When Jeffrey Wang posted to X on Monday asking if anyone would love to order some fancy but inexpensive office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said there have been so many others interested that he was in a position to order greater than 100 pieces.
“I had too many people to deal with,” Wang, co-founder of Exa Labs, an artificial intelligence research startup, told TechCrunch. “I wanted to order two nap pods for myself and see how they turned out. I had over 100 demands.”
The post didn’t just upset other X users who desired to take a nap at work. Some joked about the hygiene of sharing a bed with co-workers. One of them replied, “The last thing I want to do is share sheets with my co-developers.”
Many people admired the special features of those nap pods or approved of the whole idea of napping in the office. “every modern office should have one that is no different than taking a nap on a 15-hour flight, some tasks require better inference that it provides a good night’s sleep” [stet]– replied one other.
A few pointed to a more obvious query. Why would an employer expect people to sleep in the office as a substitute of going home? Or as one respondent put it: “Nothing is a greater red flag [stet] a potential employer presents his “nap capsules”. I would not be there anymore.
The answer is easy: Silicon Valley startup culture is making a comeback, especially in Cerebral Valley, an area of San Francisco stuffed with early-stage AI startups, often founded and staffed by 20-somethings who have been building their corporations throughout their lives. Hustle culture fell out of favor in the post-pandemic years as people moved out of each their offices and San Francisco.
But hacker houses in San Francisco do popular again. And Cerebral Valley is its own cultural phenomenon, where those that consider in the way forward for AI (or fear it) live in such houses and go to the same parties.
For Exa Labs, the need for nap pods is a natural extension of its hacking house’s history. Exa is a 10-person startup that, just a few weeks ago, was situated in a house where co-workers of small corporations work and live together.
“Like many businesses in this area, we worked out of home. We converted two bedrooms into a large office,” Wang said, adding that everybody worked, frolicked and ate together. “And that scaled to about nine people.”
So nap pods maintain employees’ ability to stop working and sleep, quite than creating the concept that “employees are slaves,” he said.
“We live in a world where it’s not always possible to sleep perfectly. No matter how you prioritize, sometimes you have a bad night,” Wang said. “If people are tired, they should be able to take a nap. Sleep is the foundation of productivity.”
However, he also admits that in his opinion, as a founder, the lifetime of a startup requires total commitment.
“Life in a startup is not for everyone. “My co-founder and I went to Harvard and had a really, really grueling semester,” he said. “But this is something on one other level, you know? This startup thing is a lot harder than I expected.
The company is Y Combinator graduate which trains LLM models to perform search functions when they should access data sources or the Internet. Wang says it has about 100 paying customers and tens of 1000’s of developers, ranging from other AI startups to AI researchers and labs.
Exa Labs employees are “well paid,” Wang said, and have equity. That’s why the company’s approach is: “if you’re out, you’re out,” he says. “Maybe for some startups there’s nothing wrong with not having the company be your top priority in life, but certainly not for a fast-growing one.”
This translates into long working hours and, if not living in the office, then at least taking naps. As the saying goes: “Code, sleep, repeat.”
As someone who has been reporting on the ups and downs of startups for many years, I can say with certainty that there comes a moment in the lifetime of a growing company when when this rush culture must be toned downor what the company is really doing is mismanaging projects and employees.
The time for reasonable expectations about working hours should come when hiring levels exceed the ability to offer attractive start-up capital to employees; or in a size where more labor law regulations apply. Or simply when the team starts adding people with families who want to come back home to them every night.
When it comes to scrub bedding in Exy pods, this may not be a problem, says Wang. “We had a toga party to have a good time the rebranding and bought 30-40 sheets. We have loads of sheets.