When Jeffrey Wang posted Monday on X asking if anyone wanted to take an order of fancy, yet affordable office naps, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many more are wanted, he could have ordered over 100 units.
“I had too many people than I could handle,” Wang, co-founder of AI research startup Exa Labs, he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to order two naps for us and see how they turned out. I had more than 100 requests.”
The post didn’t just strike a nerve with other X users who wanted a nap at work. Some people joked about the hygiene of sharing a bed with office colleagues. One replied: “The last thing I want to do is share sheets with my software development colleagues.”
Many admired the special features of these midday naps or applauded the whole idea of napping at the office. “Every modern office should have something other than napping on a 15-hour flight. [sic]” replied another.
Some pointed to the more obvious question. Why would an employer expect people to sleep in the office instead of going home? Or, as one responder to the post put it: “Nothing is a bigger red flag [sic] a potential employer showing off his ‘sap pods’. I’d be out of there.”
The answer is simple: Silicon Valley’s startup hustle culture is making a comeback, especially in Cerebral Valley, San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood filled with early-stage AI startups, often founded and staffed with 20-somethings who make the companies them all their lives. Hustle culture has fallen out of favor in the post-pandemic years, when people have moved away from both their offices and San Francisco.
But hacker homes in san francisco are popular again. And Cerebral Valley is its own cultural phenomenon, where those who believe in the future of artificial intelligence (or fear it) live in such houses and go to the same parties.
In the case of Exa Labs, the need for nap pods is a natural extension of the hacker house’s history. Exa is a 10-person startup that was, until a few weeks ago, in such a house, where partners of tiny companies work and live together.
“Like many companies in that area, we were working out of our home. We turned two bedrooms into a big office,” Wang said, adding that everyone worked, hung out, ate together. “And that escalated to nine people.”
So naps preserve the ability of employees to stop work and sleep, instead of the idea that “employees are slaves,” he said.
“We live in a world where you don’t always sleep perfectly. No matter how much you prioritize it, sometimes you have a bad night,” Wang said. “If people are tired, they should be able to take a nap. Sleep is key to productivity.”
But he also admits that, in his view as a founder, the startup life requires a complete commitment.
“The startup life is not for everyone. My co-founder and I went to Harvard and had really, really hard grueling semesters,” he said. “But this is something on another level, you know? This startup is much more difficult than I ever expected.”
The company is a Y Combinator-graduate which trains LLM models to perform search operations when they need to access data sources or the internet. Wang says her offering is used by about 100 paying customers and tens of thousands of developers, ranging from other AI startups to AI researchers and labs.
Employees at Exa Labs are “well-paid,” Wang said, and have equity. So the company’s attitude is, “if you’re not in, you’re out,” he says. “Maybe in some startups, it’s okay for the company not to be your main priority in life, but certainly not in a high-growth company.”
This translates into long hours and, if you don’t live in the office, at least sleep there. As the saying goes, “Code, sleep, repeat.”
As someone who has covered the ups and downs of startups for many years, I can definitively say that there comes a time in the life of a growing company when such a culture of hustling needs to be moderatedor what the company is really doing is mismanaging projects and employees.
The time for reasonable expectations for working hours should come when hiring has grown beyond the ability to extract a handsome equity from the first employees. or in size when more labor laws apply. Or just when the team starts adding people with families who want to go home every night.
As for clean sheets on Exa’s naps, that won’t be a problem, Wang says. “We had a toga party to celebrate a rebrand and bought 30-40 sheets. We have a lot of sheets.”
