You ask any computer science student to describe his classes and he will start ranting about how time-consuming a certain class was. In my case, the class was CS150: Components and Design Techniques for Digital Systems, the beast of all beasts at Berkeley. The project was to build a wireless video conferencing system, which included memory controllers, video encoder, wireless card drivers, arbitration system, and a graphics engine. I easily put in 50 hours a week for just this ONE class. It was hard work.

But I thought to myself, what the heck was I doing wasting my time in the lab while James Hong and Markus Friend are working 2 hours a day in their underwears? Why don’t I just start a company myself?

Life’s easy right? You wish! Glenn Kelman guest-posts on Guy Kawasaki’s blog and gives truthful insight about startups.

7. It’ll always be hard work. Most start-ups find an interesting problem to solve, then just keep working on it. At a recent awards ceremony, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to think of the secret to Microsoft’s success and could only come up with “hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, work.” This is an obvious cliche, but most entrepreneurs remain fixated on the Eureka! moment. If you don’t believe you have any reliable competitive advantage, you’re the kind of insecure person who will work your competition into the ground, so keep working.

Don’t get caught up wondering why everyone else are throwing tech parties while you are struggling just to get by. The truth is everyone has to work hard. There’s no such thing as an easy way out, even for bloggers. More people agree here and here.

Loren Feldman puts it bluntly:

It’s true; Scoble responded to our Facebook post at 3am in the morning. I’ve observed Michael Arrington, and he’s one of the hardest working person I’ve ever met. While everyone is sleeping, he’s blogging head to head with Om Malik on the latest story. And then there’s Heather Harde, who works even harder than Michael.

So for all you kids in school wondering why a CS150-type class is useful? Professor Katz told me, “If you went through CS150, you’ll be able to handle anything.”

Oh, and I talked to people who work at HOTorNOT and they don’t work 2 hours a day

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