A short talk (YouTube video) in which Jason M. Lemkin reflects on his startup-era tendency to overwork (80–90 hour weeks), recounts sleeping under his desk, and argues that such sustained overwork is unsustainable and counterproductive—leading to burnout, brain fog, more mistakes, and lower-quality output despite more hours spent.
So I think my intent was. So I'd been in startups since the dot com era and I'd been that person that worked 80, 90 hours a week. I remember sleeping under my desk because the BART had shut. It's not sustainable. It leads to a lot of burnout, leads to people just not doing their best work. Is the other thing I learned that I was working more hours and I would come back and look at my work the next day, and I had made so many mistakes, and if I was in this brain fog, I wasn't doing great work. So it's not a productive environment. You think that you're working more, you're really getting less done.
