Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and formerly one of the richest people in China, has reappeared this week. It's not the first time he's managed this feat; he also reappeared in 2023. This time seems more impactful, because it was among a group of businessmen in the front row of an event being hosted by Chinese premier Xi Jinping.

A year before official reaction to his criticisms of Chinese regulatory regimes led to him stepping back from public view, he came under some scrutiny both domestically and abroad for public statements praising 996 work culture. 996 is a nickname for a 72 hour work schedule where employees work 9am - 9pm, 6 days a week.

If you think this kind of overwork is unique to China, or even to east Asian work cultures, then I invite you to think again.

InfoSys founder Narayana Murthy has also publicly come out in favor of 70 hour work weeks in 2023. This week, it's Sergey Brin's turn, urging Googlers to work 60 hour work weeks in order to stay competitive in the AI race.

Having spent my whole career in startup culture, I want to explain this point of view from that perspective, in a way that's maybe more charitable to these people than you might expect.

Of course, before I explain why I think they have reasons to think this is not exploitative, I want to say that it is exploitative. The world's richest people implying people should work more is at best breathtakingly tone deaf, regardless of the context of their statements.

It's that context that has me writing this, because I think the underlying message makes sense to me. Ma implied that he looked back with fondness on periods of work that were like 996, and I believe him.

Unlike the inherited dynasties like the Waltons and Rockefellers, Ma, Brin, and Murthy all acquired their wealth by starting a company.

Early-stage companies are risky and labor intensive. The minimum amount of work to run a business is still a lot of work, so doing it with few people inevitably means long hours.

In the smallest businesses, founders typically have to double as laborers and executives, doing the "actual" work that the business is founded upon as well as managing the books, acquiring customers, etc. This is not limited to technology companies; a mechanic who owns their own shop has to pay taxes, buy local ads, and fix vehicles. If they are excellent at fixing vehicles and terrible at running the business, then the business will fail.

If a company grows slowly and steadily, then the founder will usually transition into a more singular role. If they love the work, they'll become a privileged laborers, and if they love the management or fear relinquishing too much decision making power, they become managing executives. A chef either stays in the kitchen or starts a restaurant group.

For companies that end up in hypergrowth, the job is always bigger than the available pool of employees, and founders can end up working incredibly long hours.

This period is intense, but it's so exciting and energizing that adrenaline keeps you from feeling the grind slowly wearing you down. This is what you dreamed of, because if you continue to execute and grow in this manner, you're gonna be rich.

In the tech world, the ubiquity of equity distribution among early employees means that a lot of the people putting in that grind will end up getting rich as well. When Google IPO'd, Sergey Brin made a thousand millionaires.

These hours are only ruinous for "work/life" balance if you do not consider building the company to be part of your life, and for a founder who has built something like AliBaba, InfoSys, or Google, that work is going to be life defining.

Unless you convert your wealth into political power, any mention in press or in our histories will be as the founder of these companies. Even as the richest man in the world works to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and convert the US into an authoritarian government run by executive fiat, the media refers to him as Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX).

For Ma, Murthy and Brin, managing hypergrowth and the overwork that goes along with that are seminal moments in their lives. They associate incredibly long hours with success, and they look at their long hours fondly, in no small part because they've been handsomely rewarded with wealth and power.

I empathize a lot with this view. The story you hear time and time again is that these tech giants caught lightning in a bottle, assembled a group of top quality people with incredible perks and high pay, and managed to segue that into a series of continued advancements that built a more broad and industry defining business. I am not sure it's possible to do this without sustained overwork.

But the crucial missing ingredient unacknowledged by the three of them is that working this kind of schedule for AliBaba, InfoSys, or Google in its present state is a terrible deal that lacks the upside of doing so for a startup.

You cannot recreate that spark at a large company. People who tell you "We are kind of like a startup working within X large company" might mean well, but they are lying to you.

In an early stage company, stakes are lower and the low level decision making is often more distributed. Layoffs are uncommon because the machinery for large scale talent acquisition isn't there. There is stress, but the working environment is relaxed and informal. There's one or two layers of management that you need to be responsive toward.

Large companies are nothing like this. There are 2-4x more layers of management, and often other groups that are competing to take on the same work you're doing. They do not hand out non-executive pay packages worth anywhere near the amount that an early stage equity grant represents once it's undergone a 1000x+ multiple.

If your 60hr worker makes Google the vanguard of AI and Alphabet grows 300%, then they will have created $4tn of wealth, more than the GDP of the United Kingdom. Sergey alone stands to gain on the order of $200bn. What will his workers who are putting in 60 hour work weeks get, other than more TPS reports and 20 extra hours of meetings?

Mar 3