Silicon Valley\u2019s startup hustle culture is starting to look more and more like an outlawed Chinese working schedule.<\/p>\n
According to a new report from <\/a>Wired<\/a>,<\/a> Bay Area startups are increasingly leaning into models resembling China\u2019s 996 working culture, where employees are expected to work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week, totaling 72 hours per week.\u00a0<\/p>\n Startups, especially in the AI space, are openly asking new starts to accept the longer working hours. For example, AI start-up Rilla tells prospective employees in current job listings<\/a> not to even bother applying unless they are excited about \u201cworking ~70 hrs\/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC.\u201d<\/p>\n The company\u2019s head of growth, Will Gao, told Wired there was a growing Gen-Z subculture \u201cwho grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies.\u201d He said nearly all of Rilla\u2019s 80-person workforce works on a 996 schedule.<\/p>\n The rise of the controversial work culture appears to have been born out of the current efficiency squeeze in Silicon Valley. Rounds of mass layoffs and the rise of AI have put pressure and turned up the heat on tech employees who managed to keep their jobs.<\/p>\n For example, in February, Google<\/a> co-founder Sergey Brin told employees who work on Gemini that he recommended being in the office at least every weekday and said 60 hours is the \u201csweet spot\u201d for productivity.<\/p>\n Other tech CEOs, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have stressed that productivity among workers is king, even if that means working hours or days of overtime. In November 2022, Musk infamously told remaining X, then Twitter<\/a>, employees to commit to a new and \u201cextremely hardcore\u201d culture or leave the company with severance pay.\u00a0<\/p>\n Part of the reasoning for the intense work schedules is a desire to compete with China amid a global AI race. Especially after Chinese startup DeepSeek released an AI model on par with some of the top U.S. offerings, rocking leading AI labs.<\/p>\n China has actually been trying to clamp down on the 996 culture at home. In 2021, China\u2019s top court, the Supreme People\u2019s Court, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly declared China\u2019s \u201c996\u201d working culture was illegal. At the time, the move was part of the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s broader campaign to reduce inequality in Chinese society and limit the power of the nation\u2019s largest tech companies.<\/p>\n But the practice has already spilled over to other countries. Earlier this summer, the European tech sector <\/a>also found itself in a heated debate over the working culture.<\/p>\n Partly exacerbated by an ongoing debate about Europe\u2019s competitiveness in the technology and AI space, some European VCs warned that more work and longer hours may be needed to effectively compete.<\/p>\n