Opinion

‘We’re stressed and tired, and we’ve never been happier’: start-up founder

Despite the stress, sweat and tears, the founder of Modano says he is never happier than when problem-solving with his colleagues.

Michael Hutchens

Feb 16, 2024 – 5.00am

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A few years ago I had lunch with a good friend who had been the chief technology officer of my business 10 years earlier. He told me how much he missed working together, and how in hindsight his decision to resign may not have been the right one.

He left our business while in the throes of raising very young children, and the combination of this with the constant chaos of building a start-up was too much to handle.

Modano founder Michael Hutchens loves the challenge of solving problems. Eamon Gallagher

But since leaving our start-up, he’d struggled to find anything as fun and rewarding, and told me that he’d come to learn that there’s no ideal time to be part of a start-up.

Prior to having children he had heaps of free time but little wealth, so walking away from a big corporate job created huge financial risks. But since having children he had less time and more responsibility, and didn’t see this changing until his kids were much older and he himself would be close to retirement age.

His conclusion was that he should have hung in there, and that if he had we could have continued to do some amazing things together.

His words deeply affected me, as someone who has run a self-funded start-up for the past six years, and many times battled with extraordinary fear, anxiety, loneliness and frustration. All while being told how lucky I am to have my own business.

I’m also now watching my wife establish her own start-up, after seven years focusing on our three young children, which has made life busier and at times more challenging than I could ever imagine.

But irrespective of all of this, I continue to encourage everyone to be involved in a start-up at some stage in their life, and not for the reasons you might think.

When I was young, I viewed start-ups as a way of getting rich while not working for the man. As a deeply iconoclastic person, this held enormous appeal.

Yet after years in a start-up, I’ve learned that they are much more than this – they are conduits through which passionate people solve problems, and thereby make the world a better place.

I used to scoff reading quotes from the founders of companies like Canva and Atlassian preaching about changing the world, cynically viewing them as akin to snake oil salespeople. But I’ve come to appreciate that there’s truth behind their words, and their success is not all due to luck, timing and hype.

Other things aside, the primary reason why a start-up succeeds is that it finds ways of solving problems shared by many people. Canva makes graphic design easier and more affordable, Atlassian improves the efficiency and effectiveness of teamwork.

My company, Modano, has achieved some early success as we help businesses better understand their financials.

My business may crash and burn over the coming years, while my wife’s business may never make any money. If this happens, we may need to downsize our home and may not have the luxuries of private schooling for our children and international holidays.

We’re doing them anyway because, other than having children, there are few things we’ve done in life as satisfying and rewarding as solving a problem with which we deeply relate.

Solving people’s problems, like raising children, requires deep levels of selflessness and empathy, and it’s unsurprising to me that psychologists all agree that happiness often comes more from giving than from taking.

A start-up forces you to better understand yourself and the world around you on a level few other things do.

My wife and I have never been more time-poor, sleep-deprived, manic or anxious. And we’ve never been happier.

So next time you think about starting or joining a business that aims to solve a problem you passionately believe needs solving, try to focus on all the amazing upsides – many non-financial – rather than the endless reasons to stay in the rat race.

Because on your deathbed, ticking off your bucket list items, I can assure you that being part of the team that solved that problem will be one of the more rewarding things you will have done with your brief time here.

Michael Hutchens is the founder of Modano, which sells financial-modelling software.