Who needs work-life balance when you've got power imbalance.

A founder who builds a culture of relentless work isn’t doing it out of passion alone—it’s a business strategy. Every hour they put in is worth 10x what their employees get out. Their time compounds. Yours... doesn’t.

Time is the great equalizer. It’s non-renewable. We all get the same 24 hours. But in the workplace? That equality dissolves fast.

It gets leveraged.

Some people’s hours turn into fortunes. Others’ get drained for someone else’s upside.

A recent SF Gate article captured this dynamic perfectly. The CEO of an AI startup laid it out bluntly:

“We don’t believe in work-life balance—building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two,” he wrote. “We know that not everyone who joined Windsurf had signed up to join Cognition where we spend 6 days at the office and clock 80+ hour weeks.”

Wu doubled down Tuesday on X, calling it “extreme performance culture.” He bragged that staff “routinely” works weekends and late nights, adding: “Many of us literally live where we work.”

Let’s break that down.

The CEO is pitching a lifestyle—80-hour weeks, no separation between life and labor—as noble. As mission-driven. Maybe even enlightened.

But let’s follow the money.

If you grind yourself down, maybe you’ll see a $300K payout. He’ll walk away with $300 million.

He can justify the cost—health, time, burnout—for himself and his family. The tradeoff is generational wealth.

But what about you? If the finish line is a few years of financial runway, not freedom… is it worth running this hard?

Ask yourself: are you building the dream—or just fueling someone else’s?

Why glamorize “extreme performance culture” when the benefits are so lopsided?

You can be ambitious. You can care deeply.

But if the game is rigged, don’t confuse sacrifice with strategy.