{"id":876,"date":"2026-06-02T04:10:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T04:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=876"},"modified":"2026-06-02T04:10:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T04:10:27","slug":"this-startup-founder-says-he-works-7-days-a-week-keeps-a-mattress-in-the-office-and-sleeps-3-hours-a-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=876","title":{"rendered":"This startup founder says he works 7 days a week, keeps a mattress in the office, and sleeps 3 hours a night"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Nico Laqua said he’d rather shave years off his life than see his startup fail.<\/p>\n

He cofounded Corgi, an AI insurance company, in 2024. Corgi became a unicorn in May, raising its Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation \u2014 before raising a Series B1 round at a $2.6 billion valuation three weeks later.<\/p>\n

Read more VC Bill Gurley says Anthropic is \u2018midwifing a deity\u2019 by \u2018building a species that\u2019s superior to humans\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

To reach such heights, Laqua said he keeps an unusually strict schedule, where he works seven days a week, sleeps in the office, and gets around three hours of shut-eye.<\/p>\n

On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released Saturday, host Harry Stebbings asked Laqua: “Would you rather Corgi was a trillion-dollar company, but you died at 50, or it was a fail, and you live till you were 80?”<\/p>\n

“The answer to that is pretty easy,” Laqua said. “I’m dying either way.”<\/p>\n

Laqua’s outlook is part of a bigger trend in tech: the locked-in, “grindset” style of work. Founders are embracing the ‘996’ schedule \u2014\u00a09 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week \u2014\u00a0and cutting out alcohol and sex.<\/p>\n

But Laqua takes it to an extreme. Here’s what he told Stebbings on the podcast:<\/p>\n

He isn’t sleeping much<\/h2>\n

Laqua said he has a mattress on the floor of the Corgi office. His employees call it “Nico’s room.”<\/p>\n

“I don’t spend every single night there anymore,” he said. “I used to shower at the Equinox one street over, and they close very early, like 8 p.m. on Fridays. So, that was unpleasant.”<\/p>\n

Other startup founders are also embracing the office bed. When Business Insider toured young founders’ apartments in September, several pointed to couches and blow-up mattresses in their offices.<\/p>\n

While the fusion of work and life may work for some, it can also cause burnout.<\/p>\n

Laqua alsosaid that he isn’t sleeping much. He said that he gets three to four hours of sleep a night. “I would rather measure my lifespan in victories than years,” he said.<\/p>\n

The 7-day workweek<\/h2>\n

Some leaders want a four-day workweek. Laqua aims for seven.<\/p>\n

“Whatever you can get done in five days, I promise you you’ll get more done in six and seven,” Laqua said. “You should go all out.”<\/p>\n

Laqua said that high-growth startups in San Francisco have full offices on the weekends. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”<\/p>\n

That doesn’t mean Corgi workers can’t take a rest day. Laqua said that its employees take a day off “every now and then” \u2014 but that they don’t have a ritualized weekend of rest.<\/p>\n

Read more Amazon\u2019s AI jackpot: Its $8 billion Anthropic holdings are now worth $74 billion<\/a><\/p>\n

“If your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every week, then you will not have a place at Corgi,” he said.<\/p>\n

Linear cofounder Karri Saarinen wrote on X that Laqua’s thinking represented that ofyoung founders “where the startup becomes their identity.”<\/p>\n

“They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you,” Saarinen wrote. “But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.”<\/p>\n

Laqua responded: “If you’re obsessed with a problem, you work hard.”<\/p>\n

Those doggy tattoos<\/h2>\n

When Stebbings shared the interview online, he included one extra detail: that “2\/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.”<\/p>\n

The statistic is not discussed in the interview. In September, Laqua told the Wall Street Journal that “two-thirds of our early employees got Corgi tattoos.”<\/p>\n

Corgi has 177 employees, per PitchBook.Laqua and Corgi did not respond to requests for comments from Business Insider.<\/p>\n

The tattoos stirred up debate online. “Imagine getting a tattoo all for building B2B SaaS,” wrote Coinbase’s Richard Wu. Former Lovable engineer Tiger Abrodi called it a “clown show.”<\/p>\n

Others seemed intrigued. OpenClaw chief architect Vincent Koc quoted the line on X, added “Hmmmm,” and tagged the agent’s creator, Peter Steinberger.<\/p>\n

On the podcast, Laqua emphasized the importance of strong branding.<\/p>\n

“The cosmetic stuff does matter,” he said. “There’s a reason why governments and religions and all of the really important things tend to care about symbols.”<\/p>\n

Read more Sam Altman says companies embracing AI the most are actually hiring<\/a><\/p>\n

Would you work at a company with the expectation of a seven-day workweek? Let us know below:<\/h2>\n
<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Corgi cofounder Nico Laqua said he often gets 3-4 hours of sleep. “I would rather measure my lifespan in victories than years,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-startups"],"yoast_head":"\nThis startup founder says he works 7 days a week, keeps a mattress in the office, and sleeps 3 hours a night - American home journals<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=876\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"This startup founder says he works 7 days a week, keeps a mattress in the office, and sleeps 3 hours a night - American home journals\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Corgi cofounder Nico Laqua said he often gets 3-4 hours of sleep. 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