You may have seen a story about a San Francisco AI startup founder who posted to X — where else? — about how he tells prospective hires that his company expects "no work-life-balance" and 84-hour workweeks, in order to weed out the less motivated.
The post originally went up nearly a month ago, and clearly has been bouncing around some circles before going fully viral on Reddit. In it, Greptile co-founder Daksh Gupta, 23, discloses that he has recently been telling job candidates that his company "offers no work-life-balance" and that they often work Saturdays, sometimes Sundays, and going home at 11 pm is fairly "typical."
For those of us not living in the high-stress, high-stakes world of young startup culture, such talk is laughable, but to Gupta's point, he is trying to weed out the people who would balk at such intensity — and, as he explained in the longer thread, "this amount of intensity is temporary, only until we hit escape velocity."
recently i started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work saturdays, sometimes also sundays. i emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no…
— Daksh Gupta (@dakshgup) November 9, 2024
There are some echoes in the volume of the reaction to this from the last tech boom, when San Francisco startup culture last butted up against San Francisco's larger culture — which, despite rumors to the contrary, may not be entirely dead.
And Gupta also got some racist commentary as well as an earful from the IndianWorkplace subreddit, prompting him to respond, "lot of indian hate coming from this post so i want to clarify that i am like this not because im indian but because im san franciscan."
I mean, he may have been quick to learn the the talking points and lay of the land when it comes to early-stage startup culture, but "San Franciscan" might be a stretch.
As the Chronicle reports, Gupta moved here sometime in 2023, after graduating from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and called himself "a struggling new grad startup founder" on the company's website.
And it's not like there is some army of bleary-eyed developers clacking their lives away on keyboards at the Greptile offices. The Chronicle reports that the company has six employees, and works out of an office at the Transamerica Pyramid.
The company, which is creating an AI tool for other developers, was launched with the help of Y Combinator last year, and recently closed a seed-funding round of $4.1 million led by Initialized Capital.
The Chronicle further reports, after speaking to Gupta, that he somehow has time for a girlfriend, and that he himself, after a long workweek, will typically only be in the office from about noon to 5 pm on Saturdays, in order to finish up tasks and prepare for the week ahead. And, yes, he buys lunch and dinner for the employees when they're working these crazy hours, which they eat at their desks or around a conference table.
