Abstract
When every day on the job is do-or-die, employees are left gasping for air. If they catch a breath, they are revived with the potent oxygen that fuels start-ups: hype. Go inside Silicon Valley's Brainshare, where the young men who pile in are not far-out believers but children of the upper middle classes with outsized expectations for work.
the first lesson you learn as an employee at BrainShare is that you’ve got to be all in
"You are going to live by your Slack and your email," Aaron, my 26-year-old manager, explains during training and onboarding. He instructs me to enable notifications on my personal phone and mentions that I could block out times to stop getting pinged—"like, when you sleep," he offers—but adds that responsiveness is imperative in "start-up life."
The commitment required of start-up life becomes clear a few weeks into my job at BrainShare, when I try to turn down a new assignment from Aaron, citing that I’m feeling "pretty full" logging back-to-back 70-hour weeks. "Yeah, pretty full is alright," he says. "But we want you to be more like… slightly underwater?" I must have flinched. "Not drowning," he assures, "but enough so you have to think about how to do things efficiently."
Waterboarding is an apt metaphor for work at BrainShare, where every day is do-or-die and employees are left gasping for air. When they do catch a breath, workers are revived with the potent oxygen that fuels start-ups: hype.
Start-ups get young people to work such extreme hours by drumming up a dream. At BrainShare, that dream is to build an online "knowledge sharing" marketplace (the "Uber for Knowledge") where everyday people can buy and sell their expertise to strangers in 30-minute chunks. James, the baby-faced CEO, runs team meetings like a frat house religious revival: transcendent goals are announced ("democratizing knowledge the world over"), muscles are flexed, and employees publicly commit to throwing out the "old playbook" and delivering "next gen" technologies. A moment of rapture—the day the firm takes off in a viral fit of growth and goes "to the moon"—is always imminent.
Over the last two decades, Silicon Valley has moved to center stage of the American economy and tech start-ups have become a primary destination for recent graduates from the nation’s most prestigious universities. They have also become notorious burnout factories, pushing employees to the brink of collapse by demanding round-the-clock availability and intensive social and emotional investments in the workplace.
What is attractive about this work? Why are so many upper middle-class young men not only submitting themselves to managerial waterboarding, but declaring their love for "the grind"? What place do women occupy in this hypermasculine hype culture? And what can tech start-ups teach us about the meaning of professional work today and in the future?
I sought answers to these questions by joining industry ranks. Following workplace ethnographers like Michael Burawoy and Ashley Mears, I took an entry-level job at BrainShare to gain an insider’s perspective on what often looks to outsiders like delusional self-exploitation. As a full-time employee, I was accepted as one the boys (if, at 30, a slightly older one) and found myself quickly immersed in the mix of excitement and exhaustion that defines start-up life.
From this position, I came to see start-up hype as a solution to a set of dilemmas faced by upper middle-class young men entering the working world for the first time. Hype culture plays to this group’s particular anxieties and ambitions to offer an irresistible vision of "having it all" at work.
the boys of brainshare
To understand what drives start-up workers, we need to understand how this cohort of workers learned to labor. We need to understand Eric.
Eric learned from a very young age that the winner’s circle in today’s labor market is small and that access to it is highly competitive. A second-generation Chinese American, Eric was raised in a middle-class household in an outer borough of New York City. At age seven, Eric’s parents enrolled him in weekend tutoring and test prep with the hope that he would test into one of the city’s elite magnet schools. Eric studied hard and did just that, landing at a Manhattan academy that boasts of admitting only the top 0.25% of applicants and sending a quarter of its graduates to the Ivy League. His success continued at Princeton, and he followed his classmates into investment banking upon graduation.
Eric had gleaned something about careers in these elite institutions. He learned that being truly successful means not only earning a big paycheck but also feeling passionate about one’s work. In this regard, Eric worried that he might be doing something wrong. The bank paid well but didn’t offer much to be enthusiastic about. Its "aging demographic" looked to him like lifeless drones: "They came in, punched their proverbial clock cards, and then left right when the train was coming for them to commute to the suburbs," Eric recalls. "It was just hard to get excited about that being the career path." Where every day is do-or-die, employees are left gasping for air. When they catch a breath, they are revived with the potent oxygen that fuels start-ups: hype.
The buzz of the start-up scene only exacerbated this feeling that he was somehow failing to live his best life. In start-ups, he saw excitement. He saw "young folks interested in new ideas and really running with those new ideas." He saw people like him "throwing themselves at opportunities, throwing risk by the wayside."
BrainShare’s CEO liked to hype the start-up’s workers on the idea that they were disrupting a set of corporate dinosaurs to "democratize knowledge" on the internet and "empower the masses."
iStockPhoto // shironosov
Eric could also see, from his perch in finance, that money was tilting tech’s way. The business press was constantly crowning new boy-kings who rejected the bureaucratic grind, followed their guts, and won anyway. When Eric got connected with the founder of BrainShare, he decided it was time to make a leap. He knew the chance of catching a seat on a "rocket ship" start-up was slim, but he was only 25. Why not?
The young men like Eric who fill the ranks of tech start-ups are looking for something. They have been raised with competing sets of values vis-a-vis work. On the one hand, they’ve been cast in the achievement arms race that defines upper middle-class adolescence today. On the other, they’ve learned that really making it means not just securing a high salary but also loving labor: feeling proud, excited, and deeply connected to one’s job. As inequality scholar Erin Cech has shown, the exaltation of "doing what you love" has become an imperative for young professionals—and an ideal only accessible to elites.
Eric saw start-ups as a way to reconcile these competing goals. Start-ups position themselves as incubators of youthful passions that might also become vectors for rapid personal growth and wealth accumulation. Never was the promise of start-up life more alive for Eric than during his first week on the job at BrainShare, when he attended an all-company weekend retreat that he would describe, simply, as "euphoric."
hype
James stands at the front of the room, arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. "We are all committed to 10X-ing," he declares, naming BrainShare’s growth goal. "99.9% of companies don’t 10X in a year, but we have enough data now to see what the path to 10X looks like!"
Two dozen 20-somethings look on from kitchen counters, shared benches, and bean bag chairs. About half of the crowd is wearing the blue BrainShare-branded hoodies we received last night on arrival.
James paces in front of a PowerPoint slide titled "The Meaning of 10X." He stares thoughtfully downward, rubbing his chin, doing his best Steve Jobs. The congregation leans in. "By end of day," he says, pausing and turning toward his audience, "I want everyone to be confident that we will 10X this year!"
The declarative is met with serious, knowing nods from the young men, like soldiers being read their mission. This is what we came for. All BrainShare employees have been flown down to this dorm-style Airbnb in Mexico City for the quarterly retreat, a weekend of team building, vision-crafting, and partying.
In this marquee presentation, James takes the group beyond quantitative growth goals. He opens up an extended metaphor comparing the year ahead to scaling a mountain, sharing photos of himself and his friends summiting a Rocky Mountain peak. Our pinnacle—our mission at BrainShare—James reminds us, is righteous: we are disrupting a set of old corporate dinosaurs to "democratize knowledge" on the internet and "empower the masses."
After outlining some extremely ambitious benchmarks for the year ahead (tripling our headcount, international expansion) James switches up the metaphors. When BrainShare takes off, he jokes, we’re going to need to swap out our boyish shorts and t-shirts for suits and ties. "What are we even going to be wearing at the end of the year?" James asks, tugging at his shirt as everyone giggles. "‘Cuz it’s not what we’re wearing now!"
Super-pumped rituals help build employee investment in the work and in the set of social and emotional relationships that will define start-up life. The hype, however, doesn’t hit the same for women.
iStockPhoto // alexkich
The early afternoon sends the team out into small groups that cluster on the Airbnb’s terraces, lounging and brainstorming how to rapidly scale BrainShare’s product offerings, "dominate the sector," and "build the dynasty." These sessions bubble over with ideas as young men build on each other’s pitches with "yes, and" extensions—yes, we should "game-ify" the app experience and send personalized rewards to top users. After report-backs to the whole group, James wraps up the day’s work. "It’s going to be a massive year," he says, now holding a beer. "There is momentum building."
The rest of the weekend is an extended party, revolving around a booze-y boat trip and a taco-tasting tour. BrainShare employees set out in gaggles to explore the city, hitting salsa clubs and hipster watering holes. At dinner, the head of product orders Mezcal shots for the table, which we tip back before discussing what we will do with our earnings if BrainShare does, indeed, go to the moon.
For new hires like Eric, the retreat is a warm introduction to start-up hype. It cultivates collective, imaginative excitement about the future. "I was like, ’I see the vision, I think it’s brilliant. I’m in!" he says, reflecting on the weekend excursion. "It was the excitement. The actual, genuine excitement of breathing new life into doing a stodgy thing, just in the 21st century."
The weekend also opened up an attractive social world to Eric, a world where he would be a valued member of an intimate community. "It was just a really cool opportunity to meet people and bond," he says, comparing the small numbers at BrainShare to the ocean of analysts at his bank. "You knew these were the people you’d have to get along with and foreseeably work with for a long time. And I just genuinely liked the people!"
Super-pumped rituals like these build investment in work and in the set of social and emotional relationships that come to define start-up life. Between caffeinated brainstorms and late-night tequila, the start-up moonshot starts to look like not only an attractive project but an achievable one. If he commits himself fully to the job, Eric learns in such events, he can find community, reinvent the economy, and become a man—and maybe get 10X richer along the way.
The hype doesn’t hit the same for the three women on the trip. Anisha, who has been handed planning duties despite her Finance title, spends most of the weekend ensuring the group is fed and transported between destinations. Samantha, the only Black woman in the company, looks lost and withdrawn throughout the weekend. As the young men excitedly debate the merits of intermittent fasting and discuss the latest episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, she sinks in her chair. The idea of changing into a suit, while titillating for the men, doesn’t mean much to Samantha. The next week, in a private debrief, she rants about the trip. "They only want to talk about what White people want to talk about!" she exclaims, recalling that the event was advertised as building a "one-team vibe." "It’s fun, but after a while," she sighs, trailing off. "These just aren’t my people."
"Older" workers were similarly less hyped by the hype. A few weeks before the retreat, BrainShare had hired a person employees joked was the startup’s first "adult," a 38-year-old woman with extensive experience "scaling" start-ups. The "adult" in question, Steph, decided not to come on the trip, telling the team she wasn’t feeling well. Whether or not this was true, Steph likely would have found herself in an impossible social situation—married and a decade older than the score of men she would have been bunked up with. As it happened, Steph would only last a few months at BrainShare; when she left, James would once again be the elder.
Between caffeinated brainstorms and late-night tequila, the start-up moonshot starts to look like not only an attractive project but an achievable one.
Hype works in large part because it resonates at a particular set of cultural and demographic coordinates. Its excitements depend on exclusions—of women, pushed into devalued "mother" roles, and of older workers, whose obligations outside of work (e.g., to children and spouses) are considered a drag on the firm’s acceleration. These exclusions go mostly unnoticed by workers on the inside of the hype. For the young men at BrainShare, hype feels like a natural extension of the social worlds they have long moved through, from competitive sports teams to college fraternities. And celebrations of this sort feel, in Eric’s words, "euphoric."
grind
Of course, not every day is an offsite trip, and the daily grind at BrainShare is mostly mundane and monotonous. The majority of my team’s tasks consist of pushing out mass spam messages on LinkedIn, inviting people to start making money by selling their knowledge on our app. While James insists that we are building the Library of Alexandria for the 21st century, we often feel more like ancient stone-draggers than imperial architects.
BrainShare leaders manage the gap between the company’s grand vision and its employees’ daily grind with a temporal tactic: we are almost to the promised land, they say. When faced with resistance from an exhausted workforce, managers project slides showing the totemic "hockey stick curve," the mythol-ogized growth trajectory for tech start-ups, in which a radical inflection point suddenly sends the firm scaling to the moon. That inflection point is always just around the corner. "We are going to look back on this moment," James encourages during a particularly grueling month, "as the moment when we switched from ‘start-up’ to ‘this-is-the-real-deal.’"
The invocations of a coming breakthrough are surprisingly effective as a managerial tactic, especially when the graphs are pointing up. During multiple periods, my team pushed itself to a physical breaking point on the promise that the next few weeks might determine the fate of the company—and potentially our careers—by winning us a new fundraising round or pulling off a product pivot. It imbues labor with anticipatory excitement and urgency, like the final frantic tinkering before our rocket ship blasts off.
The young people who pile into start-ups are not far-out believers. They are children of the upper middle classes who have developed an extremely ambitious set of expectations for work.
But anticipatory excitement is a fragile resource. The rocket launch can only be delayed so many times before the team starts to wonder if it will happen at all. Start-ups like BrainShare sustain the unsustainable by systematically churning out employees who become exhausted or disillusioned with the mission.
Some quit. Ben, a 24-year-old Yale grad, had been working regular 12- to 14-hour days and still found himself constantly on the receiving end of managerial frustrations. He once received a scolding when he didn’t pick up a phone call while he was on the toilet: "This isn’t Yale anymore," the founder told him in a disciplinary dressing down. "This is real life. People get hurt." Ben eventually showed himself the door and ultimately left the start-up sector entirely.
By drumming up a dream, start-ups get young people to work extreme hours and compete to exhibit total commitment.
iStockPhoto // gorodenkoff
Other workers are dismissed for performance. Eric had logged several months of, by his count, 80-hour weeks and was taking serious hits to his mental and physical health in the name of the firm. But he was ultimately fired by the founder when management determined he was unable to deliver on the "insane" (Eric’s words) growth goals he was tasked with.
Still others are targeted for termination when they try to curtail their commitments to the firm. Anisha, who planned the retreat trip and was known to be always available, started to enforce boundaries between work and non-work time after a year on the job. "It just becomes not worth it," she says, naming the multiple do-or-die moments she gritted her way through. "When there’s a period of growth, it’s super exciting and you’re like, ‘Okay, my efforts are paying off.’ But when that stops, you pause for a second and you’re like, ‘Why am I here?’" When she made it clear that she would no longer be answering emails on Saturdays, tension with the leadership team, who questioned whether she was still "all in," increased. Anisha was fired soon thereafter.
The regular culling of exhausted and insufficiently committed workers is a crucial part of start-up life. By systematically flushing out doubt, disappointment, and disillusionment, start-up leaders maintain a "good vibes only" rule within the firm, protecting the optimism and excitement that propels employees to extreme work.
fears of failure, fantasies of fulfillment
The young people who pile into start-ups like BrainShare are not far-out believers. They are children of the upper middle classes who have developed an extremely ambitious set of expectations for work. They’ve learned that a successful job should bring them both substantial money (enough to land on the winning side of a hollowed-out labor market) and transcendent meaning (a purpose and prestige around which to fashion one’s identity).
Start-ups target this dilemma. They manipulate this cohort’s fears of failure and fantasies of fulfillment at work, channeling them into a complete devotion to the firm. Leaders hype up the possible rewards for commitment—getting rich, finding belonging, earning a suit—and young men, especially, come to feel that being all-in at a start-up is a way to be all-in on life. It means choosing not to slouch through a lifeless old bureaucracy but to throw oneself fully into a challenge—to do something bold, exciting, and possibly world-changing.
Invoking coming breakthroughs is a surprisingly effective managerial tactic at start-ups, where teams can push themselves to the breaking point on the promise that the next few weeks might determine the fate of the company (and their careers).
iStockPhoto // .shock
In many ways, hype is the latest iteration of what sociologist Reinhard Bendix identified as the core of capitalist ideology: the persistent belief that hard work will be rewarded and that success will follow naturally from sacrifice. Start-ups renew this story for a new cohort of workers and a new era of capitalism, tailoring its details to young men stepping into a volatile, winner-take-all labor market.
But the predictable cycles of burnout and churn in startups belie this promise. These firms are structured to bring eager workers in on a high, burn them at both ends, and spit them out when they’re charred—replacing them, most often, with younger new hires. From this perspective, start-up life and start-up hype can look like a dupe.
And yet, the promise of "having it all" at work is evergreen. After a several-month downturn, including layoffs that erased a third of the company, James is getting back into an evangelical register. Success with a large new client, he says, is evidence that BrainShare has "unlocked" a massive new market. The next few months, James is now assuring the group, "could absolutely change our lives."
recommended resources
Carolyn Chen. 2022. Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. A provocative analysis of the centrality of work culture in a secularizing society.
Sarah Rose Etter. 2024. Ripe: A Novel. New York: Scribner. A sharp novel about a young woman confronting the contradictions of start-up life.
Benjamin Shestakofsky. 2024. Behind the Start-up: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press. A sociological analysis of the financial engine behind hype culture.
Malcolm Harris. 2017. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. New York: Little, Brown and Company. A brilliant (and fun) read about the political-economic situation that Millennials find themselves in.
Emily Chang. 2019. BroTopia: Breaking Up the Boys Club of Silicon Valley. New York: Portfolio. A searing critique of sexism in the tech industry.