Weekend plans

It's time to go on the offensive.

Tyler Denk
March 11, 2025

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I’ve personally been an avid supporter of Superpower since I first joined back in November and have recommended it to dozens of my closest friends.

Luckily for you, my readers can skip the 150,000 people on the waitlist if you sign up within the next week.

Most founders would agree: the weeks are absolute chaos.

Amidst the recurring meetings and calls there is a revolving door of things breaking and other things being fixed. There are customer escalations, employee escalations, meetings about meetings, endless back-and-forths on slack, and thousands of emails and dm’s to reply to. There are kick-off calls, post-mortems, product launches, floods of user complaints, floods of user praise, candidate interviews, employee onboarding, and a dozen people who just want to make small talk and ask about your weekend.

I typically start my day at 5:30am with a plan, and end the day at 9pm having handled a dozen things that weren’t ever a part of that initial plan.

It’s not without trying though. We have two focus days per week (i.e. no meetings) on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Relative to our size, we are extremely light on meetings, and handle almost everything async.

But when you have 90 remote employees located across the globe and are growing more than $1M ARR per month… there’s just a whole lot going on at all times during the week.

great engagement tbh

Without a doubt, I get my best work done between Friday and Sunday night. I’m not even trying to virtue signal — there’s just legitimately not another way to focus and push anything forward.

This was the shared sentiment amongst all the founders at my mastermind event in Costa Rica a few weeks back. Everyone felt that they spent most of their weeks playing defense, being reactive. Which leaves the weekends for offense.

It wasn’t all talk either. We had a free morning on Saturday to do whatever. I woke up at 7am to head down to the main area only to find the entire group impromptu grinding away, implementing some of the stuff we had spent the past few days chatting about.

Rise and shine baby

I’ve spent the past decade of my life in different entrepreneurial circles and the only constant of those who “make it” are the ones who prioritized their company above everything else. The founders at my mastermind were clearly operating at a different level and inspired me to fire off this bad boy:

I swear I don’t always tweet about hustle culture bullshit, but someone had to say it. And you typically know you’re right on the money when you get lots of polarizing responses.

But what’s the fun of having a bunch of strangers disagree with you on the internet if you aren’t going to rebuttal their terrible takes in your newsletter.

Myth one: the classic work smarter not harder.

It’s difficult to measure raw output or progress, but for simplicity's sake, let’s say that the average worker has an output of 10 units per hour. A routine 40 hour work week yields 400 units of output per week per employee (math).

Now let’s say that you’re as smart as Ethan above and found a way to double your output to 20 units per hour. What would you do in that situation?

Work 20 hours = 400 units of output per week (yay working smarter!)
Work 40 hours = 800 units of output per week
Work 80 hours = 1,600 units of output per week

Well, if you’re an employee who owns a part of the company and has shared upside (i.e. equity), there’s a strong financial incentive to maximize your output per week. And if you’re a founder whose entire livelihood, wealth, and reputation is dependent on the outcome of the company’s success… well you’d be an absolute moron to settle at 20 hours because you found a way to “work smarter.”

Smarter or harder is a false dichotomy for losers… or middle managers at a large consulting firm (before deep research replaces them).

Reid agrees.

Fortunately Reid got lots of terrible takes in his replies too so I can keep this post rolling.

Myth two: success or health, pick one.

Yet another false dichotomy. I go to the gym every morning at 6am, eat healthy, get 8 hours of sleep, and routinely make time for surfing, yoga, hiking, basketball, etc.

Hell, you can even work all weekend and still do a ton of activities before and/or after.

But because this post isn’t about me flexing my health regiment (or my Superpower scores), it’s important to call out that a lot of my founder friends are some of the healthiest people I know.

That is just an incredibly lazy take. Next.

Myth three: founders who optimize for balance are happier and thus more likely to succeed.

Let’s address the elephant in the room — there are always exceptions to the rule. I am certain you can find a handful of founders who have experienced success while maintaining a balanced life and galavanting around with friends and family on the weekends. And honestly, power to them.

But let’s not conflate happiness with success (or vice versa).

If I wanted to optimize for happiness I’d work at some late stage venture fund, spend my summers in the South of France, and eat mushrooms every weekend with my friends.

But I’m not optimizing for happiness right now, I’m optimizing for success. And “balance” is a human construct that the free market doesn’t give a shit about.

If you find fulfillment running a successful small business and want to optimize for balance, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, part of me envies it.

But I’m a psychopath and want beehiiv to be a $10B+ company that positively impacts millions of people around the world. That requires a good amount of sacrifice to accomplish (including but not limited my sanity, my weekends, my weekdays, my cortisol levels, healthy relationships, and well you get the point).

Dharmesh, the founder and CTO of Hubspot (and beehiiv power user), suspiciously dropped this post just a few days after mine. (I’m sure he had this planned ahead of time).

Which leaves me with my last big takeaway of the whole bruhaha: be careful who you take advice from. The internet makes it easier than ever to package strong opinions into well-worded truths and spew them all over the place for anyone to take at face value.

Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) and Dharmesh (founder of Hubspot) happened to chime in and agree on how to win at this fun game of free market competition. And others like our boy Grigori Guitchounts (who?) happen to think that we’re all just insecure losers.

The only thing I’m insecure about is that growing $1M ARR per month just isn’t going to cut it. We need to accelerate.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/weekend-plans

Credit: Gregory Kuntjoro

Guys literally only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.

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Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

Russell Westbrook just launched a newsletter covering “a front-row seat to culture” (Word of Westbrook)
Really interesting writeup on Apple’s AI strategy with Siri, the new M3 Ultra chip, and their developer ecosystem (Stratechery)
Dharmesh (the same Dharmesh from above) shared a brief overview of Claude vs GPT vs Perplexity (Simple.ai)