This editorial appeared in the August 7th, 2025, issue of the Topline newsletter.
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Remember when tech companies bragged about their nap pods and unlimited PTO? That era is dead. Today's hottest startups are posting a different flex: teams grinding 6-7 days a week, employees living together to ship faster, and founders celebrating 80-hour weeks on X.
Jared Sleeper (Partner at Avenir) captured this shift with surgical precision through his Grindscore analysis — a brilliant hack of Glassdoor data that reveals something counterintuitive. He divided companies' 'positive business outlook' scores by their 'work-life balance' ratings. Low work-life balance but high belief in the business = high Grindscore.
The results read like a venture capitalist's dream portfolio. Rippling, Ramp, Owner, and Figma dominate the top 15. Companies we'd all love to own stock in. Places where 'I'm tired' isn't part of the vocabulary
What follows is our conversation about how Jared discovered this metric, why founders suddenly have permission to demand intensity again, and what this means for the future of work in an AI-accelerated world.
Enjoy!
Asad: The Grindscore was the most interesting use of Glassdoor data that I've ever seen. I have generally found Glassdoor data to be noise, but this was the first time I saw somebody use that data where I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting." How did you land on doing this research?
Jared: It's been about five years now since I've been working with Glassdoor data and I quickly discovered two things.
One, a lot of the reviews are incentivized or encouraged. Companies will see that there's a challenge and encourage a bunch of employees to post. You'll then see a burst of reviews all at once that are all five stars. The other effect is that people often leave reviews around layoffs.
I realized pretty quickly that for my purposes, the punchy content was when someone who leaves a bunch of one-star reviews said something positive about the company - “I hate this company, they fired me, but the product is amazing” - or when someone who does a bunch of five star ratings on different categories said something negative about the company.
The exercise that I was trying to do was how do we find such insights at scale. When we play with large data sets here, we're always trying to find things that we can efficiently do for all the companies and then rank them. There's other ways we use Glassdoor, but this is the one that's sung for us because we've got close relationships with some of the companies, and the data does map well with their culture.
Asad: I know some of the companies on the list - such as Owner - and the data really captured their environments quite well. Were you expecting to find such a high level of correlation or were you surprised at the results?
Jared: I still always feel a little bit surprised when you can take granular online data and have it map to intuition. Usually, almost every data experiment I do results in me finding less correlation than I would have thought.
I think I was a little surprised to see the consistency in the grindscore data - there's a few head scratchers at the top of the list, but not too many. If you look at the public companies at the bottom of the list that I published, I've invested in a lot of those companies in my history as a public company investor. I can confirm that those are companies that are known for not being places people work particularly hard.
Overall, I would say I’m always surprised, but not by the intuition behind it. I think great companies often do look like the ones that score high on the grindscore.
Asad: The reaction I saw was generally quite positive about the findings. There were even companies celebrating being on the top of the list. But it made me think that if you had done this a few years ago - when labour had more leverage - that the reaction might have been different. I'm curious, was the overall reaction positive or did you get some push back?
Jared: Yeah, the reaction was generally positive. I haven't checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this would end up on Reddit anti-work at some point.
I'm not an anti-work life balance person though. I actually think for a lot of people choosing careers of high work life balance is the right thing. But if you're pursuing greatness, it's a myth to claim that there's no sacrifice there. So I deeply respect the people who accept that they're making a tradeoff either way.
But it's the people who say that you can have it all who may be kidding themselves a little bit. I'm sure there's some situations. Someone did make an interesting point in the replies to which I agree with which is that it is true that some businesses are so high quality that they don't need to grind to be successful. Maybe if it’s a monopoly, it doesn't matter as much if everyone's working 80 hours a week.
The other thing I'll say here is that when a company's growing and someone can come in and be promoted quickly or advance their career or make a lot of money through equity, people do feel like they're participating in capitalism. They would willingly trade work-life balance for the upside.
Whereas a lot of the blowback is people who are working really hard but at a business that isn't capable of providing those sorts of rewards to them in the long run. That is a head scratcher. The natural flow of talented people should be to companies like Ramp that are going to reward them, promote them, and potentially make them rich one day versus the legacy companies of the world where you know that's not credibly on offer. I don't know why you would accept a low work-life balance to be part of one of those companies.
Asad: Beyond growth and opportunity, what else do companies where people willingly go after it with real intensity get right to bring that out of people?
Jared: There's also something in how companies treat people. There's this great Napoleon quote: “A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.”
Obviously it's a little bit overdone to compare startups to war, but there is this dynamic where if you are a soulless company that treats people like cogs in a machine and coin-operated, it's very hard to have this positive low work-life balance that we're talking about and a high grindscore.
One of the things that Elon is great at is just hammering home the missions that his companies are on and making people feel like they're bigger than themselves. Same thing with Palmer Luckey and Anduril. There is an advertisement where he says, "You can waste your days doing this or you can come defend democracy."
Companies also underestimate the value that their brand can have for their employees. If you feel like you are part of something great and your work will be appreciated externally - “oh wow, you were at Ramp, you must be a killer” - people like to be part of that.
Asad: For a while labour had such leverage, that companies were afraid to ask people to work harder. Now, founders seem to have permission to do this. There are so many examples of startups working in the office 6-7 days a week, 12 hours a day. Do you think this is mainly because labour has lost some of its leverage because of the economy having corrected or do you think there are other drivers as well?
Jared: I have a couple of answers there. I think the first answer is AI has this almost messianic or prophetic pull. There's a genuine strain of thought in San Francisco that this is the last stretch to make it before AI makes the world so difficult and confusing for labor broadly. We have portfolio companies that work incredibly hard seven days a week - by default, some even in which everyone lives in the same house just to work. There's the personal motivation that this is the last chance to make a lot of money.
But there's also the feeling of basically bringing humanity into a new era. People feel a sense of purpose. Anthropic is very much like that. The wave of SaaS companies in 2021 by and large did not have that. It’s difficult to feel like you're changing the world when you work at some incremental product like a sales outbounding tool. Now there's a lot of companies that are applying AI in a way that feels like it could genuinely change the world and I'm not shocked that it energizes people.
The other dynamic is that a lot of these companies are just full of very young people. A lot of the bigger SaaS companies of yesteryear were founded by folks later in their career.
Asad: An important discussion that's being had right now is that will labor ever get the leverage they had a few years ago back. It seems that we are now in a bifurcated world, where top talent has outsized leverage - we saw this with what was happening with AI Researches recently - and the average or below average employee has far less leverage, and it'll keep reducing over time. What's your take on this?
Jared: It ties into bigger macroeconomic questions. It does strike me that top talent has always had leverage. You already covered that. What happens to mid-tier and lower-tier talent depends on how AI impacts the economy. We've been in an unusually high period for labor leverage since just before the pandemic. Low unemployment rates, close to full employment. We have a generation that has forgotten what it feels like to be in a different world.
I think that labor has quite a bit of leverage today relative to history, even though it's down from where it was. So unless AI makes the economy run hot where there is still room for humans and there's enormous hiring needed, I would still probably take the under on labor leverage over the next three to five years. The reason is that I think we're still well above the historical trend and it does strike me that AI is more of a labor replacement.
I do shudder to think what would happen if we had a recession at some point, for whatever reason. There are many potential causes, but companies will be much more comfortable using AI to automate work in that scenario than they may be right now. Currently, there is still some human hesitancy to be the company that deploys AI and then lays off a bunch of people. This is the reason why people are usually laying off their BPOs or their consultants, but not their people. In a future recession, that protectiveness would change, unfortunately. So obviously, I hope it never happens.
Asad: Are you seeing AI eat into the labour budget already?
Jared: Traditionally software products have famously been sold at a small fraction of the implicit labor. Today, we are seeing companies go in with a pitch of labor replacement to enterprises and get pretty big budgets albeit on an experimental basis, on the view that “Hey, we can lay off these people or we can get rid of this BPO”.
The buyers I see bifurcate between “Is this a tool that humans are going to use or is this something that no humans are going to look at that's going to just get work done for me?” And they pay for that latter thing as if it was a human for now.
Asad: Ok time for the last question, which is a bit more about you as a professional. Achieving greatness often requires working very hard over a very long period of time, and that requires giving some thought to how you are going to manage yourself to be able to work so hard over a long period of time. What's your way of creating some integration between how much energy you put towards work and what are the things that allow you to consistently put that energy into high-quality level outputs?
Jared: Great question, I put a lot of thought into this. Obviously, loving your work, liking the people you work with is important. One of the best things I've done here at Avenir is putting a ping pong table into our office and just playing a couple of games of ping pong a day. It is an amazing de-stresser. Your brain just turns off, and you're focused on the game for a while.
Beyond that, it's just coming to accept the tradeoffs. The biggest trade-off for me, and it's going to sound silly when I say it, is that I don't watch TV. I've watched one TV series in the last two years. To me, that felt like a pretty easy thing to give up.
I also make sure that when I do unplug, I unplug hard. There's a yurt in Utah that I go to once a year. No cell coverage, no internet for three or four days. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, but I'm just off. That really works in a way that I value enormously. I can always come back from that recharged and ready to attack things.
