When Jeffrey Wang posted to X on Monday asking if anyone would like to order a luxurious but affordable office nap pod, he didn't expect the post to go viral. He said he may have been able to order more than 100 units because there were so many others who wanted them.
“We had too many people available,” Wang, co-founder of AI research startup Exa Labs, told TechCrunch. “He ordered two nappods for himself and wanted to see what would happen. There were over 100 requests.”
I am purchasing a Japanese capsule bed as a nap pod for my new office in San Francisco. If you want to order in bulk from me, it should be around $1000 per bed.
Please DM me if you are interested!
Comparable products sold in the US cost around $15,000 pic.twitter.com/eker5y4LfZ
— Jeffrey Wang (@wangzjeff) May 13, 2024
This post didn't just strike a nerve with other X users who like to take naps at work. Some joked about the hygiene of sharing a bed with office colleagues. One person said, “I would never share bed sheets with a colleague who is a software developer.”
Many people praised the special features of these nap pods, as well as the whole idea of napping at the office. “Every modern office should have something no different than a nap on a 15-hour flight. Some tasks require better reasoning that REM sleep is effective.” [stet]” responded another.
Several people pointed to more obvious questions. Why would employers expect people to sleep in the office instead of going home? Or as one post respondent put it: “There are no more serious red flags.” [stet] A potential employer is showing off a “nap pod.” I'd like to get out of there. ”
The answer is simple. The Silicon Valley startup hustle culture is back. Particularly in Cerebral Valley, an area of San Francisco that is home to many early-stage AI startups, many of which were founded and are home to his 20-something employees, who have been with the company their whole lives. Hustle culture fell out of favor in the post-pandemic years as people moved away from both their offices and San Francisco.
But San Francisco's hacker houses are becoming popular again. And Celebrity Valley is its own cultural phenomenon, with people who believe in (or fear) an AI future living in such houses and attending the same parties.
For Exa Labs, the need for nap pods is a natural extension of the hacker house's history. Exa is his 10-person start-up company, and until a few weeks ago, he was living in a house like this, where colleagues from small companies work and live together.
“Like many businesses in the area, we were working from home. We converted two bedrooms into a large office,” Wang said, adding that everyone worked together and He added that they played and had meals together. “And that grew to about nine people.”
So rather than the idea that “employees are slaves,” Nappod maintains the ability for employees to stop working and sleep, he said.
“We live in a world where we don't always get perfect sleep, and the more we prioritize it, the more we sometimes end up having terrible nights,” Wang said. “If people are tired, they should be able to take a nap. Sleep is fundamental to productivity.”
But as a founder, he also acknowledges that startup life requires full commitment.
“Startup life isn't for everybody. My co-founder and I went to Harvard and we went through a really, really tough semester,” he said. “But this is on another level, you know? This startup thing is way harder than I ever expected.”
The company is a Y Combinator graduate that trains LLM models to perform search functions when they need to access data sources or the internet. Wang said the service is used by about 100 paying customers and tens of thousands of developers, from his other AI startups to researchers and his AI lab.
Wang said Exa Labs' employees are “well-paid” and have capital. In other words, the company's attitude is “if you're not in, you're out,” he says. “Maybe in some start-ups it's okay for the company not to be the number one priority in your life, but in high-growth companies that's definitely not the case.”
That means long hours, and even if you don't live in the office, you'll at least take a nap there. As the saying goes, “Code, sleep, repeat.”
As someone who has covered the ups and downs of startups for many years, I can tell you that there comes a time in a growing company's life when the hustle culture has to be toned down, or the company will suffer. What they are actually doing is poor project management and employee management.
The time when reasonable work-hour expectations are required should come when employment growth exceeds the ability to provide sufficient capital for initial employees. Or on a scale where more employment laws apply. Or simply when teams start adding people with families who want to go home every night.
As for clean sheets in Exa's nap pods, Wang says there are no issues. “We had a toga party to celebrate the rebrand and bought 30 to 40 sheets. We have a lot of sheets.”