Harnessing Scrappy Startup Energy (Without Burning Out Your Team)
How to motivate your team to work more without mandating 996
Lately I’ve been hearing more and more about AI startups running on 996 culture — 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The argument is simple: speed is everything, and long hours are the competitive edge.
What used to be a sustainability-focused, remote-friendly, ZIRP-era industry now feels like survival of the fittest. Investors are pushing harder. Founders are asking candidates straight up: are you willing to be in the office six days a week, working nights and weekends?
This instinct makes sense — hours are the easiest lever to reach for, but they’re not necessarily the most effective. Counting hours gives you the appearance of urgency without guaranteeing impact. If it’s the only lever you reach for, you’re not just risking burnout — you’re leaving a lot of performance on the table.
The truth is, extra hours can help, especially in today’s AI landscape. When a team is aligned, focused, and has tight feedback loops, putting in more time can accelerate building. I’ve experienced the magic that comes from everyone leaning in together, but those moments work because people choose them, not because they’re forced.
Hours can amplify motivation, but they can’t manufacture it. If you want speed without burning people out, you need to create the conditions where people want to give more, not by just mandating more hours.
Scrappy Energy, Done Right
I’ve felt the magic of scrappy startup energy.
Pulse, the first startup I worked at after leaving Google, was literally run out of a converted garage in Palo Alto. Every morning, we pulled up the garage door to let fresh air and sunlight in.
The night before an event, I stayed up late designing a flyer and woke up early to pick up hundreds of copies at FedEx Office before spending my whole Saturday at the UC Berkeley career fair, handing them out and pitching the company.
Outside of 9-5, we stayed late to host social events for other Palo Alto startup people, gave talks about Android development, and blogged regularly about our experience at a startup.
Nobody told me I had to do any of that. If the job description had said, “nights and weekends required,” I probably wouldn’t have even applied. But because I wanted to, because I felt part of something exciting, I gave up some of my “off-hours” willingly.
A few years later, I was at Medium, and I remember sitting at home the evening before our public launch — the entire team was online, filing bug reports and opening pull requests with bug fixes. Working as a team towards that concrete goal felt so satisfying.
When your team has a clear focus, you can harness scrappy startup energy. People lean in because they’re aligned, excited, and want to see the thing ship. It’s one of the best parts of early-stage startups.
But you can’t manufacture scrappy energy with mandates. In fact, mandates kill it. While I was happily putting in hours at the Palo Alto startup, a friend who worked nearby complained that a company executive had set the expectation of 70 hour workweeks, and she felt really resentful about it.
The Bake Sale Principle
A quick detour.
A few months ago, my kids and I ran a bake sale to raise money for the Trevor Project. Instead of putting prices on the cookies and brownies, we just said: take whatever you want, donate whatever you want.
We raised more than double what we expected. People gave generously when it was their choice.
That lesson applies to startups too. The type of people who want to work at early-stage startups want to contribute, they want to be part of something and have impact. They want to feel generous with their time and energy. But they want to do it on their own terms.
When you tell them exactly how much to give — “be here 9am to 9pm, six days a week” — you take away the freedom that makes giving feel good. You also take away their agency to work when it feels aligned with their lives, and when they’re most productive.
Hours ≠ Output
Another misconception is that the number of hours someone spends “at work” is a reliable measure of effort. It absolutely is not.
At that same garage startup, I was often the first one to leave the office. Many of my coworkers stayed until midnight. From the outside, it looked like they were working twice as hard.
But if you zoomed in, it wasn’t that simple. Some people planned their day to include a midday gym trip, a long dinner with friends, or errands — so their “long hours” weren’t really continuous work. Meanwhile, I’d leave earlier, but then often spend my night designing flyers, coding, or whatever else needed to be done at home.
The point is: hours at your desk are not the same as hours of meaningful work. Some people have families or responsibilities outside work. Others can fold those into their workday and make it look like they’re always around.
And then there’s the other kind of “long hours”: the ones filled with busy work. I’ve worked at places where people constantly mentioned how late they worked — but most of what they were doing was unnecessary. Long incoherent docs that didn’t even need to exist in the first place. Tedious manual work that could have been automated or would become irrelevant in a few days. Hours of effort that could’ve been avoided with a ten minute conversation. And all that busy work created more busy work for other people on the team.
More hours doesn’t automatically mean better output. Sometimes it means worse.
Speed Without Burnout
The worst burnout I’ve felt in my career didn’t come from long nights. I’ve worked far longer hours without burning out.
What burned me out was working hard on things that didn’t matter — because priorities kept shifting. Or pouring myself in and feeling like my contributions were taken for granted in a low-trust culture.
That’s why I get wary when leaders rally around “more hours” as the solution. It usually signals a disconnect: a failure to understand what actually motivates people. And that disconnect often comes with other dysfunctions — unclear priorities, strategy whiplash, lack of trust. Those are the things that actually drive burnout.
This is also why the hours-first playbook backfires, even in high-stakes industries like AI. Speed matters, but frantic busy work is nothing. Sprinting without alignment just burns people out and slows you down in the long run.
There’s a cultural cost, too. If you make 996 the baseline, you shrink your hiring pool. You’ll attract mostly young, single people who can give up nights and weekends — and miss out on more experienced talent who can’t or won’t. Over time, that shapes your company in ways you may regret.
If you want to be fast and durable, you need both urgency and sustainability.
Hours Worked Aren’t Your Only Lever
Most companies have plenty of other levers to pull before resorting to “just work more.”
Clarity of strategy. If you’re going to ask for late nights, at least make sure the goal won’t change next week. Nothing is more demoralizing than sprinting hard, only to have your work thrown away because leadership shifted priorities again.
Intrinsic motivation. Figure out what lights up your team members. Some love customer impact. Some love elegant architecture. Some love seeing a graph tick upward. When you connect their work to what motivates them, they’ll put in extra effort without being asked.
Core hours + trust. Agree on a block of overlap hours where everyone’s available. Use those times aggressively for collaboration. Outside that, trust people to manage their time. Measure them on outcomes, not whether their Slack status is green at 10pm.
Explicit expectations. Save the “extra push” for actual launches or deadlines. Call it out clearly: “this week is going to be intense.” And then, when it’s over, celebrate, give people time back, and acknowledge their effort.
None of these tactics require heroics or all-nighters, just some thoughtfulness. And they all go further than squeezing an extra 20 hours of unaligned busy work out of the team.
Managing External Pressure
Part of the challenge right now is external. Investors are pushing their portfolio companies to work harder, longer, faster, and the general industry norm has shifted to pushing for more hours.
As a founder or leader, part of your job is to act as a buffer. Don’t just pass that pressure straight through to your team. “My investor says we need to work more” is not leadership. Share results and outcomes with your investors before they start micromanaging your team’s hours. Show them traction, customer feedback, progress against goals. Manage up the same way you’d manage inside the company: give people the information they need so they don’t default to breathing down your neck.
Two Cases for Extra Hours
Sometimes, yes, working more does move things forward. But there are two very different cases:
1. The Sprint
This is the late-night bug bash before launch, the weekend push to close out a big customer deal, the all-hands scramble to hit a date.
These pushes can be powerful, but only when they’re:
Aligned. Everyone knows why it matters.
Occasional. The exception, not the baseline.
Acknowledged. Celebrate the effort and give recovery time.
What kills energy isn’t the one-off sprint. It’s when every week feels like a sprint.
2. The Higher Baseline
There are also times when the job itself requires a higher ongoing level of effort. If you want to hit ambitious goals, it may take more than a standard 9–5.
The better approach isn’t to mandate a number of hours, it’s to push on outcomes.
Set a big, clear goal, and be honest that achieving it will probably require extra effort. People can then manage their time in the way that makes sense for them.
For example, you might say:
“This year is going to be a lot of work. We have a clear goal to work toward, and I expect us to do what it takes to hit it. For me, that looks like being focused during office hours, disconnecting for dinner and family time, and then logging back on for a few hours to move things forward so the team has a running start the next day. Other people prefer to stay late and get dinner delivered. My expectation is that everyone contributes toward our goals in a way that works for them — and I trust people to manage their time well.”
For candidates who want a strict 9–5, this sets a clear signal that your company isn’t the right fit. For those who are up for it, you’ve established norms that are explicit and rooted in outcomes and trust — not butts in seat time.
The Bottom Line
You can’t create scrappy startup energy by mandating long hours. You need to have purpose, clarity, and trust.
Hours are the most basic tool in your toolkit, but not always the most effective
If you want your team to give more, don’t mandate it. Create the conditions where they want to.
If you enjoyed this post, you will probably also enjoy this guest post I wrote for Every on cultivating the right kind of chaos at startups.
1000%. I left a previous company because of their continual demands that everyone worked long hours, while I have found myself working more hours than usual because I feel so motivated on my current team. The difference was the internal versus external drivers.
Two more thoughts:
- Make it worth their while. If you're a founder, you've got a hefty equity stake in the company, and a company success means life-changing money for you. Pretty much all the time, that's not the case for most employees. Align incentives so that your team wants the company to be successful, whether that's through equity, base salary, benefits, or culture (or all of the above).
- Ownership - give people problems and give them space to figure them out. Combined with the above, people will work far more than if you more micromanage them and mandate more hours.