The Pulse #142: Crazy-hours culture at AI startups

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.

Today, we cover:

1. New trend: extreme hours for AI startup workers. Pulling 80+ hour work weeks – including weekends – is becoming the norm across AI startups, and is unlikely to stop while AI is so hot.

2. Industry pulse. GPT-5 release feels like a flop, Big Tech no longer the dream job it was, Meta trials AI tools for interviews, OpenAI and Anthropic boost their values, Brex is back in the office, buyouts for Windsurf employees who aren’t “hardcore” enough, and more.

3. Figma’s IPO: end of tech IPO winter? After going public, Figma is worth twice as much as Adobe offered to pay for it in 2023. Will the likes of Stripe, Databricks, and Discord, soon go public, too?

4. Will “spec-driven-development” + AI agents succeed or flop? AWS launched its own VS Fork called Kiro. The idea is clever execution, done well, yet I sense many parallels to GitHub Workspaces, which never really took off.

1. New trend: extreme hours at AI startups

“996” stands for “from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week”, and is a common work pattern at Chinese tech companies, but has long been rejected in the US. It is even outlawed in Europe because excessive hours tend to lead to burnout and other health issues, longer term.

Despite that, more AI startups are adopting something similar to the 996 work pattern, including Cognition, which expects staff to put in 80+ hours per week. Indeed, the CEO, Scott Wu, was unapologetic about the company’s hardcore culture in a post he shared:

“People have asked about our culture and recent employee communications. Cognition has an extreme performance culture, and we’re upfront about this in hiring so there are no surprises later.

We routinely are at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night. Many of us literally live where we work.

We know that people who joined Windsurf didn’t expect to join Cognition and while we’re proud of how we work, we understand it’s not for everyone”.

There are several other cases of AI startups mandating grueling hours for workers:

• Lovable: job descriptions by the company detail “Long hours, high pace. Candidates must thrive under high urgency, with AGI timelines approaching.”

• Replit: CEO, Amjad Masad, posted photos of the whole team grinding in the office at midnight, preparing to ship something big.

• xAI: Zeeshan Pate, an engineer at Elon Musk’s AI startup, shared that the team was “grinding in the office day and night”.

• CodeRabbit: just today, the team was still shipping at 2:30am in the San Francisco headquarters

• Icon (ad maker): the founder and CEO shared that the business “only hires [the] top 0.01% engineers with no life”, and expects them to work all week: “why do 6 [days of work] when you can do 7”.

• Google’s AI unit: Google cofounder Sergey Brin told staff in the tech giant’s AI unit: “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”.

These extreme hours are justified by a sprint to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in just a matter of months. That’s because plenty of AI professionals believe that when this point is reached, it will be “game over” for most companies in the segment, with a new, solidified, status quo in place, and AGI being able to improve itself with more resources. From then on, companies with AGI will dominate the industry. This is the incentive for using every means possible (including employees’ labor) to get to AGI – and quickly! Personally, I don’t buy this simplistic prediction about AGI and what might happen when or if it’s reached, but it is the driving force behind the thinking of many founders with commercial pressures.

It’s nearly three years since ChatGPT was released, and there are still no signs of AGI, even though LLMs continuously improve. But what about the exhausting work patterns that are meant to be in place for a few months; could they stay in place for years, and become standard?

Asking or demanding staff to put in very long hours is a recipe for making the pace of work slow down, and for individuals to burn out. We live in an economic system in which companies try to “extract” as much as possible from employees across all industries, so why don’t employers in other sectors also make staff work 80-hour weeks?

In many countries, regulations mandating sensible working conditions are one reason, and unions advocate for this. Another is that the downside of long working hours soon becomes visible:

• Staff take more time off for sickness

• Productivity drops

• More employees quit for places with shorter working weeks

Plus, mandating long working hours automatically excludes many strong potential candidates who…

• have family duties outside of working hours

• live further from the office, and for whom the commute would be too long

• prioritize personal, non-work, activities outside of core hours

Of course, if you hire young professionals, burnout won’t occur so fast – and some people can work for years like this. Plus, if they don’t have families or a busy social life, they may be comfortable with working what looks like “crazy” hours.

Another powerful incentive for an AI startup to create a long-hours culture: the promise of generational wealth. Consider these two questions:

1. Would you work 6 days a week at a startup, and pull 80+ hours per week indefinitely, for less than you’d earn at a company with a 40-hour work week?

2. Would you work 6 days a week and put in 80+ hour weeks for 1-3 years, then walk away with $10M in compensation?

The answer to #1 is likely “no”, but the answer to #2 is “obviously yes” for most people! And the incredible growth in the AI industry means that #2 seems achievable to many. Take Windsurf: just 10 months after launching the Windsurf IDE, 40 employees from the team were acquired by Google. The founders likely made hundreds of millions, and some engineers may have made $10M+ in compensation! That’s not bad for a few years’ work!

Now, put yourself in the shoes of founders who are set to make not $10M, but a multiple of that. For them, it was absolutely worth putting in the long hours and pushing their team to do the same.

Based on that, we can expect founders to keep pushing staff to sp