When Jeffrey Wang posted on X on Monday asking if anyone wanted to have a go at ordering fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral. He said so many other people wanted it, he could order more than 100 units.
“I had more people than I could handle,” said Wang, co-founder of an AI research startup. AXA Labs, told TechCrunch. “I wanted to order two Nap Pods for myself and see how they turned out. I had demands for more than 100.”
The post didn’t bother other X users who wanted to take a nap at work. Some people made fun of the hygiene of sharing a bed with office mates. One replied, “The last thing I want to do is share bedsheets with my software developer coworkers.”
Many people praised the special features of these nap pods, or the whole idea of office napping. “Every modern office should be no different than taking a nap during a 15-hour flight; some tasks require better estimation of what REM sleep gives you.” [sic]The other one replied.
Some people pointed to a more obvious question. Why would an employer expect people to sleep in the office instead of going home? Or as one post respondent said: “There is no greater danger than [sic] A potential employer showing off his ‘nap pod’. I’ll get out of there.”
The answer is simple: Silicon Valley startup hustle culture is back, especially in Cerebral Valley, San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood that’s packed with early-stage AI startups, often founded and staffed with under 20 people. Build your companies your whole life. Hustle culture evaporated in the years following the pandemic, as people moved away from both their offices and San Francisco.
But there are hacker houses in San Francisco popular again, And Cerebral Valley has its own cultural phenomenonWhere people who believe in the future of AI (or are afraid of it) live in the same houses and go to the same parties.
In the case of AXA Labs, the need for nap pods is a natural extension of its hacker house history. Axa is a 10-person startup that, until a few weeks ago, was housed in a house where co-workers from small companies worked and lived together.
“Like a lot of companies in that area, we worked out of our home. We turned two bedrooms into a big office,” Wang said, adding that everyone worked together, spending time together , used to eat together. “And it was the equivalent of nine people.”
So nap pods preserve employees’ ability to turn off work and sleep, rather than the idea that “employees are slaves,” he said.
“We live in a world where you don’t always get enough sleep. As much as you make it a priority, sometimes you have a bad night,” Wang said. “If people are tired, they should be able to take a nap. Sleep is fundamental to productivity.”
But he also admits that, in his view as a founder, startup life requires an overall commitment.
“Startup life is not for everyone. My co-founder and I went to Harvard and experienced a really, really hard, grueling semester,” he said. “But this is on a whole other level, you know? This startup thing is a lot harder than I expected.”
the company is A Y Combinator-Graduate Which trains the LLM model to perform search tasks when it needs to access sources of data or the Internet. Wang says its offering is being used by about 100 paying customers and thousands of developers, ranging from other AI startups to researchers and AI labs.
Wang said Axa Labs employees are “well paid” 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 OK for the company to not be the main priority in your life, but certainly not in a high-growth company.”
This means working long hours and, if not staying in the office, at least taking naps there. As the saying goes, “Code, sleep, repeat.”
As someone who has covered the ups and downs of startups for many years, I can definitely say that there comes a time in the life of a growing company When such a hectic culture needs to be reducedOr what the company is really doing is poor project and employee management.
The time for reasonable work-hour requirements should come when hiring has exceeded the ability to provide good initial-employee equity; Or at that size when greater employment laws apply. Or just when the team starts adding people with families Who want to go home every night.
As far as clean sheets in AXA’s nap pods go, that won’t be a problem, Wang says. “We had a toga party to celebrate the rebrand and we bought 30-40 sheets. We have lots of sheets.”
with-ai-startups-booming-nap-pods-and-silicon-valley-hustle-culture-are-back-techcrunch
