I've been watching the founder debates on X, and I think it's time to talk about 996.
There's this idea going around that if you're really serious about building something generational, you should basically be living in the office. 12-hour days. Six days a week. Grindset as a badge of honor.
I get where it comes from. Startups are hard. Especially pre-PMF or early-PMF startups. You do need to work extremely hard. Anyone pretending otherwise is lying.
But I don't think 996 is the flex people think it is.
My personal belief is that if you have to enforce 12-hour days, six days a week, just to keep the company alive, something is already broken. You're understaffed, you hired the wrong people, or half your team is performing for you instead of actually working.
Pick one.
None of those gets fixed by adding hours.
The whole premise falls apart anyway. Nobody is doing 12 hours of high-quality work every day. That's a fantasy. What actually works is the opposite: tight, focused blocks of real work, high urgency, high standards, and then giving people their lives back so they can come back sharp the next day.
My philosophy is pretty simple: quality over quantity.
That's why our team rarely stays in the office after 7 pm, and we work 5.5 days a week, with half days on Sundays after lunch to prep for the next week. Yeah, that's still more than your average tech job. But we've thought hard about where the extra hours stop being worth it, and we try really hard to stay on the right side of that line.
Hard work is required to build a generational company. But there is a limit to it.
We push hard to make sure people get enough sleep and hit the gym. It's literally one of our company perks. We also step out for a 45-minute team lunch every day to get sunlight and reset.
That's not some feel-good culture thing. It's how you build a team that can actually last. It's also why our team genuinely likes being around each other.
And honestly, this is a hiring thing too.
No senior, genuinely talented person is signing up to grind under the 996 banner. Especially not someone with a wife and kids. Their family comes first, and it should. If your culture is built around exhaustion, you've already lost a lot of the best people.
No cracked person with tons of opportunities is going to work like a mule for an unproven startup, giving up everything for someone else's "mission."
I know this because I wouldn't have done it either.
If I had tons of options, why would I go work for a startup that was deliberately designed to burn me out? Why not go work at an existing hypergrowth company with a great culture, great people, and equally interesting problems?
When I was at Whatnot and Deepgram, both fast-growing companies, the cultures were incredible. They were built on trust and respect. People worked hard, but taking time off for family and life was normal. Hypergrowth did not require a toxic environment.
Now, to be clear, startups are still a shitshow. Especially early on. Every day there's something breaking, some fire to put out, some existential thing to figure out.
But that's exactly why you need time away from the storm.
You need space to think with a fresh perspective. I use my Saturdays for this. Some of my best thinking happens when I'm not in the middle of the chaos.
We are trying to build generational companies. That means we are running a marathon, not a 100m sprint.
Founders burn out, too. Teams burn out, too. And trying to run a company on two hours of sleep is not hardcore. It's stupid. You need to be well-rested to make the kind of decisions a successful company requires.
Work extremely hard. Hold a high bar. Move fast. Push people.
But if your company only works when people are sleeping in the office, you're not building a high-performance culture.
You're just hiding the fact that something is broken.