Question
Assuming the 2-person company is angel funded and the product hasn't launched, how many hours should a co-founder be working a day?
Answer
If you are both techies, doing development, I don't know what to say.
If you are both biz guys, can I come over and look at the strange pink giraffes? :)
If you are the biz guy, and he's the tech guy, I think you're fine. Development is more of a turn on/turn off charge/recharge game, while biz is more of a "never off your mind" game.
If he's the biz guy, and you're the tech guy, you may have a problem, and the key there is "7 hours of video games." That's a deep level of unplugging. No biz lead should EVER be that unplugged. Unless they have superhuman monk-like abilities, they should be going to bed anxious, waking up anxious. They should be ruining their health a bit with toxic worry.
For effective biz types, even if they are doing very little active work (steady, active visible biz work with measurable "output" is to an extent only possible during certain phases of a product's life cycle; at other times it is reactive/opportunistic etc.), their off-duty activities, if they are engaged, are likely to be relevant to the business (eg. trawling the tech blogs, networking, blogging).
But basically it is completely impossible to answer your question without knowing what your relative roles are. Not all jobs are done the same way.
I wrote about this recently: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/1...
If you are both biz guys, can I come over and look at the strange pink giraffes? :)
If you are the biz guy, and he's the tech guy, I think you're fine. Development is more of a turn on/turn off charge/recharge game, while biz is more of a "never off your mind" game.
If he's the biz guy, and you're the tech guy, you may have a problem, and the key there is "7 hours of video games." That's a deep level of unplugging. No biz lead should EVER be that unplugged. Unless they have superhuman monk-like abilities, they should be going to bed anxious, waking up anxious. They should be ruining their health a bit with toxic worry.
For effective biz types, even if they are doing very little active work (steady, active visible biz work with measurable "output" is to an extent only possible during certain phases of a product's life cycle; at other times it is reactive/opportunistic etc.), their off-duty activities, if they are engaged, are likely to be relevant to the business (eg. trawling the tech blogs, networking, blogging).
But basically it is completely impossible to answer your question without knowing what your relative roles are. Not all jobs are done the same way.
I wrote about this recently: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/1...