Inside San Francisco’s 90-hour workweek tech grind culture

“Working 80, 90 hours a week is no stretch of the imagination,” Reibman said. “It’s something that is basically required if you want to build here.”

Reibman and his co-founder, Adam Silverman, feel the pulse of that round-the-clock energy via hack nights at their office in South Park. Every week, they invite AI builders to code from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m., providing popcorn, strobe lights, fog machines, and house music. 

“We get people from all over the world, like India, Dubai, Singapore, reaching out to us to join virtually. They literally want to be here so bad, they want to watch us on the Zoom screen,” Reibman said. “People are literally clawing at the door, being, like, ‘I need this energy.’”

Reibman and Silverman chalk up this iteration of single-minded zeal in San Francisco, which has seen previous bursts of Soylent-fueled coding, to a recognition that Big Tech incumbents have a bigger advantage than ever in shaping the AI revolution. 

The conclusion is that the only way for upstarts to shoulder in on what could be the biggest tech transformation of their lives is to pour their precious time into the fight for market share.