About a year ago, I wrote about how I spent my day as a startup founder/ceo.  It's pretty interesting to reflect on it, because my role is pretty different now.  I no longer write code, I no longer do design work, and I spend most of my day reviewing progress and figuring out ways to make the company move better and faster.  Instead of building the product, I feel like I'm instead oiling and tweaking the machine that is building the product.  

I start my day around 10AM, and often have a phone call chat or early coffee meeting with a potential recruit, investor, or customer.  We hold a daily standup at the office at 11:10AM, when everyone on the product team talks about progress on their current projects.  I'll go through code reviews and designs that were submitted the day before to make sure everything is on track, and I'll spend half my afternoon working through product questions that anyone on the team has.  (remember how your professors held office hours for students?)

By 3PM, I've taken care of all immediate product needs and can finally work on new projects.  It could be designing a new feature, spec'ing out the engineering requirements of a new project, or brainstorming ways to improve the product in a certain way.  I'm often sifting through our massive list of user requests, emailing/calling/visiting customers to hear from them directly, or getting usability feedback on the design of a feature we're working on.  The team then breaks for dinner around 6PM, and I'll spend the next few hours either critiqueing design work or code that our engineers have written.  

I'll take a break around 930PM, shower up, then sync up with our remote team by 11PM.  We have about 5 people working in a different timezone, so it's the perfect time to chat with them without having any distractions from our local team.  I'll read and relax from midnight until 2, then head to sleep.  

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A few things you might notice:  

1 - I spend very little time in meetings (I'll choose two or three days a month where I'll pack my entire day with only meetings and no product work)

2 - I don't write any code and I don't design anything anymore (but I'm still very familiar with the codebase)

3 - I don't spend any time on user acquisition activities.  Since our product is still young, I decided that it'd be smartest to focus on improving product and improving word of mouth before doing anything brash with marketing.

4 - I don't spend any of my time doing operational tasks.  We have a wonderful manager (Andrea) who is handling our accounting, legal needs, HR/payroll, and other managerial work.  I also have an assistant who helps me with random chores and scheduling appointments/meetings.  

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This is probably completely different from how my life will be in a year from now.  If I had to predict, I'll probably continue to do design reviews and set product strategy, but I'll probably have all engineering-related work delegated off to my co-founder.  It's inevitable that I'll be spending more and more time doing "CEO work", which means raising more money, talking to investors, hiring and recruiting, among other things.  But in the meanwhile, I couldn't be happier leaving that to Andrea. 

If I had one point of feedback to give to the founder of a growing startup, it'd be to find your own version of Andrea.  She's a fast learner, a great generalist, and takes care of everything that isn't directly related to the product.  But even when she isn't doing operational work, she's talking to customers, helping me design new features, among other product-related tasks.