On Working Very Hard

The startup culture, especially in San Francisco has gotten borderline obsessed with the 996 and in some cases 997 zeitgeist. I think this is coming from a good place. To succeed, you must work very very hard. The trick is though how you work very very hard is what matters.

To illustrate this, let me lay out two very different ways of working very hard:

Scenario A: A CTO of a Series A startup mandates 996 for the engineering team, employees are told that the pace is to be in the office all of the time, always working at 100%+. They don’t make a case for why work so hard outside of that the company is very important and they will all do well if the company succeeds. The employees work around the clock on their jobs and the company grows.

Scenario B: A CTO of a Series A startup mandates normal working, with the exception of certain red-team sprints for critical work-streams that must be completed in order for the company to succeed - employees on those work-streams (which are time-boxed to projects with clear impact) are told that they must deliver these projects at all costs, regardless of hours.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, but which works better depends on how you define output.

Scenario A is better if you define output as

output = raw work completed over time

Scenario B is better if you define output as:

output = impact of the work x effort put into the work

I tend to be much more aligned with Scenario B, it’s not usually politically correct (within a workplace) to say that some work is more important that others, but it’s true! Certain projects, initiatives, and efforts have much higher impact and no employee was built to work on the highest impact thing all of the time. The same employee can spend their effort answering 100 emails or they can have a single call, well prepared, that closes a partnership that doubles the revenue of the company. Not all work is made equal!

I believe that the true model for what work matters is much closer to Scenario B, which requires hiring talented and self-directed employees that understand which work is important as much as how and when to work hard. This never excludes a 996 mentality for work, but most often it necessitates a pattern for employees that oscillates between sprints and jogging, so that when you decide you need to sprint you aren’t already winded.

Startups (and companies generally) are a marathon, where every once and a while you’ll need to sprint up 10 flights of stairs to deliver a single high-impact initiative, deal, or project. It took me a while to learn, but there’s a lot of wisdom in not forcing your team to sprint all of the time. Instead time markets, strategies, and important initiatives around your pace.