Intro
I am Daksh, co-founder of Greptile. We build AI agents that help software teams catch bugs and enforce standards in their code changes. We’re a small team of 20 based in San Francisco.
On two separate occasions Greptile went viral for roughly the same reason – our work hours. The first time, I had tweeted (to my then very few followers) that I’ve started telling candidates in the first interview that we don’t offer work-life-balance at Greptile. The tweet was viewed 2M times, went to the first page of reddit, and was covered by national media in the weeks following. I personally received everything from agreement to numerous death threats.
The second time, I was talking to a friend who is a reporter at the SF standard [1]. She asked me if people my age in SF were going to Burning Man. I replied that as far as I could tell, the vibe had shifted towards a work and health optimized culture.
She asked if she could quote me in an article, and I consented. Shortly after, a different friend screenshotted and tweeted that quote. That tweet was viewed 3M times, and my quote was on the front page of multiple news websites, and even the print version of the Times of India. Once again, the response ranged from agreement to racially motivated vitriol.
Source: The Times of India
Why does it matter what people say?
I have always been transparent about the intensity with which we operate. Each team member chose to join us after leaving great companies that operate with more work-life-balance.
Naturally, it matters a lot that members of my team at Greptile love the culture here. To me, how strangers feel about it is largely unimportant with a single exception – potential candidates that would have had a highly fulfilling career at Greptile but were discouraged by the flood of negativity in the press. The rest of this post is addressed to them. A from-the-source outline of our work culture, so potential teammates can self-assess their fit.
Greptile's work culture
Greptile’s work culture follows from our goals. Since the dawn of agentic coding, we are producing more code than we ever have in the past. As a result, we need better and more scalable systems to validate and quality control it.
This is a large opportunity, and like most large opportunities, is highly competitive. To win, we must quickly build the best product for the most customers. Some extremely smart teams are working on this problem. They will work nights and weekends, so we have to outsmart and outwork them to win. Software tends to be a winner-take-all business, so if we aren’t going to push as hard as possible, we may as well not try in the first place.
I don't tell people to work hard
A common misrepresentation of our culture is that I tell people to work 72/84/90 hours a week. Not only do I not do that, it wouldn’t even work if I tried. You can’t tell extremely smart people to work hard. Here is what we do instead:
- Select for people that expressly want a high velocity startup environment (essential step)
- Help them build conviction in our thesis, approach, and way of operating
- We give our team trust, respect, and generous compensation including equity
- My co-founders and I work as hard as possible ourselves, recognizing that we set the effort ceiling for the company
Mispriced equity and a company worth grinding for
Two things should be clear by now – first, that large, competitive opportunities are sought by multiple highly smart teams and are won by the ones that work the hardest, and second, that while we can't tell smart people to work hard, we can select for people that want to, and create a great incentives and a great environment for them. In other words – we have to run a company worth grinding for.
The decision to dedicate a large chunk of your most productive years to a company is not trivial. What are the characteristics of a company that would make this worthwhile? To me there, there are two:
- The problem is one you align with closely, and the idea of working on it with smart people with whom you enjoy working is invigorating.
- You believe the company and therefore your equity in it will grow dramatically in future. Today, the equity is mispriced.
"Grindworthiness" is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. Our interview process is designed to make this assessment easier. We are completely transparent about our finances, key metrics, and each candidate gets the opportunity to attend team lunch and meet everyone. When asked, we regularly introduce candidates to our investors so they can hear their thesis around investing in Greptile and why they have conviction in the company.
We get it, you 996, but why do you have to be loud about it?
A common criticism about our approach to work culture is that we talk about it too much, to a degree that seems performative. After all, the greatest companies work unusually hard, except they do it quietly. As you may have read in the first section of this post, we actually aren’t particularly loud about it. I tweeted once to what I thought would be a tiny audience, and months later sent a text and consented to it being published with no premonition that it would be so widely and passionately discussed. That said, I do think our “loudness” about work culture is ultimately a good thing for a simple reason: · Most people are not interested in grinding at a startup · We respect those people’s preferences and don’t want to waste their time · Being vocal about our culture lets those people self-select out.
I've tried to capture the essence of work culture as a company. If you're interested in joining our team, we'd love to hear from you -> greptile.com/careers
[1] The reporter's name is Rya Jetha. She is probably the best reporter covering Silicon Valley today. She approaches the valley with genuine curiosity rather than adversarial vitriol, so her work reads like it was written by an insider.
