Silicon Valley has always glorified hustle culture. Some startups, like AI education company Arrowster, recruitment unicorn Mercor and Y Combinator-backed Corgi, are taking it to another level with 6 and 7 day work weeks.<\/p>\n
T<\/strong>he job listing<\/a> doesn\u2019t mince words: \u201cThis role isn\u2019t for everyone. It\u2019s almost for no one.\u201d<\/p>\n The post, from Arrowster, an AI startup that helps students apply to study abroad programs, is looking for a go-getter to help drive growth. But it also warns of a requirement that would be a dealbreaker for most: Working seven days a week.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no way to sugarcoat it. At startups, you work extremely hard,\u201d CEO Kenneth Chong told Forbes. Chong, 30, compared the all-consuming role to that of being an athlete, who trains intensely and dedicates time and energy to the sport beyond normal business hours. \u201cNot everyone wants to be an athlete. And if you do, then you chose that life.\u201d<\/p>\n The five-person company is based in San Francisco, with Chong in the Bay Area, his cofounder in New York City, and three employees in Vietnam. Instead of a standard work week, he thinks schedules should be broken into smaller increments of work and rest, with intense working sessions followed by naps, instead of waiting for weekends to catch a breath. \u201cWhy is a week seven days? If you think about it, there’s no logical reason,\u201d he said. \u201cThere might be historical reasons, but why is it five days working and two days off?\u201d<\/p>\n Arrowster isn\u2019t the only startup to embrace a work week with no weekends. Job listings from Y Combinator-backed Corgi also come with a \u201cwarning\u201d label about the all-in schedule at the \u201crocketship\u201d insurance startup. \u201cWe work seven days a week in our SF office because we believe in pushing boundaries and getting things done,\u201d wrote Corgi\u2019s Josh Jung in a Linkedin update earlier this month.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy is a week seven days? If you think about it, there’s no logical reason.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Kenneth Chong, CEO, Arrowster<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Then there\u2019s the six-day cohort. In job listings, biotech company Latchbio, AI data tools startup Autotab and recruitment unicorn Mercor make a call for new recruits to work all but one day a week in the office. Mercor, which raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation in February, also says in job postings that it offers a $10,000 housing bonus for employees to live within a half mile of its Financial District office in San Francisco. The company used to work seven days a week, but began to take Sundays off about a year after starting the business, CEO Brendan Foody told Forbes. The startup has about 90 workers, and Foody said he understands the culture will have to change if the company grows to employ, say, a thousand people. \u201cBut ideally we hold onto it as much as possible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Six days a week isn\u2019t required at Decagon, a San Francisco startup building AI agents to answer customer calls, but has become part of the company culture, cofounder Jesse Zhang told Forbes. Up to one-third of the 80-person company typically work Sundays in its office in the city\u2019s South of Market district, according to Zhang.<\/p>\n He said the practice started because he and his cofounder, Ashwin Sreenivas, began coming into the office on Sundays, and others began following suit. He said the schedule is informal, with some employees arriving around noon and coming and going as they please. The benefit, he said, is in-person collaboration without the distractions of meetings. \u201cThere’s really no such thing as a rocket ship that doesn’t have a certain level of intensity to fuel itself,\u201d said Zhang. \u201cOur team really buys into that.\u201d<\/p>\n Founders in the past might have hoped early hires would have a Stakhanovite work ethic, but few were typically brazen enough to advertise a hard-scrabble, long-hours culture. But as AI has engulfed Silicon Valley, a new crop of startups is in a grueling race \u2014 not only against other well-funded upstarts, but against tech stalwarts bolting on artificial intelligence upgrades, as well as AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic that could squash fledging startups with new feature updates.<\/p>\n \u201cMy inbox is 20% death threats and 80% job applications.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Daksh Gupta, cofounder, Greptile<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In that scrum, working long hours can be an edge. So can claims about an intense work culture that can help attract attention, talent, and ultimately dollars from venture capitalists. In November, a post on X from Greptile cofounder Daksh Gupta went viral after warning potential hires that his AI code review startup offered no work-life balance and a minimum of six-day work weeks. Gupta later posted: \u201cMy inbox is 20% death threats and 80% job applications.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s precedent for longer work weeks. In China, a culture of \u201c996\u201d permeates at domestic tech giants like Alibaba, ByteDance, and JD.com, referring to business hours from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. In Greece, the government passed a law<\/a> last year that lays out a six-day work week for companies in certain industries, like manufacturing, that provide round-the-clock services, with 40% overtime for workers. In South Korea, a slew of influential companies, including Samsung, last year began mandating managers to work six days a week<\/a>.<\/p>\n Silicon Valley might not have a term for it, but long hours have been a fixture of the \u201chustle culture\u201d at fast-growing startups for decades. Hackathons, marathon sessions where caffeine-addled engineers code all night to build a product, are part of the tech industry\u2019s DNA. Under Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, the ride-hailing app\u2019s motto<\/a> was \u201cwork harder, longer, and smarter.\u201d Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has boasted of 100 hour work weeks \u2014 a remnant of the dot-com bubble era, when engineers regularly crowed<\/a> about working 120 hours a week. OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman claimed he worked so hard on an earlier startup he got scurvy (he later<\/a> conceded this was self-diagnosed). And it\u2019s not only the tech industry working exhaustive hours. On Wall Street, some junior bankers have been logging 110-hour weeks<\/a>.<\/p>\n Autotab cofounder Jonas Nelle also works six days a week from the startup\u2019s New York-based office, but he sees a big difference between the grind of hustle culture and a sprint to take advantage of the AI boom. \u201cThis is a very unique moment in time that warrants sacrificing some of the things to have more of focus in the short term,\u201c Nelle told Forbes.<\/p>\n Nelle and his cofounder are currently hiring for a founding engineer to join them six days a week. \u201cIt definitely disqualifies some people but it is also a filter to finding the right people and convincing them that your company is the thing to dedicate time and energy to.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am quite convinced that it’s not the amount of hours and the amount of days that you work. But rather, it’s much more about quality.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Orly Lobel, University of San Diego professor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On a Sunday afternoon call from his office, Nelle pushed back on the idea that work should be considered as separate from life. \u201cIn the world of art, if you stay really late at the studio no one will say you are whipped by your work,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you are coding or trying to build a company, that feels like the default cultural assumption.\u201d<\/p>\n While extreme, there are generally no restrictions on how many hours people can work, as long as they are considered \u201cexempt\u201d from overtime laws, said Catherine Fisk, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in employment and labor policy. In the U.S., no federal law caps the number of days or hours worked, but states have their own labor codes. In California, for example, where many startups are based, exempted<\/a> salaried employees must meet certain criteria, like being in executive management or having a particular occupation like an attorney, as well as making double the state\u2019s minimum wage \u2014 a bar easily cleared by most tech workers. \u201cYou could work 8 days a week if there were,\u201d Fisk said.<\/p>\n However, the practice could lead to issues of violating fair labor practices, if older workers or people with families are discriminated against, said Orly Lobel, a labor law professor at the University of San Diego. Beyond the question of legality, the risk of burnout could hurt companies, too. \u201cI am quite convinced that it’s not the amount of hours and the amount of days that you work,\u201d she said. \u201cBut rather, it’s much more about quality.\u201d<\/p>\n Since the pandemic, many tech companies have tried to walk back work-life balance accommodations made for the work-from-home era, but sometimes pushback against long hours has blown up in public. \u201cCrunch\u201d became a buzzword in the video games industry for overtime needed to hit deadlines. But complaints about months, or even years-long, \u201cdeath marches\u201d at studios like Fortnite developer Epic Games and Cyberpunk\u2019s CD Projekt Red have sparked criticism over burnout and gruelling work cultures.<\/p>\n The irony of a six or seven day work week for AI companies is that many have hyped artificial intelligence\u2019s promise to spawn a new era of productivity, leading to predictions of a shorter work week. \u201cYour children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology,\u201d JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in 2023<\/a>. \u201cAnd literally they\u2019ll probably be working three-and-a-half days a week.\u201d Lazarus AI, a company that builds foundation AI models, said<\/a> earlier this year that AI could \u201cabsolutely\u201d shorten the work week to four days because of models becoming more capable.<\/p>\n Chong, the Arrowster founder, said AI companies have to work harder to create that potential future. \u201cIt\u2019s about reaping the benefits of AI, but the benefits have to be built by other people,\u201d he said. \u201cSomeone has to make the sausage.\u201d<\/p>\n \nMore From Forbes<\/strong>ForbesThis Tech Incubator Is Harder To Get Into Than HarvardBy Richard Nieva<\/a>ForbesThese Chinese AI Companies Could Be The Next DeepSeekBy Richard Nieva<\/a>ForbesTrump\u2019s Tariffs Could Cost Us The AI RaceBy Richard Nieva<\/a>ForbesWhy Amgen Hired An AI Head From NikeBy Amy Feldman<\/a>ForbesClearview AI\u2019s Founder Removed From Facial Recognition Company\u2019s BoardBy David Jeans<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley has always glorified hustle culture. Some startups, like AI education company Arrowster, recruitment unicorn Mercor and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,35812,1942,35815,35813,35814,3374,35811,35816,8175,53,16,15,35817],"class_list":{"0":"post-71681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-arrowster","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-brendan-foody","12":"tag-corgi","13":"tag-decagon","14":"tag-employment","15":"tag-ercor","16":"tag-jesse-zhang","17":"tag-labor","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-work-week"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114445025495684571","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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