To compete in AI, a 72-hour work week isn't enough

To compete in AI, a 72-hour work week isn't enough. The new standard is '007' - midnight to midnight, seven days a week.

That’s the argument described in a recent Wired article on the rise of "996" culture.

It's a race to the bottom that distorts the history of how great companies are built.

Apple, Google, Facebook and other tech giants were built with intense, 90-hour work weeks but there is a fundamental difference between those founding stories and the mandate being sold today.

Their early team were a small tribe of self-selected fanatics. They were believers who consciously opted into a high-risk, all-consuming crusade. The insane hours were a byproduct of a shared, organic obsession to build something the world had never seen.

What's happening now is the normalization of unsustainability into a standard employment prerequisite. It's not a shared obsession emerging from a team, it's a top-down filter to weed people out.

This shift from an "opt-in crusade" to a "mandated grind" replaces the hard work of building a compelling mission with a simple, brutal litmus test. It takes intrinsically motivated people and treats them like disposable cogs, killing the very passion that drives innovation.

It's also a fragile way to build a company. When a real crisis hits, you need a resilient, cohesive team of believers, not a collection of burned-out devs waiting for their vesting cliff.

My goal as a leader isn't to mandate hours. It's to create an environment with compelling challenges where talented people want to invest themselves, knowing when to sprint and when to recover for the long haul.

Building a sustainable, high-engagement culture is much harder than just demanding more hours, and infinitely more valuable.