Your well-funded startup is already dead.

As soon as a startup receives initial investments, most often I already see how the team will get bogged down with problems in just a week.

Perhaps the founders finally deserved vacation for the whole year, it doesn't matter. I already know that their startup will be bent.
This is what three out of four startups do immediately after receiving the initial investment:

• After several months of work 60 hours a week (and a little rest, as a rule) to start and show growth, so that investors believe that they are worth something, the founders start working from 9 to 5 five days a week - they relax even before the start of hard work;
• Since the money received provides an opportunity to solve life / work problems, their Facebook feed over the next few weeks and months begins to be gradually filled with photos from weekend tours, parties and concerts;
• They almost always find time for a weekend or a trip home to see their relatives, because they deserve it;
• A new apartment or house is one of the priorities, since now they can pay themselves a fairly high salary;
• Finally, there is an opportunity to pay compensation to a long-suffering partner - perhaps they will finally be able to plan a dream wedding, which has been talked about for months.

If this continues to continue for several weeks after receiving the investment, such startups are likely to die even before the funding of the Serie A.
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The point of initial investment is to help your startup stay alive long enough to prove that customers and buyers like what you are doing. No one will give you more money until you can prove that many people like what you are doing.

You have to do a lot more and prove a lot more after you got the money than before.
Initial investment is fuel that helps you do a lot more, go ahead and make it faster. Do you really believe that you will achieve more by working less - by focusing less attention or being less devoted to your work than before you received the money?

The saying "work smarter, not harder" does not work here. You can always solve problems, ensure efficiency and optimize processes - but small teams in this area face a lot of difficulties, and therefore hard work cannot be replaced by anything.

This is not about working until you burn out. No investor wants a team to break up. But as a founder, you need to understand that your startup is your priority for the next five years. This means that you will not be able to see your family and friends often. This means that relationships will suffer in some places. Take a day off if you feel you are starting to fade. Get out, recharge. Go away for the weekend and disappear from the network - but when you return, you will be expected to work 12 hours a day with the same intensity and determination that you showed before receiving money.

I imagine how much the founders, with whom I work or in which I have invested, resent reading this, asking myself if I do not mean them. It is likely that you - so let me lay out all this for you and others who are in a similar position: if you decide to move to a normalized work schedule after you received the initial investment, if you treat your founder position as a regular job if you think you can work less after you got the money - I can confidently say that your startup is already dead, and all you do is waste your time and money reaping what you couldn’t sow.

To clarify the situation: I am not saying that you have to sacrifice everything in life in order to have a chance of success. I say that if you, as a founder, treat investments as a means to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, and if you hope to enjoy the same benefits while playing a corporate role without commitment beyond your job responsibilities, then you will fail.

Give me the name of the founder of at least one startup that has succeeded in scoring everything.
Either you want the routine work from 9 to 5, or you want your startup to be successful.
Choose one thing. I guarantee you that you will not be able to achieve both.

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