Should a culture of intense hard work be openly celebrated, or is that expectation harmful?

Marc Lore · Jul 12, 2021

Being in sixth gear genuinely conflicts with a balanced life; you cannot do it all, and hobbies, TV, news and social media have to fall away in favour of prioritized commitments.

There simply isn't enough time in the day to sustain that intensity and also maintain all the peripheral activities.

7:13 20VC: Jet.com's Marc Lore on How To Assess Human Potential and "The Resume Test", Why Chief People Officer Should be One of Your First Hires and Why We Need a New Type of Venture Capital

Harry Stebbings · Aug 4, 2023

You cannot build a great business — defined as $5B+ — while maintaining work-life balance

Scope: offered as his own contrarian belief that others disagree with

38:23 20VC: Why "Hire Great People and Get Out of the Way" is Total BS, Why Your Upbringing Can Make You a Worse Leader & A Bentley, Two Nissan Cubes and Becoming One of Macedonia's Largest Employers; The Story of Slice with Ilir Sela

Mike Shebat · Nov 27, 2023

The claim that an extreme work schedule is unsustainable is simply false

The hardest-working people who do leave at five just go home and work on their craft anyway, and nobody calls that work; when you are with like-minded people building something incredible at scale, it doesn't feel like work

10:03 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

Elite performers in every field never stop outworking everyone, and there is no substitute for that in achieving success

Jordan and Kobe took 500 to 5,000 shots a day, kept shooting after playoff games and practiced at 5AM; successful DJs play 300 shows a year until they make it and 150 after

10:32 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Mike Shebat · Nov 27, 2023

Elite performance comes from spending every incremental moment on preparation even when the body is resting, such as a football player studying hours of opponent film

What looks like a heroic in-game interception is actually the product of off-field preparation

14:47 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Mike Shebat · Nov 27, 2023

LinkedIn realized only about 5–20% of its potential and should have ended up more valuable than Facebook rather than a $24B acquisition

It lacked an Olympic work ethic — engineers wanting thirty-five hour weeks; because most people thought the Internet was dead in 2003–2005, Reid Hoffman couldn't recruit stellar talent, and mediocre hires each hired ten more like themselves, producing a mediocre culture on top of a brilliant idea and great viral distribution

Scope: $24B is a great outcome by most people's standards

30:36 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Harry Stebbings · Dec 1, 2023

You cannot have work-life balance and be part of the top 0.1% at anything, including being a great public company CEO

You can be good or very good with balance, but not great

50:21 20VC: HelloFresh CEO on Why When You Raise VC You Only Have Two Options, Why Your IPO Price is Irrelevant, Why Timing is So Important in Going Public & Why D2C is Not Dead with Dominik Richter

Harry Stebbings · May 13, 2024

Monzo and GoCardless succeeded precisely because Tom had no work-life balance; nothing great is created with balance

To create something great you have to be exceptional, which is incompatible with balance

49:08 20VC: Behind the Scenes at Y Combinator: The Interview Process | What the Best & Worst Do in the Program | Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | Why the Value is in Application Layer AI with Tom Blomfield

Eiso Kant · Oct 7, 2024

AGI is a genuine race rather than a competition against yourself, so these first years determine who earns the right to compete, and the sacrifices of extreme work are the price of entry

This is the moment the table gets set — like mobile or the internet — and you don't want to look back in ten years having not given it everything; choosing a race means you don't get to have it all

Scope: most startups are not races; framed as a personal stance shared with his co-founder and Margarita

51:18 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside

Shervin Pishevar · Jan 13, 2025

Uber's culture was excellent, not the ruthless problem it is portrayed as

It was the fastest growing company in history, and you cannot achieve that without fierceness, extreme hard work and very intelligent people working as one team

18:38 20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years

Harry Stebbings · Mar 18, 2025

Working unreasonably hard yields better outcomes and work-life balance is a myth

Scope: offered as an example of a position people can genuinely take the other side of

12:33 20VC: HubSpot CEO on Where Value Accrues in SaaS AI | How HubSpot Competes Against Salesforce | Why B2B Is Not a Winner Take All Market | How to Go From SMB to Enterprise an Win | How SEO Dying Changes HubSpot's Business with Yamini Rangan

Larry Aschebrook · Jun 16, 2025

Work-life balance is found when your work is your life — you can only sustain the grind if you love it enough to make it your identity

The years of unrewarded grinding, like Harry's early unlistened-to shows, only happen out of love for the work

85:50 20VC: How We Made $800M on Coursera | We Lost Money on Uber and Made Money on Lyft | We Did 3x on Postmates in 18 Months | DPI is King, MOIC is BS | We Dodged Theranos and I Still Lost Millions with Larry Aschebrook @ G Squared

Peter Rahal · Aug 8, 2025

As the world gets more competitive, outlier outcomes require extraordinary effort and always carry a huge personal cost

Ordinary inputs don't produce extraordinary outcomes; look at any real outlier and there is a large cost behind it

45:33 20VC: The $BN Greenoaks Backed Protein Bar | Hitting $100M Revenues in David's First Year: Lessons & Mistakes | $0 to $600M: The Untold RXBAR Story | Product-Market-Fit, Pricing, Branding: What Every Founder Gets Wrong Today with Peter Rahal

Andrew Feldman · Oct 6, 2025

You cannot build something extraordinary from nothing on thirty-eight or fifty hours a week; it requires every waking minute, and the work-life-balance version of entrepreneurship is a myth

It isn't true in any part of life — world-class athletes like Ronaldo control everything they put in their bodies, train daily, and even work on rest as a discipline

Scope: allows there are many paths to a happy life and many good things one can do; acknowledges there are costs

61:17 20VC: Cerebras CEO on Why Raise $1BN and Delay the IPO | NVIDIA Showing Signs They Are Worried About Growth | Concentration of Value in Mag7: Will the AI Train Come to a Halt | Can the US Supply the Energy for AI with Andrew Feldman

Harry Stebbings · Nov 9, 2022 · hedged

His own relentless seven-day-a-week work is why his show has been successful, and he suspects other companies' growth is flat because their people are off doing offsites and yoga retreats

He attributes the podcast's success to working seven days a week, and sees stalled growth at companies focused on perks

Scope: admits he is being 'totally unfair'

15:27 20 Product: Hugo Barra on Lessons Building Hardware Products at Android, Xiaomi, Oculus, and Detect; Feature Kings vs. Budget Kings; 996 Work Culture in China; There Are No MVPs in Hardware; The 3.5-Hour Recruiting Interview

Harry Stebbings · Dec 13, 2024

It is easy to win today because most people are weak and won't do the extra work

He wants to watch Netflix like everyone else, but watches twenty minutes and then works two more hours — across seven days that's two extra full days of work per week

57:20 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

People who work hard get more done and accomplish more, and society should empower and celebrate those who want to work hard

This is a moment where there is so much that could be built, so people who work hard to learn and build will accomplish a lot

Scope: not everyone at every point in life is in a position to work hard; people who can't work hard should be equally respected; he wishes four-hour weeks could produce wild success but that isn't the practical reality

54:18 20VC: Andrew NG on The Biggest Bottlenecks in AI | How LLMs Can Be Used as a Geopolitical Weapon | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI? | Is Defensibility Dead in a World of AI? | Will AI Deliver Masa Son's Predictions of 5% GDP Growth?

Alan Chang · Jan 5, 2026

The only way to build a generational company is with a very strong work ethic; wanting work-life balance is legitimate but incompatible with that goal

He simply sees no other way to do it

Scope: respects people who want a nine-to-five; those people should not join Fuse

11:06 20VC: $0-$260M in Revenue in Three Years: How We Did It | You Need to Work Weekends to Win — Most Founders Aren't Ambitious Enough | The Revolut Playbook: Speed, Urgency, Extreme Ownership, and Zero Excuses with Alan Chang @ Fuse Energy

Avichal Garg · Apr 11, 2022

Work-life balance is not something to believe in or aim for; the better outcome is turning your obsession into your day job so you can do it constantly

he loves and is obsessed with his day job, so the distinction dissolves

Scope: acknowledges he is fortunate in this respect

50:58 20VC: Why Crypto is Software Eating Money, Why Crypto Firms Will Outcompete Traditional Venture Firms, How To Price Tokens and When To Have Them, DAOs: How Are They Structured and What Makes One Successful with Avichal Garg, Co-Founder @ Electric Capital

Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023

Work-life balance is basically nonsense; 'life harmony' is a better frame

He is never off and never tries to be, always running background processes, and Shopify is a perfect vehicle for someone on a live mission

Scope: grounded in his own type of brain

32:24 20VC: Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke on Why Micromanagement is Good | Why You Will Learn More From Studying World of Warcraft Guilds Than You Will Companies | Why Happiness is BS; Lessons on Marriage, Fatherhood & Decision-Making Quality

Dominik Richter · Dec 1, 2023

The work-life balance framing is wrong because work is part of life; balance is needed but not between work and life

The term assumes work is bad and life is good, whereas in practice it is fluid whether you read something because you enjoy it or because it makes you a better CEO

Scope: you should still be balanced in some way

50:36 20VC: HelloFresh CEO on Why When You Raise VC You Only Have Two Options, Why Your IPO Price is Irrelevant, Why Timing is So Important in Going Public & Why D2C is Not Dead with Dominik Richter

Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

A demanding work culture must be sold as the corollary of an enormous ambition, and a candidate's immediate reaction to hearing it — excitement versus trying to negotiate it away — reliably predicts fit

If you're asking people to help build a trillion dollar business, the work follows from that; candidates who justify or try to change the expectation are signalling they won't fit

Scope: based on reading candidates in interviews

18:52 20VC: Keith Rabois and Mike Shebat on Creating an Olympian Mindset to Work Ethic, Why First-Time Founders are Better Than Serial Entrepreneurs, Why Remote Work Does Not Work, Why the Best Founders Always Start in their Teens & Why Companies are Cults?

Sridhar Ramaswamy · Feb 10, 2025

High-intensity leaders should bring people along by showing them the big picture and the fleeting nature of opportunity, and should not apologize for high expectations

Snowflake grows in two years what world GDP takes a century to achieve; the returns and opportunity are big and the opportunity cost is even bigger, so it takes extraordinary people

Scope: accepts that it is not for everyone

11:51 20VC: Why Model Providers Will Kill Many Startups Moving into the Application Layer | Why Deepseek is not a Threat to OpenAI & Why OpenAI Beats Anthropic | Apps vs Models vs Infrastructure: Where is Value in AI with Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake CEO

Alan Chang · Jan 5, 2026

Team members are expected to work weekends

Fuse is competing against huge energy companies with billions in revenue and far bigger balance sheets; with less cash and fewer resources, work ethic is the only way to win

40:57 Weekend work is the only edge against bigger rivals

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023

Startup culture cannot be built on perks like espresso machines; the startup process is a grinder that screens people out either because the work is too hard or because the emotional volatility of swinging between succeeding and failing is too much

The work and the unresolvable uncertainty about whether you're winning or losing chews people up

56:54 Startup grind naturally screens people via difficulty and emotional volatility not perks

Keith Rabois · Nov 27, 2023

When everyone knows their colleagues will also be working at 8PM, decisions get done that night rather than deferred, and compounded across many decisions this makes the whole company move dramatically faster

Shared expectation removes the option of pushing work to tomorrow, and the speed gains compound over time

13:44 Shared after hours availability compounds into faster organizational decisions

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

It is unfortunate that in parts of the United States advising someone to work hard is treated as socially unacceptable

He came to appreciate the speed and intensity of Baidu and the China ecosystem

53:59 Stigmatizing hard work is a cultural liability