SAN FRANCISCO (TIP) : Indian American tech founder Daksh Gupta received backlash after his social media post on startup culture and work-life balance on Nov. 9 went viral.
Gupta, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based AI startup Greptile, found himself posting on X about the current hiring practices, which included being upfront about 14-hour workdays and grueling work environment at his early-stage startup to see if other founders did the same.
Gupta said: “Recently I started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays. I emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work.
It felt wrong to do this at first, but I’m convinced now that the transparency is good, and I’d much rather people know this from the get-go rather than find out on their first day. Curious if other people do this and if there’s some obvious pitfall I’m missing.”
The X post which now has 1.6 million views and over 2,000 likes, received both good and bad criticism from viewers. The post has reportedly been shared on Reddit sparking discussion on the social platform.
The American Bazaar reached out to Gupta to ask what his thoughts were behind the post and he said, “It was a pretty casual tweet aimed at my typical small audience. I had less than 3,000 followers at the time and my tweets were only read by a few hundred people.”
Gupta added in his email response that “startup people know the first few people at a startup must push exceptionally hard to reach escape velocity. I didn’t want to hire someone who wants work-life balance and force them to work in this intense environment. To avoid that, I started telling people upfront (in the job posting as well as the first interview), that as an early-stage startup, the environment is extremely intense and doesn’t offer any work-life balance.
Gupta’s startup Greptile builds codebase AI experts for software companies and helps engineers catch mistakes when any changes are made to their codebase.
Based in San Francisco and used by about a thousand organizations, the startup raised $5.3 million in funding, backed by Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, SV Angel, Paul Graham, and others.
A day later from his initial post, Gupta took to X once again to follow up on the uproar and explain himself, claiming his “inbox is 20% death threats and 80% job applications.”
“Lot of Indian hate coming from this post so I want to clarify that I am like this not because I’m Indian but because I’m San Franciscan,” a part of his post said.
Gupta noted that “a lot of the backlash was targeted at my race, saying that it was typical for Indians founders to exploit workers.”
With Indian tech veterans like Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, not backing down from his controversial stance of “70-hour work week” to boost productivity and expressing dissatisfaction over five-day work weeks as well as publicly saying that he does not “believe in work-life balance” — work hours and workplace culture seem to be a significant cause for concern within the Indian diaspora.
“Greptile employees are not exploited, they all came here from cushy high-paying big-tech jobs with the express desire to pour themselves into a project and build something great. Some of the comments about my race were quite racist, and I wanted to clarify that my desire to have an intense work culture and to identify others that have similar desires is a consequence of my “SF-ness” [“San Francisco-ness”],” Gupta added.
The Georgia Tech alum credits the Greater San Francisco region as the birthplace of several “greatest technology companies in the last 50 years,” and that “nearly all had a super-intense culture for the first several years.”
“I am a product of that culture,” Gupta said.
However, Gupta unlike Murthy doesn’t recommend this lifestyle for everyone and instead believes that this “is the level of intensity an early-stage startup needs.”
“This is NOT meant to be prescriptive. There are brilliant people who run successful companies full of brilliant people that don’t push themselves this hard. Many others started the way we are starting,” a part of his follow-up post said.
When asked about how this incident affected him and how this might shape the future of Greptile’s work culture, Gupta said: “I am generally unaffected by what strangers say about me on the internet. Early in my startup’s life, people I respected and looked up to have said much worse things to my face, some anonymous hate comments are entirely harmless in comparison.
“Our culture remains unchanged. We are here to outsmart and outwork the competition to build an enormously successful technology company. That means hiring the smartest people that want to work extremely hard and thrive in high-pressure situations. Those that won’t just tolerate a lack of work-life-balance, but actively seek it out.”
Gupta mentioned that Greptile’s current goal remains to create a product that customers love and can reach as many people as possible, bypassing their competitors.