I noticed there is zero mention of burnout in the article, which is exactly what every one of these founders will get if they keep pushing at the crazy pace they are going at, and highlights the problem with this kind of mentality.
Burnout is a bitch, at least in my case it felt like I developed ADHD. Couldn't focus on anything, couldn't remember things that were said at meetings. I managed to pull back and now things are fine but had I not I probably would have been fired from my job.
Beyond that my other thought is more philosophical: which is there is more to life than just work. I sympathize deeply with these founders because I had a mentality that was just like theirs. That mentality started to change once I met my now wife and we started building our life together. She and many of our friends are from Brazil and they taught me that the grind/hussle culture described in this article is very much an American phenomenon and everyone else is on the outside looking in going "what in the hell are those folks doing???".
When I started my company before I met my wife the goal was a billion dollar exit, private jets and super yachts and the idea that my company could become a tech behemoth. Now that vision has largely shifted to "I just want a small business that pads my income and maybe lets me buy a few toys"
I've just turned 40, have been married for almost 20 years, and now have a 9-month-old baby. I've spent most of what would otherwise be my free time working, ever since I was 15 and bought into the American idea of entrepreneurship and became obsessed with technology.
Before having the baby, I'd leave the premises maybe twice a week, forced by necessity, mostly for health reasons, and I couldn't care less most of the time about seeing a blue sky or hearing the birds sing.
I've probably never worked the insane hours some entrepreneurs put in, but I've definitely worked far more than most people I know. My wife is the same. We have a great relationship, and I love my daughter, who I'm lucky to spend time with every day since I set my own hours. But if there's one thing I'm always chasing hours to do more, is working, creating. It doesn't even feel like work, as long as it's something I'm building that's mine. Sure, there are grueling tasks I can't avoid, the real eat glass stuff. But even then, I wouldn't trade it.
I've never gotten truly rich, not in the way I once imagined I would. But it's not something that weighs on me, not even the idea that maybe I never will. The real reward has always been doing the things I love to do. Recently my wife has asked me more than once if I could make more money than I do now by working less in a company. Maybe so, and I'd probably work much less with a lighter load if I were in a company job, but the idea of going back to that doesn't excite me. I like the grueling work, I like building something of my own, and I like having my own routine, even if I end up working more this way.
I think there must be a genetic predisposition to burn out as I have noticed many people that should be burning out but do not. My burnout was clearly genetic (hEDS) as is the burnout of everyone I personally know. Looking at the stats of people hospitalized with Covid there appears to be a subset of people who will die before experiencing a level of stress that could induce burnout or even trigger post viral fatigue. My rough estimate is that 50% of the population cannot burn out. It appears to only become chronic burnout in 20% of those that do (10% of general pop) and half of those appear to have ADHD and or generalized joint hyper mobility (GJH) which suggests a strong genetic component to the duration and severity.
That said AI founders are not the general population and there are a few strong selection criteria biases that I think likely favors those who are likely to burn out.
I noticed there is zero mention of burnout in the article, which is exactly what every one of these founders will get if they keep pushing at the crazy pace they are going at
Or just pretend that you, and the people you ape, aren't taking drugs to keep yourself going.
As much as I dislike a certain high-profile African-American rocket launching car salesman tech bro, at least he doesn't hide his addiction.
Most of these founders are performative. It's like the rash of cringey overproduced startup videos, just meant to try to get eyeballs in a time where sadly startup founders are trying less to be good at tech and more to be cluely-like marketers. I hope to see us get back to people who love tech and building and let those folks move back to different fields.
My least favorite genre of this are the ones who crow about working 60-70 hours per week and still making time for family or whatever, but it's because they're paying to make 30-40 hours of work that ordinary wage-earning folks do, go away. Laundry, lawn maintenance, getting the car in for an oil change, child care, running errands, cooking, doing your own accounting, waiting on hold to deal with erroneous medical bills, fixing that toilet that keeps running, cleaning the gutters, patching that hole a damn woodpecker put in your siding—people for whom all these things are purely optional activities that they can and do pay others to take care of, will act like they're just such hard workers, while actually working, in total, less than their employees.
Gotta promote bootstrapping somehow, because you just know most of these folks won’t see one thin dime from their equity, and those that do will be worshipped as visionaries while conveniently ignoring the piled masses of unsuccessful bodies behind them.
Right? Like if one's identity is found in you work and one doesn't step back there's a good chance they think amphetamines are a good thing one should take to stay awake and work more.
It's incredible that we're at a point where people here feel the need to argue – apparently in all seriousness – that sleep and fun are important. As if that was something not self-evident.
And I mean intrinsically, of course, not just as a means to help produce more value for shareholders.
There were people on here the other day arguing earnestly that women should get jobs and pay for childcare because it would improve their contribution to GDP.
And arguing over whether or not businesses need to care for employees (while pretending that an argument for a corporate culture of collectivist genuine effective care was somehow an argument for businesses to operate how they already do).
People also quibble on here over what exactly is genocide and should we really be against it.
Not sleeping is disastrous for productivity. Why would you advertise to your investors, customers, and coworkers that you’re intentionally cognitively impaired?
I am sick to death of founder propaganda like this, none of them actually work this much. 'No Booze' i believe, all of them do psychedelics and designer drugs now anyways. I would love if it a single reporter asked the obvious question in all of this "If the AI is so good, how come you have to work this 20 hour monster days?" the AI is both a mega machine capable of doing every persons job and somehow this doesnt lead to reduced work hours or increased output for anyone? Im not buying it.
This sounds like abuse. Give them the money to satisfy their ego, take their lives away and multiply your your wealth?
Then they hate the society, don’t have moral compass and relentlessly keep trying to increase control and resources for even more ego stuff.
Sounds very unhealthy to me. Fits with the observation that numbers are all time high but everyone hates their lives and trying to destroy the system(whatever they perceive it as). Suboptimal practices are better as they leave some life on the table.
Cutting alcohol out of my life was one of the best decisions I ever made. Better health and more money in my wallet at the end of the week. But come on you gotta sleep, and you gotta have some fun, call it decompression if you want to be serious about it.
No Booze is the only item on this list that is helpful (as someone who has been the personal coach to Unicorn Founders over the last 20+ years, currently with a waitlist).
For certain, the elimination of all alcohol will help everyone achieve more in life. If this triggers you, consider you may have a drug problem.
No Sleep kills your energy and productivity. You need proper sleep to be your best. Could you imagine an NBA player saying the secret to winning an NBA championship is not sleeping and working out all night?
Mastering leadership will get you time back, and prioritizing self care time so you can go hard is the winning combo.
No Fun. Again, you need to recharge, find creative inspiration, have healthy relationships.
Overall, it is a very negative signal if founders are doing #2 & #3. It signals they are trying to cosplay looking like what they think success looks like.
The reason I have a job is because the actual most successful unicorn founders understand they need world class support, coaching, and self care to really build something incredible.
I quit alcohol completely maybe a year ago and it has been nice but I didn't get any sort of dramatic power-up that some people claim. I suspect a lot of the people who quit alcohol and talk about it loudly are those who had a pretty harmful relationship with it to start with. That's not everyone though.
Unfortunately, theres been enough recent papers that indicate alcohol is a carcinogen that causes various types of cancers (colorectal, breast, liver, mouth, voice box, throat and esophageal). And evidently even small amounts raise this carcinogenic risk.
I'll still cook with red wine/meat sauces and white wine/seafood. But at least right now, am reconsidering any alcohol past 20%.
Just look up alcohol cancer risk. Tons of articles from reputable journals. Emotional or religious crap doesn't get me to accept. Science does, and it seems to corroborate. Even if you leave out US government sources for potential compromise of ethics, there are still a great deal of primary journal sources.
This is due to primarily resveratrol, not alcohol. You can simply eat red grape skin or take supplements. Also, in these studies the amount of reservatorl used in vitro is at levels you would rarely see in human consumption.
> Laqua, whose father is a lawyer for an insurance company, said he hires only people willing to work seven days a week. Of his 40-plus employees, around 30 are ex-founders. His welcome gift to new hires is a mattress to keep at work.
> “I live at the office,” said Laqua, who considers himself the most hardcore of his peers. Employees share similar feelings. Though not a work requirement, Laqua said, “two-thirds of our early employees got Corgi tattoos.”
How do you get former founders to put in that kind of dedication to _someone else's company_?
Also, are these actually AI companies? By what definition? Corgi's home page appears to be _only_ a list of open positions presently, none of which are ML/AI engineers.
> How do you get former founders to put in that kind of dedication to _someone else's company_?
It is common for people to call themselves "founders" because they vibe-coded an app over the weekend and sometimes just because they have an idea for an app. Like an aspirational lifestyle thing. I suspect that is the kind of "founder" we are talking about here.
I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.
But the thing is, unless you're building your own business, it just doesn't matter. No one will remember this in five years. In a corporate environment, every doc, every line of code you wrote will be replaced or forgotten far sooner than you suspect. Two or three reorgs later, your team might not even exist as a distinct entity. There will be no statue of you in the hallway after you're gone.
It's also not your family. If you become any sort of a liability, if you make an off-color joke, if the revenue metrics are off by 5% - thanks kid, here's the door. The first layoffs you go through will be devastating precisely because they crush that illusion. Yeah, your manager might be a genuinely nice and caring person, but by the end of the day, if they're asked to sort a spreadsheet with your name in it and then draw a line somewhere, they will, and there will be "nothing they could do".
The only lasting thing you're getting out of the heroics is the money you save, the skills you learn on the job, and for a short while, the reference you get from your old boss when you apply for the next job. If you optimize for that, you'll probably have a satisfying career. If you don't, you wake up one day realizing that you've given up a good chunk of your life to make Sam Altman 0.01% richer, and that's that.
If a company is demanding that you sacrifice social life and well-being, ask yourself what's it worth to you. Are they paying more than anyone else? Or do they just want to get more kLOC out of you for free?
The reality is, unless youre working on something that is actually revolutionary and positively going to impact humanity (which is rare I know) - who cares? Many people get wrapped up in their identity for work and its pretty sad. Little do they realise, they play straight into the hands of those who want them to be a productive asset and nothing more.
> ” I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.”
This describes me almost exactly when I was in my 20s. However, I have far fewer regrets than you might. My career progressed a lot faster than it otherwise would have, and thanks to salary compounding my family enjoys much greater financial security than we otherwise might have. The institutional and product knowledge I gained in those days enables me to now have a much more relaxed work schedule and spend time with my family while still delivering value. And finally, it’s fun to walk through a lab and see the software I wrote unprompted over a few weekends still humming along two decades later on hundreds of stations.
I am under no illusion that my company is my family, but I didn’t do it for them. I did it for myself, and the company happened to benefit. There have never been any loyalty expectations on either side, and I would probably do it all over again.
I have no regrets. My point is that it's easy to have regrets if you build your self-worth around the company and your impact there. That's the part that's almost always too ephemeral to matter.
The secret is that the "crazy hours" tricks works best in a normal company, because your contributions stand out. If you're in a place where everyone is expected to work 9-9-6, you're not getting ahead, you're just keeping up until you burn out.
It's the same tired trope that they trotted out in the .com boom. Same trope resurrected in whatever the recovery of the '08 recession was. And now since AI is the big hot thing, they'll bandy about the same mythic, stoic, ascetic founder baloney. "Get rich by giving up everything about yourself." It's just sad how so many are so taken in by it. "But no, I'll be one of the different ones" says ten thousand others. Fine, whatever, you do you. I guess we'll all have to be subject to the same navel-gazing when 99.999% crash and burn about how much I was changed, or we were so close but I'll never give up the mission or other hogwash that every other one of these delusional "founders" fall back on. They'll just go onto the next scam.
The correction can't come fast enough so the real, actual value-producers are left standing.
Indeed. Eating is found to be a major cause of wasted billions of hour per day in the world. Can you imagine productivity growth if people just stop eating.
This is a great argument for a dietary regimen of feasting before a sprint, intermittent fasting during the middle of it, and fasting fully for crunch weeks! I bet it could be so successful, I could start an AI company copying what others do, not changing a thing, and I'll just be so much more productive I'll wind up on top!
One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.
About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach, trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman to the fisherman.
“You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”
The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”
“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer. “And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling. The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.
The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.
“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.
The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”
Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”
The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”
The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?”
Seems generally worse for the world if we want to force everyone to work 24/7 with no joy or interests outside of work. Ah well. Do you think they can recognize it? I don't think any of these companies will have anything interesting to say, last ten years, or improve lives.
It mostly looks like an act to me, a cargo cult where if they offer up enough "work" they'll be rewarded, disregarding any usefulness.
As far as I could tell, the article seems to be specifically about founders, not "everyone".
Personally I don't agree even for founders since I've seen too many that end up just grinding the gears without producing value - when that leads to meetings etc reducing the productivity of the entire team it's a problem. But committing to a stressful life as a founder in itself doesn't seem that bad as long as it's not propagated poorly to the team.
If AI actually makes development faster, shouldn't going without sleep or fun or life be less necessary - otherwise what is the point of it all. If anything, keeping healthy with a balanced perspective is even more called upon and valuable with AI offloading work in the loop.
The booze I can take or leave but is laughable to give up booze but then impair your judgement another way with a low sleep schedule.
live like a monk to build a chatgpt wrapper that imagines what your cat is thinking! Give up on time with your social world to create a phone app that turns the things you say into ad data!
I noticed there is zero mention of burnout in the article, which is exactly what every one of these founders will get if they keep pushing at the crazy pace they are going at, and highlights the problem with this kind of mentality.
Burnout is a bitch, at least in my case it felt like I developed ADHD. Couldn't focus on anything, couldn't remember things that were said at meetings. I managed to pull back and now things are fine but had I not I probably would have been fired from my job.
Beyond that my other thought is more philosophical: which is there is more to life than just work. I sympathize deeply with these founders because I had a mentality that was just like theirs. That mentality started to change once I met my now wife and we started building our life together. She and many of our friends are from Brazil and they taught me that the grind/hussle culture described in this article is very much an American phenomenon and everyone else is on the outside looking in going "what in the hell are those folks doing???".
When I started my company before I met my wife the goal was a billion dollar exit, private jets and super yachts and the idea that my company could become a tech behemoth. Now that vision has largely shifted to "I just want a small business that pads my income and maybe lets me buy a few toys"
I've just turned 40, have been married for almost 20 years, and now have a 9-month-old baby. I've spent most of what would otherwise be my free time working, ever since I was 15 and bought into the American idea of entrepreneurship and became obsessed with technology.
Before having the baby, I'd leave the premises maybe twice a week, forced by necessity, mostly for health reasons, and I couldn't care less most of the time about seeing a blue sky or hearing the birds sing.
I've probably never worked the insane hours some entrepreneurs put in, but I've definitely worked far more than most people I know. My wife is the same. We have a great relationship, and I love my daughter, who I'm lucky to spend time with every day since I set my own hours. But if there's one thing I'm always chasing hours to do more, is working, creating. It doesn't even feel like work, as long as it's something I'm building that's mine. Sure, there are grueling tasks I can't avoid, the real eat glass stuff. But even then, I wouldn't trade it.
I've never gotten truly rich, not in the way I once imagined I would. But it's not something that weighs on me, not even the idea that maybe I never will. The real reward has always been doing the things I love to do. Recently my wife has asked me more than once if I could make more money than I do now by working less in a company. Maybe so, and I'd probably work much less with a lighter load if I were in a company job, but the idea of going back to that doesn't excite me. I like the grueling work, I like building something of my own, and I like having my own routine, even if I end up working more this way.
Different strokes, I guess.
EDIT: typo.
> have been married for almost 20 years, and now have a 9-month-old baby.
You're rich.
I think there must be a genetic predisposition to burn out as I have noticed many people that should be burning out but do not. My burnout was clearly genetic (hEDS) as is the burnout of everyone I personally know. Looking at the stats of people hospitalized with Covid there appears to be a subset of people who will die before experiencing a level of stress that could induce burnout or even trigger post viral fatigue. My rough estimate is that 50% of the population cannot burn out. It appears to only become chronic burnout in 20% of those that do (10% of general pop) and half of those appear to have ADHD and or generalized joint hyper mobility (GJH) which suggests a strong genetic component to the duration and severity.
That said AI founders are not the general population and there are a few strong selection criteria biases that I think likely favors those who are likely to burn out.
I noticed there is zero mention of burnout in the article, which is exactly what every one of these founders will get if they keep pushing at the crazy pace they are going at
Or just pretend that you, and the people you ape, aren't taking drugs to keep yourself going.
As much as I dislike a certain high-profile African-American rocket launching car salesman tech bro, at least he doesn't hide his addiction.
Don't take your health and lifestyle advice from start-up founders, episode 36. Elizabeth Holmes writes the same kind of nonsense.
It's just an attempt to pass themselves off as exceptional beings who owe their success solely to their talent and iron discipline.
I don't know anyone who can keep going in the long term by neglecting their sleep and their physical and mental health.
Most of these founders are performative. It's like the rash of cringey overproduced startup videos, just meant to try to get eyeballs in a time where sadly startup founders are trying less to be good at tech and more to be cluely-like marketers. I hope to see us get back to people who love tech and building and let those folks move back to different fields.
My least favorite genre of this are the ones who crow about working 60-70 hours per week and still making time for family or whatever, but it's because they're paying to make 30-40 hours of work that ordinary wage-earning folks do, go away. Laundry, lawn maintenance, getting the car in for an oil change, child care, running errands, cooking, doing your own accounting, waiting on hold to deal with erroneous medical bills, fixing that toilet that keeps running, cleaning the gutters, patching that hole a damn woodpecker put in your siding—people for whom all these things are purely optional activities that they can and do pay others to take care of, will act like they're just such hard workers, while actually working, in total, less than their employees.
Drives me up a wall.
Gotta promote bootstrapping somehow, because you just know most of these folks won’t see one thin dime from their equity, and those that do will be worshipped as visionaries while conveniently ignoring the piled masses of unsuccessful bodies behind them.
Right? Like if one's identity is found in you work and one doesn't step back there's a good chance they think amphetamines are a good thing one should take to stay awake and work more.
100% this
Well, in what other way could they justifify the compensation they ask for?
What compensation are you talking about? Most founders make very little.
It's incredible that we're at a point where people here feel the need to argue – apparently in all seriousness – that sleep and fun are important. As if that was something not self-evident.
And I mean intrinsically, of course, not just as a means to help produce more value for shareholders.
There were people on here the other day arguing earnestly that women should get jobs and pay for childcare because it would improve their contribution to GDP.
And arguing over whether or not businesses need to care for employees (while pretending that an argument for a corporate culture of collectivist genuine effective care was somehow an argument for businesses to operate how they already do).
People also quibble on here over what exactly is genocide and should we really be against it.
Not sleeping is disastrous for productivity. Why would you advertise to your investors, customers, and coworkers that you’re intentionally cognitively impaired?
Apparently there are enough investors who take this as a sign of “grit”. They may well be the primary audience for these performative stunts.
I am sick to death of founder propaganda like this, none of them actually work this much. 'No Booze' i believe, all of them do psychedelics and designer drugs now anyways. I would love if it a single reporter asked the obvious question in all of this "If the AI is so good, how come you have to work this 20 hour monster days?" the AI is both a mega machine capable of doing every persons job and somehow this doesnt lead to reduced work hours or increased output for anyone? Im not buying it.
This sounds like abuse. Give them the money to satisfy their ego, take their lives away and multiply your your wealth?
Then they hate the society, don’t have moral compass and relentlessly keep trying to increase control and resources for even more ego stuff.
Sounds very unhealthy to me. Fits with the observation that numbers are all time high but everyone hates their lives and trying to destroy the system(whatever they perceive it as). Suboptimal practices are better as they leave some life on the table.
Archive Link: https://archive.is/LtZFs
AI Startup founders have a winning formula: No Booze, No Sleep, No Fun... for their employees.
Cutting alcohol out of my life was one of the best decisions I ever made. Better health and more money in my wallet at the end of the week. But come on you gotta sleep, and you gotta have some fun, call it decompression if you want to be serious about it.
No Booze is the only item on this list that is helpful (as someone who has been the personal coach to Unicorn Founders over the last 20+ years, currently with a waitlist).
For certain, the elimination of all alcohol will help everyone achieve more in life. If this triggers you, consider you may have a drug problem.
No Sleep kills your energy and productivity. You need proper sleep to be your best. Could you imagine an NBA player saying the secret to winning an NBA championship is not sleeping and working out all night?
Mastering leadership will get you time back, and prioritizing self care time so you can go hard is the winning combo.
No Fun. Again, you need to recharge, find creative inspiration, have healthy relationships.
Overall, it is a very negative signal if founders are doing #2 & #3. It signals they are trying to cosplay looking like what they think success looks like.
The reason I have a job is because the actual most successful unicorn founders understand they need world class support, coaching, and self care to really build something incredible.
I quit alcohol completely maybe a year ago and it has been nice but I didn't get any sort of dramatic power-up that some people claim. I suspect a lot of the people who quit alcohol and talk about it loudly are those who had a pretty harmful relationship with it to start with. That's not everyone though.
I know a guy who quit alcohol and was amazed by his weight loss, I asked how much he was drinking and he said "normal amount, 5 or 6 a night"
Thats a lot! For most people quitting alcohol is not going to give that level of boost, even close to it.
> For certain, the elimination of all alcohol will help everyone achieve more in life. If this triggers you, consider you may have a drug problem.
Oh please. What a puritanical take. There is nothing wrong with the moderate consumption of alcohol - a glass of wine a week is hardly dependency.
Unfortunately, theres been enough recent papers that indicate alcohol is a carcinogen that causes various types of cancers (colorectal, breast, liver, mouth, voice box, throat and esophageal). And evidently even small amounts raise this carcinogenic risk.
I'll still cook with red wine/meat sauces and white wine/seafood. But at least right now, am reconsidering any alcohol past 20%.
Just look up alcohol cancer risk. Tons of articles from reputable journals. Emotional or religious crap doesn't get me to accept. Science does, and it seems to corroborate. Even if you leave out US government sources for potential compromise of ethics, there are still a great deal of primary journal sources.
https://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/most-americans-unaware-o...
Long story short: dont drink alcohol.
And yet it has also has a significant beneficial effect in the reduction the chance of developing cardiovascular disease.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28521683/
As in all things, informed moderation is the key.
This is due to primarily resveratrol, not alcohol. You can simply eat red grape skin or take supplements. Also, in these studies the amount of reservatorl used in vitro is at levels you would rarely see in human consumption.
If it’s a requirement, it is a dependency.
A mentor once shared..
How do you know if you have a drug and alcohol problem?
1. Do you have problems in your life?
2. Do you use drugs or alcohol?
Turns out to be a pretty useful mental model.
And if it's not a requirement, but simply something that is enjoyed? What utter tosh.
If one requires it to achieve enjoyment then it’s a dependency. It’s not a controversial or unusual thing. We got to be honest to ourselves.
I'm at the "whatever" stage of this thread. Gods luck with that.
Incorrect.
You sound like a grifter.
If you find encouraging people to stay sober, take care of themselves and enjoy life to be a grift, it seems like perhaps you've already been conned.
[dead]
> Laqua, whose father is a lawyer for an insurance company, said he hires only people willing to work seven days a week. Of his 40-plus employees, around 30 are ex-founders. His welcome gift to new hires is a mattress to keep at work. > “I live at the office,” said Laqua, who considers himself the most hardcore of his peers. Employees share similar feelings. Though not a work requirement, Laqua said, “two-thirds of our early employees got Corgi tattoos.”
How do you get former founders to put in that kind of dedication to _someone else's company_?
Also, are these actually AI companies? By what definition? Corgi's home page appears to be _only_ a list of open positions presently, none of which are ML/AI engineers.
> How do you get former founders to put in that kind of dedication to _someone else's company_?
It is common for people to call themselves "founders" because they vibe-coded an app over the weekend and sometimes just because they have an idea for an app. Like an aspirational lifestyle thing. I suspect that is the kind of "founder" we are talking about here.
This reads more like a cult than a startup.
All these companies could have been built with booze, sleep, and fun.
I've seen Mad Men, those guys were pretty successful.
The Ballmer Peak is real
I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.
But the thing is, unless you're building your own business, it just doesn't matter. No one will remember this in five years. In a corporate environment, every doc, every line of code you wrote will be replaced or forgotten far sooner than you suspect. Two or three reorgs later, your team might not even exist as a distinct entity. There will be no statue of you in the hallway after you're gone.
It's also not your family. If you become any sort of a liability, if you make an off-color joke, if the revenue metrics are off by 5% - thanks kid, here's the door. The first layoffs you go through will be devastating precisely because they crush that illusion. Yeah, your manager might be a genuinely nice and caring person, but by the end of the day, if they're asked to sort a spreadsheet with your name in it and then draw a line somewhere, they will, and there will be "nothing they could do".
The only lasting thing you're getting out of the heroics is the money you save, the skills you learn on the job, and for a short while, the reference you get from your old boss when you apply for the next job. If you optimize for that, you'll probably have a satisfying career. If you don't, you wake up one day realizing that you've given up a good chunk of your life to make Sam Altman 0.01% richer, and that's that.
If a company is demanding that you sacrifice social life and well-being, ask yourself what's it worth to you. Are they paying more than anyone else? Or do they just want to get more kLOC out of you for free?
Well said.
The reality is, unless youre working on something that is actually revolutionary and positively going to impact humanity (which is rare I know) - who cares? Many people get wrapped up in their identity for work and its pretty sad. Little do they realise, they play straight into the hands of those who want them to be a productive asset and nothing more.
> ” I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.”
This describes me almost exactly when I was in my 20s. However, I have far fewer regrets than you might. My career progressed a lot faster than it otherwise would have, and thanks to salary compounding my family enjoys much greater financial security than we otherwise might have. The institutional and product knowledge I gained in those days enables me to now have a much more relaxed work schedule and spend time with my family while still delivering value. And finally, it’s fun to walk through a lab and see the software I wrote unprompted over a few weekends still humming along two decades later on hundreds of stations.
I am under no illusion that my company is my family, but I didn’t do it for them. I did it for myself, and the company happened to benefit. There have never been any loyalty expectations on either side, and I would probably do it all over again.
I have no regrets. My point is that it's easy to have regrets if you build your self-worth around the company and your impact there. That's the part that's almost always too ephemeral to matter.
The secret is that the "crazy hours" tricks works best in a normal company, because your contributions stand out. If you're in a place where everyone is expected to work 9-9-6, you're not getting ahead, you're just keeping up until you burn out.
It's the same tired trope that they trotted out in the .com boom. Same trope resurrected in whatever the recovery of the '08 recession was. And now since AI is the big hot thing, they'll bandy about the same mythic, stoic, ascetic founder baloney. "Get rich by giving up everything about yourself." It's just sad how so many are so taken in by it. "But no, I'll be one of the different ones" says ten thousand others. Fine, whatever, you do you. I guess we'll all have to be subject to the same navel-gazing when 99.999% crash and burn about how much I was changed, or we were so close but I'll never give up the mission or other hogwash that every other one of these delusional "founders" fall back on. They'll just go onto the next scam.
The correction can't come fast enough so the real, actual value-producers are left standing.
I would add “no eating”, who has time for that when you have a founder video to make
Indeed. Eating is found to be a major cause of wasted billions of hour per day in the world. Can you imagine productivity growth if people just stop eating.
This is a great argument for a dietary regimen of feasting before a sprint, intermittent fasting during the middle of it, and fasting fully for crunch weeks! I bet it could be so successful, I could start an AI company copying what others do, not changing a thing, and I'll just be so much more productive I'll wind up on top!
Yeah, I read on Linkedin If camel and survive without food for several months what's stopping you?
Regular eating is for losers, AI startup winners keep battery packs up their arse to keep them going for months without break.
“Winning” lol
When will people realize that the money doesn’t mean anything if it costs you your life?
One day a fisherman was lying on a beautiful beach, with his fishing pole propped up in the sand and his solitary line cast out into the sparkling blue surf. He was enjoying the warmth of the afternoon sun and the prospect of catching a fish.
About that time, a businessman came walking down the beach, trying to relieve some of the stress of his workday. He noticed the fisherman sitting on the beach and decided to find out why this fisherman was fishing instead of working harder to make a living for himself and his family. “You aren’t going to catch many fish that way,” said the businessman to the fisherman.
“You should be working rather than lying on the beach!”
The fisherman looked up at the businessman, smiled and replied, “And what will my reward be?”
“Well, you can get bigger nets and catch more fish!” was the businessman’s answer. “And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman, still smiling. The businessman replied, “You will make money and you’ll be able to buy a boat, which will then result in larger catches of fish!”
“And then what will my reward be?” asked the fisherman again.
The businessman was beginning to get a little irritated with the fisherman’s questions. “You can buy a bigger boat, and hire some people to work for you!” he said.
“And then what will my reward be?” repeated the fisherman.
The businessman was getting angry. “Don’t you understand? You can build up a fleet of fishing boats, sail all over the world, and let all your employees catch fish for you!”
Once again the fisherman asked, “And then what will my reward be?”
The businessman was red with rage and shouted at the fisherman, “Don’t you understand that you can become so rich that you will never have to work for your living again! You can spend all the rest of your days sitting on this beach, looking at the sunset. You won’t have a care in the world!”
The fisherman, still smiling, looked up and said, “And what do you think I’m doing right now?”
Seems generally worse for the world if we want to force everyone to work 24/7 with no joy or interests outside of work. Ah well. Do you think they can recognize it? I don't think any of these companies will have anything interesting to say, last ten years, or improve lives.
It mostly looks like an act to me, a cargo cult where if they offer up enough "work" they'll be rewarded, disregarding any usefulness.
As far as I could tell, the article seems to be specifically about founders, not "everyone".
Personally I don't agree even for founders since I've seen too many that end up just grinding the gears without producing value - when that leads to meetings etc reducing the productivity of the entire team it's a problem. But committing to a stressful life as a founder in itself doesn't seem that bad as long as it's not propagated poorly to the team.
Does that winning formula include shoveling money into a furnace and the inability to turn a profit?
Related:
New trend: extreme hours at AI startups
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45156674
996
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049
what happened to microdosing on lsd or drinking raw untreated water? i'm so behind
If AI actually makes development faster, shouldn't going without sleep or fun or life be less necessary - otherwise what is the point of it all. If anything, keeping healthy with a balanced perspective is even more called upon and valuable with AI offloading work in the loop.
The booze I can take or leave but is laughable to give up booze but then impair your judgement another way with a low sleep schedule.
if you can't find something people want, work extra hard I guess
No internet. No phone. That will do this guy some real good.
The tattoo thing is super cringe
all these companies could have been built with booze, sleep, and fun.
live like a monk to build a chatgpt wrapper that imagines what your cat is thinking! Give up on time with your social world to create a phone app that turns the things you say into ad data!
Hi this is too real can you stop this train I want out
Talking nonsense seriously.
"Winning Formula", attract your attention
No Sleep, No Fun -> No Efficiency, No Creativity -> No good product, No good company -> No health, No life
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