How founders can strive for work-life harmony

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Loney Antony’s entrepreneurial journey was measured in long, hard yards. The 2008 financial crisis struck shortly after Sequoia India invested in his company, Prizm Payment Services. He had to work twice as hard before the business began to hit the kind of scale we all knew it could achieve. And for every hard yard that Antony walked, so did his family.

At a celebratory dinner in 2014 (when Prizm was sold to Hitachi), Antony’s wife, Pushpa, made a short speech that struck a deep chord with me. After congratulating the company’s founders and the management team, she shared the unvarnished truth about the sacrifices made: long hours, lost moments, and how much their two sons had missed their father during their critical teenage years. She knew what her husband had set out to do and supported him all the way. It was all worthwhile, she said, but it was also incredibly tough.

Her candor brought to the fore the invaluable role that the unsung heroes play in a successful founder journey. It also underscored the continual challenge that founders face in finding time for their family.

The reality is that starting a company is a 24/7 affair. Work-life balance is not a realistic goal for any entrepreneur.  What many young founders are now talking about instead is work-life harmony. They’re focusing on the quality (and not just quantity) of time spent on the key aspects of their lives to help them fulfill their vision of what they want to achieve as a partner, parent, and entrepreneur.

By sharing this post we want to encourage more folks in the ecosystem to come forward and share their experiences. Over the last few months, we chatted with a number of entrepreneurs on this topic. Here are some useful tips from founders on what they’re doing to find that harmony.

Overcommunicate

Communication with family is probably the best defense against the stresses of building a startup. I recently had a conversation with a group of founders at a gathering in Singapore, where Circles.Life co-founder Rameez Ansar shared some important advice. He recommends overcommunicating with your spouse and treating them as you would your co-founder.

“My big learning is to treat your spouse as you would treat your co-founder because they are, in a way, co-founders to your business. And how would you treat your co-founder? You’d be transparent, you’d make time to listen to them, you’d discuss your problems, and [you’d] find solutions to each problem as it comes up.”

Ansar got married a few years after he launched his company. He concedes he wasn’t initially super communicative with his spouse (who was a busy finance professional) about what he was going through at work. He started to realize, however, that it wasn’t going well and that better communication led to better understanding. It’s a challenge in many Asian cultures, he notes, where men sometimes feel they need to be pillars of strength and don’t want to appear vulnerable.

Ansar recommends that couples read up on the risks and realities of the startup world before one of them embarks on the journey. Statistics shows that only a few startups succeed, and they typically take five to 10 years to hit scale. Your partner should be fully aware of these facts. It’s going to be a long and tumultuous journey.

Ansar, who was a seed investor before he started Circles.Life, observes that many couples fail to anticipate these realities. He recalls one situation where a founder’s wife stayed in a well-paying job she didn’t like so she could keep things afloat at home. She assumed that her husband’s startup would be ticking along after two years and she’d be free to pursue her own passions. But as the years dragged on, emotional debt piled up and resentment set in. The startup eventually failed, and so did the marriage.

Don’t let your spouse chafe in a job they hate while you pursue your entrepreneurial dream, says Ansar. “It’s going to be a very long journey. Your spouse needs to feel happy and satisfied in what they’re doing too.”

Likewise, it’s equally important to maintain open lines of communication with your kids. Antony held a big family meeting before he left his role as the managing director of Euronet Worldwide Services India to launch Prizm. He explained what he wanted to do and what it meant for them as a family.

Spend inviolable time with your family

Be truly present

Recognize that your workforce is dealing with the same challenges