Return of the Grind

When the Balrog is bottomless mimosas, a new episode of Your Friends & Neighbors, and a night out at Gabriela—but you’ve got shipping to do.

I’m not making a moral judgment here. Just describing what I’m seeing and hearing from founders and teams.

And honestly, it makes sense.

We’re living through the most urgent moment in tech since the birth of the internet. Everyone feels it, whether they say it out loud or not. The ground is shifting fast. People are spinning up agents that make money in a weekend. Tiny teams are building things that would’ve needed 50+ people just a few years ago. Incumbents feel fragile in ways they haven’t in decades.

Some of this urgency is market-driven. It’s harder to get hired right now. Just showing up every day is a differentiator. But it runs deeper than that. The new tools are good. You can get more done with fewer people and fewer hours—but that also means the bar is higher. If you’re still working like it’s 2018, you’ll get lapped by someone using 2025 tools at twice the pace.

This isn’t just founders burning the midnight oil. What’s striking is how many teams are now matching that energy—because they can see the prize. As a former founder, I’ve always felt that creating a culture of extreme intensity—the kind you’d find at an Elon company—is almost impossible unless either (a) the founder has near-mythic gravity, or (b) the work is so ambitious and interesting that the whole team feels like they’re in peak Ikigai.

And right now? I think we’re seeing more of the latter.

I’ve felt it myself—vibe coding has made building fun again. It used to feel like a slog just to get something basic out the door. That’s changed. The energy is back. I’m fired up every time I open Cursor, no longer dreading the mental tax of writing out each for loop and unit test from scratch.

For what it’s worth, I’m not in an office six days a week. But I am seeing just how much more intensity is surfacing across the ecosystem—especially among early-stage builders who see this as a narrow window worth sprinting through.

And oddly, it doesn’t feel like the same kind of burnout risk. The hours aren’t filled with drudgery. If you’re using the tools right, you can get a lot done just by being imaginative—which is fun. Every time you have an idea, you can push it forward one well-crafted prompt at a time.

There’s a window open right now. It probably won’t stay open forever. And you can feel who knows it—they’re the ones in the office on Saturday, sprinting to be the first and best at whatever they’re doing.

This isn’t advice. Just an observation of the moment.

But if there’s ever been a time to go hard, it’s probably now.