The job listing doesn’t mince words: “This role isn’t for everyone. It’s almost for no one.”
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.
“There is no way to sugarcoat it. At startups, you work extremely hard,” 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. “Not everyone wants to be an athlete. And if you do, then you chose that life.”
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. “Why is a week seven days? If you think about it, there's no logical reason,” he said. “There might be historical reasons, but why is it five days working and two days off?”
Arrowster isn’t the only startup to embrace a work week with no weekends. Job listings from Y Combinator-backed Corgi also come with a “warning” label about the all-in schedule at the “rocketship” insurance startup. “We work seven days a week in our SF office because we believe in pushing boundaries and getting things done,” wrote Corgi’s Josh Jung in a Linkedin update earlier this month.
“Why is a week seven days? If you think about it, there's no logical reason.”
Then there’s 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. “But ideally we hold onto it as much as possible,” he said.
Six days a week isn’t 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’s South of Market district, according to Zhang.
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. “There's really no such thing as a rocket ship that doesn't have a certain level of intensity to fuel itself,” said Zhang. “Our team really buys into that.”
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 — 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.
“My inbox is 20% death threats and 80% job applications.”
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: “My inbox is 20% death threats and 80% job applications.”
There’s precedent for longer work weeks. In China, a culture of “996” 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 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.
Silicon Valley might not have a term for it, but long hours have been a fixture of the “hustle culture” 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’s DNA. Under Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, the ride-hailing app’s motto was “work harder, longer, and smarter.” Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has boasted of 100 hour work weeks — a remnant of the dot-com bubble era, when engineers regularly crowed about working 120 hours a week. OpenAI’s Sam Altman claimed he worked so hard on an earlier startup he got scurvy (he later conceded this was self-diagnosed). And it’s not only the tech industry working exhaustive hours. On Wall Street, some junior bankers have been logging 110-hour weeks.
Autotab cofounder Jonas Nelle also works six days a week from the startup’s 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. “This is a very unique moment in time that warrants sacrificing some of the things to have more of focus in the short term,“ Nelle told Forbes.
Nelle and his cofounder are currently hiring for a founding engineer to join them six days a week. “It 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.”
“I 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.”
On a Sunday afternoon call from his office, Nelle pushed back on the idea that work should be considered as separate from life. “In the world of art, if you stay really late at the studio no one will say you are whipped by your work,” he said. “If you are coding or trying to build a company, that feels like the default cultural assumption.”
While extreme, there are generally no restrictions on how many hours people can work, as long as they are considered “exempt” 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 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’s minimum wage — a bar easily cleared by most tech workers. “You could work 8 days a week if there were,” Fisk said.
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. “I am quite convinced that it's not the amount of hours and the amount of days that you work,” she said. “But rather, it's much more about quality.”
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. “Crunch” became a buzzword in the video games industry for overtime needed to hit deadlines. But complaints about months, or even years-long, “death marches” at studios like Fortnite developer Epic Games and Cyberpunk’s CD Projekt Red have sparked criticism over burnout and gruelling work cultures.
The irony of a six or seven day work week for AI companies is that many have hyped artificial intelligence’s promise to spawn a new era of productivity, leading to predictions of a shorter work week. “Your children are going to live to 100 and not have cancer because of technology,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in 2023. “And literally they’ll probably be working three-and-a-half days a week.” Lazarus AI, a company that builds foundation AI models, said earlier this year that AI could “absolutely” shorten the work week to four days because of models becoming more capable.
Chong, the Arrowster founder, said AI companies have to work harder to create that potential future. “It’s about reaping the benefits of AI, but the benefits have to be built by other people,” he said. “Someone has to make the sausage.”