Grind culture is a failure of management — but we still turn away 9-5 candidates

Opinion June 16, 2026 Bob Gregory and Josh Vernon 4 min read Nico Laqua, the founder of US startup Corgi Insurance, recently gave an interview where he claimed "if you're not working seven days per week, you'll lose". In response, Karri Saarinen, founder of fellow US company Linear, proposed that “grinding is never good for any creative problem”, and that mastery is “achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort”. The argument boils down to two different world views: do great things come from exceptional effort over long hours or from a sustainable pace of focused work?

It’s an uncomfortable debate we’ve been having internally at Gigaton over the last few months. And while we’d like to believe the second philosophy is true, we’re deliberately helping to construct some version of the first. Gigaton builds AI-powered control systems to optimise industrial plants, starting with cement, which accounts for around 8% of global CO₂ emissions.

A successful deployment at a single plant canu save kilotonnes of CO₂ per year. Our mission is to achieve gigatonne-scale emissions reduction, but that mission only matters if we become good enough, fast enough. This work is urgent, and there’s a moral case for acting at pace; we’re also working against the clock commercially.

Like many startups, Gigaton is "default dead". We’re expanding our product and markets ambitiously, and doing so requires more capital. To attract capital, we need to be on a credible path towards being a thriving, profitable business.

If we can't do that, then we lose our shot at gigatonne impact. All that said, long hours aren’t inherently worthy. We believe grind culture is a failure of management: a failure to plan, to prioritise and to hire appropriately.

In our search for product market fit, we worked with anyone we could. We failed to define our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and weren’t firm enough in our technical opinion of who the product we were building was for. We are now, but we should be honest that some of our current intensity comes from precisely that.

If we had been smart enough and ruthless enough as the leaders of Gigaton, we could have set the business on the right strategic path earlier. Leaders have to own that before asking the organisation to raise the level of intensity. At the same time, we believe that this mission matters and startups are inherently messy.

It is impossible to have perfect foresight and doing hard things requires immense dedication. At Gigaton this year, we have deliberately chosen to make our culture more intense, not because grind is noble, but because the climate crisis is important, the opportunity is real and because we won't survive unless we achieve ambitious things in a short timeframe. This ambition is not without trade-offs.

Instead of immediately asking people to work weekends, we deliberately chose to focus, reducing our incoming revenue by 50% to work on a smaller number of higher-value outcomes. We aligned the entire company around two objectives for the calendar year: make the product work repeatedly and prepare for scale. We have set the bar extremely high for performance, with the result that we’ve turned away promising candidates who want a normal 9-5 job.

However, we also value flexibility, and want to support employees with families and other commitments. Bob Gregory, our CTO, will often work into the evening, and tinker (or build entire products) over the weekend, but if you call him at 11am on a Wednesday, he might be walking his dog. The requirement at Gigaton isn’t "work every hour"; the requirement is "bring the level of ownership that the mission demands, in a way that you can personally sustain".

We look for people who are mature enough to decide what caring over the long term means and because they believe in our mission, do not need to be told to care deeply. Bob has a unique perspective on this, given his background as a software engineer for 25 years, mostly working in an ‘extreme programming’ culture. Extreme programming practitioners value sustainable pace as the best way to deliver value.

They achieve that with fast feedback loops, a rigorous commitment to technical excellence and a ruthless focus on prioritisation. When you're doing extreme programming, it doesn't feel fast because every step is mindful, but it is relentless. The practices support us in making continuous progress.

At Gigaton, we want people to work hard and be exhausted at the end of a week. Then we want them to rest, reset and do it again, over and over and over, like clockwork. As a company, we reject clock-watching.

The standard is whether we can reduce carbon emissions for our customers, and scale the solution fast enough to matter. We owe our people sustainable work conditions. We owe the climate crisis a serious response.

Navigating that tension is the work of true leadership. Josh Vernon is the CEO Gigaton. Bob Gregory is CTO Bob Gregory and Josh Vernon Explore the inner workings of Europe’s h