Grindscore: A New Workplace Attractiveness Metric

Live from Schenectady, New York, it's SAS Talk with the Metrics Brothers, Growth and CAC.

And I'm Growth, better known as Ray Reich, founder and CEO of Benchmarkit.

And I'm CAC, better known as Dave Kellogg, EIR at Balderton Capital, independent consultant, and the author of Kellogg.

And together we are the Metrics Brothers.

And we go together like coffee and grounds.

Coffee grounds? You can't eat those, Dave. Why are we talking about coffee grounds?

Well, Ray, because to make coffee grounds, you have to first do the grind.

Oh, the grind. But you mean like grinding it hard at work, right?

Yes, I do, Ray. Exactly. I know you've been doing the grind yourself lately.

Yeah. Not to do an advertisement for Benchmarkit, but with all these events I'm doing over the next week and then the big SaaS Metricspalooza, which you're our featured kickoff speaker on October 8th. It's been a real grind.

Okay, well, I hope you're excited to take this Saturday recording of a SaaS Talk episode. So what we're going to talk about today is the grind, but not the coffee grind, but the grind culture, let's just say, and a new metric, a single metric episode, my favorite, called Grind Score, which I learned about from Jared Sleeper at Avenir, the French word for future, by the way, if you wanna know, that's what Avenir means, and that tries to combine business outlook with work-life balance into a single metric.

Sounds like a sleeper metric to me, Dave.

Oh, oh, Ray, you're killing me today with the dad jokes. Yes, I guess technically it is a sleeper metric, but I think we're gonna have a really, really interesting conversation about it and maybe more so what it's trying to do.

Okay, well, before that, let's hear a word from our sponsor.

The Metrics Brothers is proudly sponsored by Benchmarkit, the B2B AI and software industry's largest, broadest, and most contextualized benchmarking index. Dave Kellogg and Ray Groth Wright have put the Metrics Brothers podcast on hiatus for the remainder of 2026. All episodes we have ever recorded are still available on your favorite podcasting app. You can reach Dave @Kellogg and Ray on LinkedIn @RayReich. Thank you so much for listening to the Metrics Brothers podcast.

Okay, Ray, it's not every day that a new metric comes along, but I found one. I think this one was born in either July or August of this year, so it's fresh. And it's called grindScore, one word, lowercase s. It's a new metric that tries to measure workplace attractiveness. by balancing 2 things: positive business outlook and work-life balance. And the idea is that higher scores indicate a stronger belief in the company's future despite a lower work-life balance. I.e., what Jared is trying to do here is kind of capture teams where they're embracing the grind. So, in math, what that means is if this thing's just a fraction, that given a constant business outlook divided by a lower work-life balance is going to give you a higher score. And kind of conversely, increasing business outlook against a constant work-life balance will give you a higher score. So, the data for these ratings comes from Glassdoor, Ray, which we'll talk about the limits of that in a second. But first, let me flip off to you here. Not flip off, hit me a handoff.

Yeah, it's like, You know, I know we sometimes bicker, but the figures never— Exactly. So as soon as I hear work-life balance, I have to be careful because my meter goes up just like, hey, I think there's sacrifices you make in life between working hard and having great outcomes. So I'm interested in learning more about it, but I must admit I have to overcome my own bias.

Well, you know, you, you might like it then, Ray, because, you know, a lower work-life balance gets you a higher grind score. So, uh, and you didn't exactly say that, but this is not measuring cushy by any stretch of the imagination. Now, the data for these ratings is going to come from Glassdoor, which we have to talk about because Glassdoor is often accused of kind of polarization bias, as are many review sites. Gosh, the only people who write reviews are either really happy or really sad, and you kind of miss the big middle. Really happy or really angry, frankly, not sad. Or you miss kind of the fat middle. This is a form of selection bias, and you're only getting employees who are polarized, i.e., either very happy very angry. And there definitely is some truth to that on Glassdoor. There's also just straight-up gaming on Glassdoor. Companies run contests for positive reviews. Sometimes they do organized efforts to get negative reviews on competitors. A lot of stuff happens on Glassdoor that they try to combat. They have this give-to-get policy and a whole blog article on it that says, like, you can't contribute— you can't get data from Glassdoor unless you contribute. So they're trying to incent— if you just want to look around, you have to give a review, let's say, of your current employer. So, um, thoughts, thoughts on that, Ray? Have you played around with Glassdoor data much? What do you think of it knowing this is coming from Glassdoor? What do you think?

Yeah, I was in the hiring automation space for a few years, and we actually acquired the Glassdoor data and platform. And one of the things they did was strongly encourage us to send out emails to all the employees to provide their Glassdoor review. And the talk around the coffee machine was, oh my God, I got to say good things because if someone sees it and it's bad, that could impact my career. So that's another way it biased it. When we actually promoted reviewing Glassdoor, everybody said, I'm going to default to positive versus negative.

Yeah. So I think it's a suspect place to get data. I ran a company once where one of our competitors was very clearly targeting us with negative reviews. Jared himself, the guy at Avenir who built this, in an interview with Pavilion in their Top Line newsletter, said basically, hey, I've been looking at Glassdoor data for a while. He's paraphrasing. And for him, while there is a lot of gamification and polarization, what he found interesting was when you'd find positives buried in a negative review, like, I hate this company, but they have a great product, right?

Right.

Or the opposite, I love this company, but You know, the work-life balance is appalling, right? So, trying to find the offsetting stuff. And one of the things he was trying to do and create this metric was to kind of look for that. We'll talk about how effectively it does it in a minute. But that's where he was coming from.

Yeah.

Well, I'd like to move on to kind of understanding how you calculate things like the work-life balance because I don't want to go any deeper on Glassdoor if that's okay.

Sure. So, let's talk more about the metric then. So, it's positive business outlook divided by work-life balance data coming from Glassdoor. There's also a report from a company called Synaptic, who is a provider of alternate data. I was initially confused, Ray, about who made this metric. Was it in fact Jared at Avenir, or was it Synaptic? And it appears that Jared invented the metric and Synaptic kind of piled on by publishing a blog on it along with an Airtable spreadsheet of, I don't know, 700 companies where they calculated the Grind Score for you. So I would recommend that as a source as well. Also talked about it once already, but Pavilion has a newsletter called Topline, to which I will be contributing. And one of the early editions of Topline has an interview with Jared about this metric. So, if you want more information, that's where you go. In terms of where the data comes from, the positive business outlook data, positive business outlook comes straight from Glassdoor. So, they survey employees and they're just giving you as a percent, the percent of employees who have a positive business outlook over the next 6 months. So, good that they attached a timeframe to that. Right, if you just say you're positive on this business, well, it depends on the time frame, right? So there is a time frame built into it. By the way, Glassdoor has a chief economist, which is kind of cool, um, a bit like Carta and Peter Walker, right, who, who grinds data for Carta and publishes really interesting insights. Uh, thoughts there, Ray?

Yeah, I've been following Daniel Zhao, who's the chief economist at Glassdoor, for a while now. And I— not to have a non sequitur here, but he just made a post on LinkedIn that that shared that the ageism comments in Glassdoor up 133% year over year. Non sequitur, but he does have some good data out there.

Well, we don't allow old people on our podcast, Ray. We're ageist here at SaaS Talk, named after a 1980s radio talk show or whatever.

Okay, okay, but I digress. Let's get back to the positive outlook in the work-life balance.

Yeah, so let's talk about the 2 halves of this metric, right? So in summary, it's, it's business, positive business outlook divided by work-life balance. They're both coming from Glassdoor. Positive business outlook comes as is from Glassdoor. It's something they measure as a percent. Work-life balance, there's a little bit of math. Jared, I couldn't find where he talked about the math he did, but Synaptic does talk about the math they did. And they said it's a rescaled version of a metric that does come straight from Glassdoor, which is work-life balance. On Glassdoor, that's expressed as a scale from 1 to 5. So you might get a 4.2 or a 1.2. Right. And 1.2 is really bad. 4.2 is quite good. And what they're doing is just rescaling that because it's really a 4-point scale, right? 1 to 5 is the same as 0 to 4. So they're going to rescale it, min-max rescaling, and they're going to turn it into a percent. So for example, a 2.1 rating using their rescaling would basically subtract the minimum from 2.1. So 2.1 minus 1 equals 1.1. And then they divide that by the range, which is max minus min. 5 minus 1 equals 4. And 1.1 divided by 4 equals 0.28. So, a 2.1 rating will convert each and every time to a 0.28 percentage.

And I want to highlight here, the lower the work-life balance, the better the grind score is going to be. Is that correct?

Well, let's just say the higher. Better, we're going to have to debate. But you are correct, right? Remember fractions from fractions class? The smaller the denominator, the larger the result. And that is one of the interesting things about this metric.

Okay.

Hey, Dave, and as we were researching for this, did you find exactly what the primary variables are in a work-life balance? Because that was something very interesting to me, and I thought I found a few, but did you find them?

I think they have a work-life balance score, Ray. I mean, look, let me just say Glassdoor doesn't make it easy to get data out. I'm constantly setting off Cloudflare. I feel like the company profile page should just have work-life balance on it in a template place. It doesn't. I think they're afraid of being scraped. So to get it, it's actually more effective to search Google and say Glassdoor Databricks work-life balance, and then you can get the number. Just navigating around, it's very hard. So I think— I don't think it's a composite of anything, Ray. I think they just ask people to score 1 to 5, what's work-life balance?

Ah, got it. Okay. Because for me as an operator, I would like to say, okay, what can I do to maybe increase my work-life balance? But knowing that a lower number is better— I'm sorry, not better. A lower number is kind of— it's going to give you a higher grind score.

Correct.

I'm not going to do that, but let's get into some of the examples if we can.

Yeah. So look, one of the issues with this whole concept is I have trouble reproducing the math. Um, I have a couple of problems with the metric. I like where it's going. I think it's kind of a fun intent. I like that they're using Glassdoor data, as long as you understand the limits of Glassdoor data. Um, I can't reproduce the math. I'm— I sometimes I can, sometimes I can't, which means I can't. Um, but look, The Boring Company, Their positive business outlook is 51%. Their work-life balance is a 2.1 out of 5. That produces, by my math, a grind score of 1.85. The post calls it a 1.43, and Avenir's dataset says a 1.71. So Avenir is not footing with Sleeper, and neither one is footing with me. This makes me uncomfortable. I think part of it might be that some of these ratings change on a daily basis, but not that much. Some of it is if Jared's going to keep driving this metric, I think he should put the formula out and exactly how he calculates it, because this makes me worried, frankly, that I'm calculating it differently than Jared is and differently from Synaptic. Now, although Synaptic tells you how to calc, so I know I'm calculating the way Synaptic is. Let's try another one. Databricks, positive business outlook, 89%. Super high, right? That's why I picked it. Actually, I'd like to meet the 11% of people who work there who don't have a positive business outlook on Databricks. But work-life balance, 3.6. And this company's kind of capturing what Jared was trying to get. A great company, everybody thinks we've got a great future, work-life balance not so great, but I work here anyway, right? That was the kind of living the grind. This produces a 1.38 in Synaptics dataset, a 1.37 on mine. So this one reproduced. And then we're gonna go talk about a bunch of companies in a minute, Ray. But you have more comments here before we do that?

No, I kind of want to talk about all the companies because some things just jumped out at me. It's like, boy, it sounds like this company is a great company that everybody would like to work at, and they scored lower. So I didn't get that.

Yeah, look, one of the— I'm going to cut to the chase here, Ray. I know we're only 12 minutes in, but I think this metric does not project well to one dimension. He should have left out a quadrant. I, I think this could be like a Gartner-level magic quadrant of just the 2 axes to just say What's the PBO, positive business outlook, and what's the WLB, work-life balance? And then put all the dots up. And yeah, you can draw some regressions through them to find trends, but that would be very interesting, right? Because what you want is above a certain threshold of work-life balance, right? You want the best positive outlook, right? That's the way I would look at it. So, and this doesn't do that. By compressing this into a single number, you get companies that actually aren't that similar looking the same. For example, You know, trivial example, but just say you have a very, very poor work-life balance and a perfect positive business outlook. You're going to score the same as somebody who's meh on both, basically. If you're right, if you're extreme on both, you're going to score the same as somebody who's meh on both and everything in between, because that's what a 1.0 is, right? It means conceptually your positive business outlook is roughly in alignment with your work-life balance. So it's kind of a Goldilocks metric in my mind. I'm not sure that higher is better. The guys who defined it think higher is better. To me, it's kind of like you want to be in a zone. And really, if I were looking for a job, I would filter by work-life balance and say I don't want to work at a place, you know, and then go look for the best positive business outlook. They actually do the opposite in the data set. When Synaptic does it, they exclude all companies that don't have a positive business outlook of greater than 50%, but they include all work-life balances, right? Because they're saying you only want to work at a place that has a great outlook And I'm saying you only want to work at a place that has a reasonable work-life balance. You get the idea? But we're both doing the same thing, which is you're trying to cut the dataset and then look for those companies above a certain bar. What do things look like? Okay, ready for some numbers, Ray?

I totally get what you're saying, but at the end of the day, one of the things I have trouble with the metric is if I've got a business outlook of 90 to 100% is positive, And I have a very good work-life balance. To me, that is the perfect, right? That should be the high score, but it's not the high score.

And let's just say you're 90% on both, then you're a 1.0. And that would be a great company, right? That is a great way to get a 1.0. Unfortunately, I can also get a 1.0 with 0.25 divided by 0.25, right? Only 25% are positive in the outlook and it's a 25% work-life balance score. Right? Equivalent probably to a 1-point-something on work-life balance. But that's the problem with the metric. It doesn't want to be a fraction, right? You actually want both dimensions. Anyway, and by the way, Ray, not all metrics we're going to find are going to be perfect. This is a brand new one and it's not perfect. I do think that personally, I'd turn this thing into a quadrant in a heartbeat. That'd be very interesting. But in any case, let's get some grind score numbers. Topping one of these lists was The Boring Company with a 1.5. 4, 3. The lowest they'll go is 100 because they kind of arbitrarily cut the dataset to say if your grind score isn't greater than 1, it's not there. So they've greatly compressed the range because if you just build a little crosstab array, which I did, just saying, hey, if your work-life balance, you know, 1.1 up to 5, and then positive business outlook, 10% up to 100%, the range of values I get is 40. If you have 100% business outlook at a 1.1 out of 5 work-life balance, you get this incredibly high number, right? Because you're dividing by a teeny denominator. And I go all the way down to 0.1 in the inverse case, when only 10% of the people think there's a positive business outlook, but work-life balance is perfect, right? So, so that's what I'm saying. It's a Goldilocks metrics. I don't want to work at the 40 company because I think you'll be dead in 6 months, right? And I don't want to work at the, the 0.1 company because while work-life balance is great, the company's going nowhere. Right. So, so this is the problem with, with this metric.

Yeah.

Well, if you have that 10% PBO and 100% work-life balance, your work-life balance is going to get much better because you're not going to have work to do over time.

There you go. It's going to be perfect. All right. I'm going to throw some more numbers out. The— some top public companies. I think Jared calculated these. JFrog, 1.3. Snowflake, 1.3. Monday, 1.3. You know, Datadog, 1.2. The other thing with this metric is the calculator is it doesn't actually vary that much. Uh, Klaviyo 1.21. Thoughts, Ray? I can see you jumping around.

Yeah, I just look at Datadog at 1.23 and C3 AI at 1.23. If you looked at the financial performance of those 2 companies, including stock value— I know we don't provide investment advice here— yeah, these are not equal companies, Dave.

They're just not by any stretch of the imagination. Should any metric that puts these C3 and Datadog at the same place is kind of, we have to start asking questions. It's a really good point. And by the way, ServiceNow, tremendous company. Well, Vue is tremendous. The issue is I think they're filtering for that though. So the other thing, Ray, people have pointed out on that tweet is that Datadog is grinding so hard they're listed twice, which they are in the tweet. So let's look at some publics now, low scores. So here's some low grind score publics. Autodesk at 0.71. Cadence at 0.85, Dropbox 0.89, Salesforce 0.9, Box 0.91, Workiva 0.96. You know, I think Workiva is a decent company, by the way. Um, Yext, and then Workday, which is definitely a good company, right? Dominant in their space at 0.97.

Yeah, once again, not an investment advice show, but I look at JFrog on top, right?

Yeah.

And then I look at Workday, which is on bottom here. And Workday has a higher enterprise value to revenue multiple.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, so look, this is an interesting metric. And by the way, what does this mean if you're at Workiva, Workday, or Yext and you're getting a 0.97? What does it mean? And it means roughly that you're— I almost think of this as a harmony metric, right? That your, your positive business outlook and your work-life balance are in harmony, i.e., if one's 90%, the other's 90%, and it's a 1. But the problem is being in harmony isn't the goal because I can be in harmony with a 10% rating on both. So, I think we beat this to death at this point. But it's not— it's in my mind kind of a mistake to make it a single number. I think they should make this a quadrant. So, look, if I were trying to use this metric to go find a job, as I mentioned earlier, where do I want to work? I want to work at a company that has both, right? That it's got a reasonable— I can always work harder than the culture demands, right? So, the work-life balance, right? It's very hard to work less hard than the culture demands. So, I want a high work-life balance and maybe I even want to overperform in that dimension. That's up to me. But I definitely want a high positive business outlook. So, and I'm kind of sounding like them because that's what they cut by first. But I don't know. It's what I would do personally. I know what I would do. I would actually do a cutoff on work-life balance to say, no, there are shitty places to work and I don't want to work in a shitty place. And then given my cutoff of maybe 3, let's say, um, what companies then have the highest positive business outlook above that. So I'd use it as a quadrant. I'd basically go on one axis to another, and then I'd draw a zone and say, I want a job in this zone. And that zone's gonna be in the top right quadrant, basically. Yeah.

I think it's really good advice. And I know as we were preparing for today's episode, and I can't believe we're already over 20 minutes, it was all about the grind ethos and the 996 I call it a metric. I would love to do an episode on that if you think it makes sense, Dave.

Yeah, we should. And let's talk about it very quickly here before we, uh, hang up, so to speak. So 996, what does it mean? It means work 9 to 9, 6 days a week. So it's basically a catchy way of describing a 72-hour work week. Um, it's pretty controversial right now, particularly in Europe, because there are some people in Europe saying you gotta go 996 like the Americans, and there's a fair number of people saying no, you don't. Let's just say it's a hot topic because of that. I think AI companies have really embraced this ethos, right? You should at the start of a greenfield market. If there's ever a time to work 72 hours a week, that's it, at the start of a greenfield market.

Yes.

Obviously, there's a health question, there's a productivity question. I'm personally a big believer in diminishing marginal returns once you get above 60 hours or so. I call them crabbiness negative returns because for me, some of that lack of productivity is they start tearing into other people. And that means I got to spend more time apologizing to those people I tore into, right? So, it's just super inefficient. So, I'm not convinced that more work is always better. My personal rule has always been do 50 hours a week for your company and then do more on top of that for special projects and then be done. But don't get in the habit of going 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. It's not sustainable.

Thoughts?

Yeah, these are very personal and experience-based. You know, when I was at Netscape and we were trying to lay the foundation for, you know, democratizing access to information via the internet, I wanted to work that hard because I thought I was changing the world, so to speak. And I think that's what the AI companies are thinking today. So for the companies who want to be the winners, whether you're at OpenAI or Anthropic, I totally get it. But I do think that it's a marathon, but you do need to make sure you win the race before you finish your race.

Yeah. And by the way, what that says is go find— if you're going to give your all anyway, because you think this is the time to do that in your career and given the market opportunity, then go do it at a place with a really high positive business outlook because you want to put all that into something that's going to win.

Yeah. So, hey, the way I'd summarize today, it's an interesting metric. I'm glad we covered it, but it's probably not a metric that I'm going to put on my top 10 wall.

Okay. Well, I'll see you next time.

Okay, thanks, Dave.

The Metrics Brothers: AI, SaaS, and More is a production of The Metrics Brothers Growth and CAC and a member of the Benchmarkit Podcast Network. By accessing this podcast, you acknowledge that The Metrics Brothers make no warranty, guarantee, or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information provided or the humor content of the jokes told. Ray, information, opinions, and recommendations presented are, according to our spouses, probably wrong and provided for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered professional or for that matter, unprofessional advice. We disclaim any and all liability for any direct, indirect, indirect, misdirect, incidental, special, ordinary, consequential, inconsequential, or other damages arising out of any use of, or God help you, reliance upon the information presented here. Ray Grothreich is based in New York City and available on X @rayreich. Dave Kellogg is based in Silicon Valley and available on X @davekellogg. Kellogg. Schedectity, which is French for unspellable, is not our actual production location. Thanks for listening.