It's one thing to, as the founder of a startup, pour in 50 - 60 hours a week into your baby -- but it's another thing to routinely expect your team to do the same. Additionally, crunch-weeks should start to become less frequent as the startup moves from early stages to later stages.<p>I would argue that the ideal case shouldn't even expect hired work to put in substantially more hours than a "normal" job with an established company (e.g., 40-50 hours) -- hired work should just be expected to be better than the average candidate at those companies, and able to contribute in the team sport of startup creation and growth. If you want to argue for a hidden catch, then yes -- maybe at startups there will be a higher incidence of crunch-weeks where the team will be required to pull longer hours to put out fires -- but this shouldn't be the "norm".<p>At the end of the week, you're going to need enough time to recuperate and rest. Routinely working 10, 11, 12 hour shifts is just a recipe for burning out yourself and, maybe just as importantly, your team. When you think about it, a ten hour shift is like going to work at 8AM, staying until 7PM (with an hour for lunch) -- then when you factor in getting to work and getting home, you're talking about getting 2 - 3 hours of "free time" each workday, which you can devote to breakfast, dinner, and getting ready for bed. Making that a twelve hour shift just makes it two hours worse.<p>And if you want to talk about incentives, expecting employees to pour in 60 hours a week is the equivalent of essentially paying them 33% less "per hour" than whatever they're already getting. And 80 means that they're working for half-price. Factoring that in with whatever [potentially] fraction of a percent of equity that the employee will have by the time of acquisition (or, if you're really lucky, IPO) -- and that employee may not even be coming out ahead financially -- and that's assuming that the startup doesn't fail beforehand.<p>Maybe this means that I'm a shitty startup employee because I don't consider forcing employees to spend 80 hours a week to be the right way to run a company, but I'd rather pass on that particular opportunity and keep my sanity.<p>Anyways, just my two cents.