This startup founder says he works 7 days a week, keeps a mattress in the office, and sleeps 3 hours a night

“Whatever you can get done in five days, I promise you you’ll get more done in six and seven,” corgi-announces-106m-raise-at-2-6b-valuation-double-what-it-was-worth-3-weeks-ago/">Laqua said. “You should go all out.”

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

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” — but that they don’t have a ritualized weekend of rest.

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

Linear cofounder Karri Saarinen wrote on X that Laqua’s thinking represented that of young founders “where the startup becomes their identity.”

“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.”

Laqua responded: “If you’re obsessed with a problem, you work hard.”

Those doggy tattoos

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.”

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.”

Corgi has 177 employees, per PitchBook. Laqua and Corgi did not respond to requests for comments from Business Insider.

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.”

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

On the podcast, Laqua emphasized the importance of strong branding.

“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.”

Would you work at a company with the expectation of a seven-day workweek? Let us know below: