# Dalton & Michael: Most important lifestyle habits of successful founders

**Author:** Dalton Caldwell, Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ii-dalton-michael-most-important-lifestyle-habits-of-successful-founders
**YouTube ID:** 0IShllkCHtY

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Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the best approaches to developing a healthy lifestyle that ultimately helps
you run and grow a successful startup. Take care of yourselves out there\!

## Transcript

let's examine the facts yes fact fact fact fact great you're fine yes however sometimes we look at the facts and you're not fine [Music] this is michael seibel with dalton caldwell in our last video we talked about the setbacks that make founders feel like [ __ ] when running their startups and this time we're going to talk about how to prevent these punches to the face and how to take a punch and recover if you

absolutely must so dalton i think the cool way to think about this is a little bit like health care there's preventative health care and then there's you know treatment so let's start with the preventative and let's set the set the framework here like a lot of times founders get punched in the face as almost unforced errors it's like a result of magical thinking or like other parts of their lives not being set up and so here are things you can do to either reduce the number of punches that come or at least reduce their intensity

because you have your other [ __ ] locked up does that make sense yeah exactly it's like as we spoke to last time you can't think that you're not gonna have any setbacks and you're not gonna again take some punches it's gonna happen to you a hundred percent that the highs are high and the lows are low and so rather than assuming you can be so smart that you will never have low lows instead plan ahead put the infrastructure in place so that when you do have these these big challenges or

these low moments you have the infrastructure set up that um you know you planned ahead for it i think that's very a very good idea so we were joking when we were talking about what to talk about in this video a lot of these things could be put in the category of adulting and it might turn out that if you want to be a founder of a very successful company you might have to adult harder than the people around you in fact it almost assuredly requires

adulting harder than the people around you sometimes i think founders look at us and they're kind of like well you know my roommates don't do this so why do i have to and it's like well your roommates aren't trying to build a billion dollar company then they don't have to but maybe you need to be better than the people around you to do something extraordinary it's yet another thing that distances you from your peers and if you if your whole thing in life is i'm the same as my peers and i'm the same as my roommates that have jobs at like big tech companies

this is yet another way that you're going to be isolated and different and have to learn to love that and not feel sad that when they're like hey we're going to go pull another all-nighter we're going to go party thursday friday saturday you have to be cool with opting out of that right yep but if you if you think you can have it all you can't i don't know if you can have it all you can't we're here to tell we're here to ruin that have it all dream so where i like to start is audit how

you live like think about where you're waking up in the morning you know did you get enough sleep are you in a a place that's a home is it are you living in a place that makes you more powerful or less powerful are you sacrificing like are you losing hit points at home you know and if that's happening man that's unforced error right like so that's who you're living with what you're eating do you have easy

access to exercise are you know are you living in a place with a bunch of alcohol and drugs everywhere you know not helping you like at the minimum your home should be neutral but i think for the most successful people the home's actually a plus like the home is like where they're making points where they're winning points and i think that a lot of founders in their early days don't understand how much they could be losing based on just how they're living yeah i think almost from a clinician's perspective when someone is having

issues the first thing you look at is sleep disruption diet and exercise right if you go if you go look at you know research depression or anxiety and things that's usually where the 80 20 solution is for a lot of folks that are struggling is you look at their sleep patterns are they sleeping okay are they eating okay are they getting exercise or they're getting sun all these sorts of things and so if you don't have your house in order on those fronts you are not even if you don't currently have depression

you are not well situated to deal with really hard things that might happen to you right but dalton i went to an ivy league school and it was really hard and i went to a really challenging high school and i didn't have to change these things to get good grades or to get the good internship like i did you know i was able to like work hard and play hard why do i have to change now it's working it's working for me this lifestyle

i think i think it can work for people you and i know people that um certainly don't follow this advice and they still still did okay i just think you and i also know the same people where eventually you've got to pay the piper like at some point no matter it's almost like you're going into debt like personal health debt or whatever you want to call it and man yes you can go pretty far today you can go five years in a debt you can go 10 years into debt i don't know but at some point the debt comes due

where you can't hold it all in anymore you can't hold the whole world on your shoulders and i think what we're just trying to say is if you start off with good habits early you're not going to incur this massive debt that one day causes you to have like um a breakdown or a meltdown again what do you want whatever you want to call it well and to double down on that i might argue that like you probably can sacrifice these things for five years like maybe even seven years the tricky thing is that like the best companies last multiple decades the

tricky things is the [ __ ] that you can get away with in your 20s you can't get away with in your 30s and company running just gets harder and so i think sometimes people are like oh this is going to be a relative sprint but it's like what i like to talk to you about with yc founders a lot is like what happens if this works like are you set up for this to not work or are you set up for this to work because this works like you're going to be in it like you're going to be in it for a while and i think sometimes people set their lives

up for it to like not work and then wow you know self-fulfilling prophecy and when you think about it this isn't an age thing this is a lifestyle thing because you'll see like 19 year olds with all the good habits and you'll see folks that aren't 19 that like i still live like 19 years and so this isn't an age thing at all this is a habits thing man well and you'll even see successful people with good habits lose them and then wonder why they can't succeed again right it's like even just having

these habits doesn't mean you keep them so okay so that's so that's that's your you know physical life style setup you want to talk about this kind of social media piece because i think that a lot of people don't understand how toxic social media it's like yeah i think i think you just want to look at your information diet the metaphor i think about this stuff with is uh the same way we have a food diet and like of course what we eat and drink affects our moods and how we feel i actually think the

information we consume affects us and if you think about again like myself all of us you know when when it's a really heavy time in history when there's a lot going on when i'm doomed scrolling all the time reading about pandemic news or war news or whatever of course that affects my state of mind okay and so to some extent you can't completely stick your head on the ground about what's going on in the world no one's saying to do that but to the extent your social media habits make you feel bad or compare yourselves

to people or say you follow a lot of like investors and everything they're talking about is the investment market and who's raising all of that and this is just every day you're bombarding your brain with stuff about investor [ __ ] why why is that good why how is that helping you actually run your startup reading what a bunch of investors say about the market all the time and i think people are surprised that like successful founders like explicitly block social media they

do crazy things like you know they they grayscale their phone so it looks less interesting they turn off notifications they're aggressive users of like um screen time like tracking like they they actually pretty aggressively audit this stuff so that illiquidity saved you all and so again so if you're consuming if you're consuming media every day and you're reassessing the value like if you're too paying attention to this stuff it doesn't make you make better financial decisions does it

no isn't that wild the next area i like to talk about is salary um oftentimes and and this is more of course for companies that have raised funding just a a small incremental five or ten percent cal salary bump can make a huge lifestyle difference and and it's almost always worth it like i think people screw up and this is what i say to founders i'd love to hear your advice if your startup salary is allowing you

to save money it's probably not good right you shouldn't be sitting here like with google employee level savings running your startup however if your startup salary is giving you the lifestyle that allows you to be all in on your startup because the real world isn't distracting you negatively um then it is good and what's interesting is that often for different founders this is a different salary level you know perfect example when i

was starting i had student loans in college my co-founders didn't i made a little bit more money so that i wasn't like going into debt with my student loans and that was perfectly reasonable and no one was like oh well you need to take x percent less because you need to pay a 200 student loan every month it's like no like so sometimes small changes in salary now you know if you have a co-founder where it's like i need to make a half a million dollars a year and i'm 23. yeah that's probably different but like sometimes people are sacrificing pennywise pound foolish right like

sometimes we're being pennywise pound foolish i think this is one of those topics also like equity where what founders want to hear is here's the right answer one size fits all for everyone or here's the formula oh here's a spreadsheet here we go michael here's how much to pay yourselves just fill out the spreadsheet and we're done like and sadly like many things in life anyone that tells you their simple answers is probably trying to sell you something you know like [Laughter] right they're like yeah it's probably snake oil and

and so the subtlety that i agree with you on is you want to pay yourself enough that you don't get into debt you want to pay yourself enough so that you're properly motivated you also want to keep enough you want to keep the money in the company like these are all variables that you have to turn and you know if you're going to be a successful founder you have to have good judgment and you have to have opinions and so when founders have no opinion about this stuff it's not a great sign so it's kind of like you need a philosophy of what you're solving for around compensation you want to set everyone up

for success yes a line incentives well and also realize that this this looks different for every company man like a lot of folks ask me well how much should i pay employee number one i'm like that's a nonsensical question who are they what's you know do you see what i'm saying like like it's yeah like what they want is some answer oh you should pay employee number one x but like no man that's like no that's not how this works it was almost easier to come to these conclusions when i think back because we didn't have very much money and so we

kind of had to tell me you know like whenever anything's scarce you have to ration it more effectively and i think that like our philosophy because i like what you're saying there's no formula but we had a philosophy which is like salary is for living and equity is for upside like that's that was the kind of philosophy um and i think that served us that served us pretty well um the next area of prevention you have to learn how to have

hard conversations with your co-founders and for everyone to be okay afterwards um and everyone has to go through this and it's gonna suck but if you have some of those in the bag when you get punched in the face you all know a little bit more how to interact with each other and to me the biggest challenge that i've seen on this front we've talked about this at yc quite a bit is

this um anxious personality type versus avoid into personality type you know when people are challenged people are frustrated and this is way oversimplification but sometimes people are anxious they want to deal with the problem right now they're leaning in they want to talk for they've talked for two hours with you and they won't talk for another two hours with you and sometimes people are avoidant and you know after five minutes they're done they they want to think about it for a long time they rather talk asynchronously and i actually see that most problems between co-founders

the root cause isn't whatever went wrong or whatever they're debating it's actually their style of dealing with their frustration and if you can have a little empathy if the person who you're working with has a different style of dealing with frustration than you do and you can just take a beat right i'm the i'm the anxious type you know this dalton like i'm super i want to like talk about it for six hours then six more hours i want to plan i want to write it down right now go go go go and

i always get into trouble when i'm interacting with someone who reacts negatively to that and i always have to kind of be like [ __ ] i gotta take a beat like in this situation i gotta take a beat and so in my experience if you can figure out that dance with your co-founder it's so much more helpful when you're dealing with these external challenges and like the startup's going to present many opportunities for frustration with your co-founder infinite opportunities it's like the whole topic today which is eventually you're going to take punches you're going to have set back to your

startup eventually you're going to have conflict to the co-founder 100 100 like like and the thing that you're disagreeing about isn't even the thing like who cares it's noise right like oh it's like roommates oh did you take did you put the dishes away or like it's not about the thing and like it's not about who's right or who's wrong and it's funny because a lot of people want to ask us advice about co-founder stuff but that what they want to what they want is us to agree that they were right and their co-founder is wrong you love that they're wrong dalton can i tell you

about the situation basically i'm smart my co-founder is dumb what do you think i should do about it like it's always and it's like no no no no i'm not gonna take debate on that i'm sure like the actual thing that you need advice on a thing to work on is the meta conversation which is like how do you deal with conflict so that people feel good when it's over yeah otherwise whatever the you know not cleaning up

your dishes or taking the trash out whatever the equivalent of that is in your cofounder relationship eventually it's not gonna work out man right you gotta have tools no because there's gonna be more issues well i think that's what's fun about this what is that like early stage founders argue about the dumbest things that there's almost infinite opportunities to practice this dealing with frustration of your co-founder like it is like a roommate relationship there's infinite opportunities before something that's a real whammy comes so like take those opportunities like

please take them do you have any more on the preventative side before we move the treatment i think it's just this expectation setting i think so much of life is expectation setting where setting expectations for yourself set expectations for people you work with about what to expect if you are good at that people can deal with all sorts of stuff and when you get into the biggest trouble both with yourself managing your own brain as well as working with other people is when you say a bunch of stuff that is that turns out to be really not true and you set expectations poorly and

you have to like dig yourself out of this deep hole that you dug yourself into because you promised a bunch of [ __ ] or you set expectations in such a way that just weren't true and so expectation setting is key for prevention and you know we talked about this in another video but man it's it helps to study the real story of companies right it helps just to just know how long this takes man it really helps for you to not have stupid expectations oh well this company became a billion dollar company in two years so that's clearly the average path and it's like no like absolutely not

absolutely not it's funny because in some ways you're saying sometimes these companies punch themselves out right like they don't even need external forces they set a stupid expectation they don't hit their own unrealistic expectation then they feel like something's wrong and you're just like holy crap you just invented a crisis like startups have enough crises without that well we've talked about all the things you can do to prevent the injury let's say the punch happens bam and you need some treatment something really bad happens or you

suspect something really bad happens um i think the first point that you brought up that i really love is this idea of like do i have to do anything right now like talk about that a little bit more yeah i think i learned this as a founder the hard way which is when something bad happens you want to immediately like make a move you want to like call a meeting or you want you get a you get an email with bad news in it you want to hit respond and like

in the moment of fight or flight when your adrenaline's pumping you're like how dare you sir you know you want to you want to get start writing emails with that tone dear sir in response to your query about you know like if you're ever typing an email with that tone like you know don't do it um and what i've noticed is you can just like not respond or like let stuff sit a

little bit and sleeping on it is the minimum thing i would do this is what i always tell founders is when they have something to happen to at least sleep on it because i just noticed the next day you have a whole new amount of clarity on the situation and i and i often find myself in my best moments in my worst moments and exactly like you said i'm like act now go send that email like punch back and my best moments i'm always like if there's ever a decision that feels

like it's action one or action two there's always a third option which is don't act there's all like and it's almost never presented to you um i find a lot of times lawyers [ __ ] companies with this it's like you gotta do this or that and it's like it's not like how about we don't what if we do nothing yes and then what's really funny is that like the best founders no action becomes one of their like key plays like they use that play way more than you think

it's a great play it's such a good play um and it's amazing that like for the best founders no action is like you know 20 30 40 of the time what they do maybe more but for other founders they don't even know the play exists like they don't even know the play exists yeah maybe just archive the email yeah whatever the email says yeah that's true just hit them you know it's a really big deal they'll probably reply back i've noticed that it's a really big deal um and of course don't do this in the

case where someone's health is on the line or someone's gonna go to jail or whatever right that's different but um yeah it's more of like the stuff where someone where it's like interpersonal or someone i don't know yeah someone said something bad that you you can't archive you can wait till the weekend's over to reply to that slack message like it's gonna it'll it'll survive so the next one on the list is it's okay to take a day off it's okay to go home i think that you know

there was one moment in my career where um we were gonna get bought uh socialcam was gonna get bought and we were two months into the diligence process and we got a call that said the deal was off and it was the only moment in my career where i was like i'm not going to react to this well in front of my co-founders i just need to go home at least home i can react

in a way that won't be a bad example to them you know like because they're going to look in my reaction they're going to be like are we [ __ ] and if i'm looking like we're [ __ ] that's not helping you know when the generals like pulling their hair being like this looks horrible we're gonna die that's not good um and man like going home um hanging out with you know at the time was my girlfriend but then you know

later became my wife like taking that day the next day i could kind of bring a better michael to the table yeah right you know that was that was a big thing that was a big thing um i i was thinking about this in the context of like when things go bad there's a current inside a p set of people you should probably be hanging out with and a certain set of people you probably shouldn't be hanging out with right like how do you think about that yeah i mean again we i have my personal experience and i have

all the data points we have across yc founders and you just sometimes see people that are that are taking punches and having a hard time and there's some really amazing people that you can hang out with that support you and tell you you're okay and validate your experience and like let you take space for yourself and like all this good stuff and like these are these are great people to have in your life and then we see other sorts of folks that are like you know oh you should do tons of drugs um or

hey like let's go not sleep for a really long amount of time or let's hang out with celebrities or like you know like there's all these different crowds you can get into and it's depressing how predictive that is for how people will deal with like setbacks you know yeah even and these are adults we're not even talking we're talking about these are they're adults these are our grown people our age people still struggle with this particular one

um and so i think you just want to think about yeah who who you're spending time with when you're when you're taking punches and what kind of habits that you're taking from the peer group you know what man i really think that the best people you know i'll be explicit right the best people [ __ ] goes wrong and they go take a hike or something and the worst people think [ __ ] goes wrong and they drink and do drugs and like it tends to be that those friend groups you know for a lot of founders you know the friends who if you go out with them

you're going to drink and do drugs and you know the other friends where if you go out then you're going to go on a hike like just explicit you know and you know but pick the right group you know pick the right group um and it's weird because i don't think the friends are bad they're not trying to harm you you know well they're doing their own thing yeah um it's just that you know you have to choose the right therapy you have to choose the right therapy for yourself and and actually this that's a

good segue like let's talk about real health care let's talk about mental health care for a second like you know this is this is becoming less of a controversial issue but i still think that it's something that needs to be normed more right yeah i mean therapy is good medication is good if you're prescribed it and it's not from your friend just kidding um [Laughter] you know this is this stuff is destigmatized and it's

it's important and like a lot of founders struggle i think it's the ups and the downs exacerbate this stuff and again the stuff i said earlier um sleep disruption stress all these other things exacerbated so you know sometimes that is the appropriate thing to do here so you should do it and not think you're too tough or whatever whatever reason it would be that you wouldn't use these things as a crutch i just i've noticed that people that aren't the people that aren't willing to use this stuff they find other crutches that

yeah i would not do that right well and i think that most people don't realize this isn't the kind of stuff that that comes out in your favorite company's press release most people don't realize how the founders who they are impressed with actually take advantage of therapy actually take advantage of medication most people don't realize you know their founders i know who've sworn off drinking because like they are not good you know they they're not the best version themselves when they're drinking like this isn't the kind of stuff that

people will talk about very publicly but we know a lot of people and when someone's trying to squeeze every ounce of positive productivity out of themselves sometimes like you know um they need to use these tools and it's really helpful really really helpful so you know let's talk about the fatal punches right you know why i see we do with a lot of failure we deal with a lot of companies who fail and

you and i have to have a lot of conversations with founders who their company has failed and their first thought is i'm a failure they personalize that failure what are the some of the things you tell those people when they're dealing with that fatal punch yeah i think it as per we talked about here a lot of the things that people think are game over aren't and so our advice is don't give up like you actually have a bunch of customers you have a bunch of money like let's look at the facts you're good and so a lot of our office hours are let's examine the facts

fact fact fact fact great you're fine however sometimes we look at the facts and you're not fine and it doesn't help you like you don't need a pep talk to keep going and it actually is probably the right thing for you to not keep going because at the end of the day this is your life you only have one of them and messing up your life in a permanent way your savings your family your friends

whatever it is you know don't do that and again i know it can be confusing out there because we get bombarded with messages oh but you say you never give up or you say you know like yeah it's confusing it's that easy yeah it's complicated yeah complicated so i think you need to actually with this clear objective ways as you can be able to know when it's not working and that it was a fatal punch and that yeah you should not do this anymore like sometimes sometimes you see people get into like

debt where they owe a bunch of people a lot of money and then they shut down and they ripped off all their suppliers again you know you know what i'm trying to say like like you could you fail in such a way that you hurt a bunch of people not just yourself not good don't do that when i think that this is what's tricky is that i think someone needs to be out there saying that these aren't the things you have to put on the table to win yes when you're working hard you're gonna probably have to spend less time with your family or friends but you don't have to put those relationships

you don't have to sacrifice those relationships to win in fact they're a source of strength you're working hard you're probably not saving as much money as you would be if you're working another job but you don't have to sacrifice all your savings you don't have to go into extreme debt like if you're working hard like you might not be able to get the salary that allows you to live in the apartment of your dreams but like if you have to crash on friends couches these things don't tend to have to be sacrificed to win and so if you're if you're taking

these kind of one-way hard life hits maybe the facts are are set up yeah and again what's tough is when you're one of those folks sometimes you can even be victimized by people that'll like keep bleeding you because that's the racket and we see this a lot with struggling startups all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork to sell you services or promise they'll connect with the investors or they'll help you fundraise or you name it and it's like it's kind of like

moving to hollywood to become an actor and it's not going well all these people will like there's a whole underbelly of folks who exist to sell stuff rip off the people who aren't doing well you know to me where i see this happen that's most tragic is with non-technical founders because it'll be some dev shop or some you know if you give me your last dollar i promise that i'll solve your problem yeah you see people writing checks for

20 30 40 what are 50 grand out of their personal checking account their life savings to some dev shop yes that's like their whole business model is to rip i shouldn't say rip but like they're like yeah cool like whatever like just as long as the check clears we'll do it you know yeah it's pretty depressing that's really depressing and and i think that like those founders when we have this conversation be like hey your startup failed that doesn't mean you failed you know sometimes they just need to hear someone say that like

so often we'll talk about like look at this person they're sort of fail and they have another one that does well look at this person they should have failed and they're not working as an executive at this really cool company like these experiences you have are valuable to you even if your company didn't work you know you learned 10x more than you would have learned otherwise even if your company didn't work and sometimes when we explain that silver lining people are like oh you're right you know that's actually a fun part of the job so there you go

step one how to try to avoid the punches or step two when they come how to recover as fast as possible great shine today dalton thanks man [Music] [Music]
