, I wasn’t sure if I should be working or not over the Christmas holidays. It seemed like the founders never stopped and I wasn’t sure what they expected of me. Any time spent relaxing was tainted by the guilt of, “I should be working.” In other words, not very relaxing.
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