As AI startups boom, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are making a comeback

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X on Monday asking if anyone wanted to order some fancy but inexpensive office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said there were so many others interested that he was able to order more than 100 pieces.

“I had way too many people than I could handle” – Wang, co-founder of an artificial intelligence research startup Examination laboratories, he 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 wanted 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 these nap pods or approved of the whole idea of ​​napping in the office. “every current office should have the same, like taking a nap on a 15-hour flight, some tasks need to be better inferred to ensure a good night’s sleep” [sic]– replied another.

A few pointed to a more obvious question. Why would an employer expect people to sleep in the office instead of going home? Or as one respondent put it: “Nothing is a bigger red flag [sic] a potential employer presents his “nap capsules”. I wouldn’t be there anymore.

The answer is uncomplicated: Silicon Valley’s startup culture is making a comeback, especially in Cerebral Valley, the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, full of early-stage AI startups, often founded and staffed by 20-somethings who have been building their companies throughout their lives. Hustle culture fell out of favor in the post-pandemic years as people moved out of both their offices and San Francisco.

But hacker houses in San Francisco do popular again. And Cerebral Valley is its own cultural phenomenon, where those who believe in the future of 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 located in a house where co-workers of diminutive companies work and live together.

“Like many businesses in this area, we worked out of home. We converted two bedrooms into a gigantic office,” Wang said, adding that everyone worked, hung out and ate together. “And that scaled down to about nine people.”

So nap pods maintain employees’ ability to stop working and sleep, rather than creating the idea 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 life 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 another 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 need to access data sources or the Internet. Wang says it has about 100 paying customers and tens of thousands of developers, ranging from other AI startups to researchers and AI 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 definitely say that there comes a moment in the life of a growing company. when this rush culture needs to 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 provide 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 home to them every night.

When it comes to neat bedding in Exy pods, this won’t be a problem, says Wang. “We had a toga party to celebrate the rebranding and bought 30-40 sheets. We have plenty of sheets.