The 72-Hour Work Week Is Having a Moment. Is It Brilliant or Insane?

It seems like a long time ago now that Tim Ferriss’s The Four-Hour Work Week came out. Now the vibe has shifted, particularly in Silicon Valley and double-particularly in AI. The new trend? The 72-hour work week, better known as 996, for the idea of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

’70 hrs/week in person’

The term comes from China, where those long hours were so ingrained that courts ultimately started barring tech companies from requiring them. Now, it’s catching on in the U.S., particularly among AI startups racing to be first to market.

According to the New York Times, some companies are noting their expectation for 70-hour-plus workweeks right in their job descriptions. More anecdata:

• AI startup Rilla tells candidates right on their application page not to apply unless they’re “excited” about working “70 hrs/week in person.”
• Ramp, a “financial operations start-up,” said it observed more corporate credit card transactions happening in San Francisco on Saturdays, suggesting people really are working weekends.
• Cognition’s CEO Scott Wu posted on X that the company “routinely” works through weekends and does some of its best work “late into the night.”
• Marty Kausas, 28, CEO of AI startup Pylon, posted on LinkedIn that he worked 92 hours a week for three weeks in a row.

‘Workaholic genius’

Tech has always had intense work cultures, dating back to the 1960s semiconductor days, as historian Margaret O’Mara told the Times—legendary perks at companies such as Google 20 years ago notwithstanding.

Heck, I wrote here once about John Harrison, the “truly stubborn, self-educated, workaholic genius” who spent 50 years in the 18th century developing the marine chronometer, solving one of the great technological challenges of his time.

There’s also a sense that to at least some of the 996-ers—or at least the CEOs of the companies they’re working for—work doesn’t feel like work.

“Most of the stuff people count as work I don’t,” Magnus Müller, the 24-year-old CEO of AI startup Browser Use, told The Washington Post. (He lives in a “hacker house” with five teammates, so they can whiteboard at 1 a.m.)

And at least the founders who are talking with the media about their long hours say they include “996” or similar terms in job postings with intention.

When Müller’s co-founder Gregor Zunic posted about an opening, it got 53,000 views and plenty of criticism.

“996 = slaves with no life,” one person commented.

They want “people who are really obsessed,” as Müller put it, and they want everyone else to self-select out.

All progress depends …

Look, I’ve worked in startups, and I’ve put in long hours. And, I understand how sometimes when you love what you’re doing and think it’s important, long hours feel different than they do at other stages of life.

I’ve also described myself as a “workaholic” many times in this column over the years.

Still, I’m reminded of something George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Whether 996 sounds brilliant or insane to you probably depends on how you feel about that quote.