A day in the life of a small software company CEO

Published on Tuesday, August 31, 2004 By Brad Wardell In Business

On a non-busy week, I will work 6 days each week.  About 8 hours at the office when I get in near noon and then another 2 to 8 hours at home depending on how busy I am.

This week is busy mainly because I'm involved in more projects than I would expect. We need more managers, more developers, more graphics designers, more business development people, more IT people. We just need more people in short. But interviewing takes time I don't have either. And when it comes to hiring management level people, it's hard to find people who are realy sharp on the tech market, can do things on a shoe string budget, and have a good business background. So our management team is all working pretty serious hours right now.

Here is a typical day this week as an example (yesterdayish).

Time Activity
9:00a Wake up, shower, get dressed
9:30a Skim express email account for emergencies, check main websites
10:00a Eat breakfast, play with remaining home kid
10:30a Ride bike around neighborhood
11:00am Go to work
11:30am Do office rounds (go around and see how everyone is doing)
12:00p Lunch
12:30p Go through express email, answer easy emails.
1:00p Meet with large company about bundling one of our products
1:30p Check over forums on PoliticalMachine.com, try to help customers with tech support issues.
2:00p Radio interview regarding The Political Machine
2:30p Meeting with bank regarding purchasing new building
3:15p Meet with builders of new building
4:00p Check AI code in The Political Machine to see if AI is causing endorsement crash report.
4:45p Meet with IT team regarding WinCustomize v4 
5:15p Update Stardock websites for IconX, write news articles
5:45p Check contract status on Natural Desktop
6:00p Conference call with big company about licensing product (3pm pacific time)
6:30p Test Right-Click internal beta
7:00p Read through [email protected] email (typically around 300 non-spam email per day)
8:00p Work with Mason on GalCiv 2 intro music
8:30p Check GalCiv 2 cut scene daily progress, make suggestions
9:00p  Go home
9:30p Eat snack, watch Tivo'd stuff, play with kids, tuck them in.
11:00p Remote desktop in and make sure all of the day's express email that don't require long answers are dealt with
11:30p Try out new build of Blog Navigator, go on JoeUser.com, make posts, respond to articles, etc.
12:00a Visit forum on Neowin, make posts/respones, etc.
12:30a Check out other non-Stardock websites
1:00a Do SDTV Video on DesktopX
1:30a Try to get people to know how cool DesktopX is on various sites.
2:00a Go through WinCustomize, monitor ratings on WindowBlinds skins, moderate some skins, etc., make posts, news items
2:30a Try out some new DesktopX widgets, report bugs found.
3:00a Be glad that GalCiv AI coding hasn't started since this is an easy day.
3:30a Read book before bed (reading Kingdom Come - super hero book)
4:00a Sleep (sometimes this is as early as 1am depending on the day)