Fatigue and Overwork Have Become a Measure of Success

The term grindslop is gaining popularity in the technology industry. It refers to the public display of extreme busyness, when founders talk about sleeping at the office, working without weekends and constantly going without sleep as proof of their devotion to the business. The term was popularized by investor and entrepreneur Will Manidis, who published the essay On Grindslop on May 20, 2026, exploring the cult of «suffering» among technology founders. Manidis himself draws a parallel with medieval hagiography — stories about saints in which suffering and renunciation of ordinary life became proof of exceptional virtue.

Manidis’s central argument is that there is a fundamental difference between a difficult company and a grindslop company. In the first case, long hours are merely the price of creating a complex product. Work is the means, while the result is technology, sales or a new product. In the case of grindslop, the very display of hard work becomes the result: photos from the office at night, stories about a seven-day workweek and accounts of completely giving up one’s personal life become part of the founder’s public image.

This idea is what made the term go viral. In July 2026, Business Insider wrote about the word’s rapid spread in the technology community: according to Sprout Social, the number of mentions of grindslop on X rose from 21 in January to 453 in July. For a relatively new and niche term, this is a notable trend, showing that the expression met a need to describe an already existing phenomenon.

One of the most discussed examples was Han Wang, co-founder of Mintlify. In a post he published, he described speaking to employees and showing a slide with the phrase «Remember to not smile». Wang explained the idea through a marathon metaphor: if a person feels comfortable during the final miles, perhaps they are not pushing themselves hard enough. The founder also wrote that he had repeatedly stayed at the office until four in the morning to release a feature by the following day, linking such efforts to defeating competitors and attracting customers.

The post sparked a mixed reaction and became the focus of the discussion around grindslop. Critics saw it as romanticizing a culture in which overwork itself becomes a sign of professional virtue. However, it is important not to oversimplify the situation: Wang does not claim that sleepless nights are the goal of a business. In his version, they are a tool for achieving a result. His story is therefore better viewed as an example of the very boundary Manidis writes about: where genuine intense work ends and the public display of that intensity begins.

This is where grindslop’s economic appeal lies. On social media, it is much easier for a person to show the effort involved than to prove its effectiveness. A photo of a laptop at four in the morning is immediately clear to an audience. Actual revenue growth, the number of customers retained or the quality of a product’s architecture require figures, context and time to verify. As a result, suffering becomes a convenient visual signal: «I am so devoted to the company that I am willing to give up a normal life.»

The problem begins when this signal is treated as independent proof of effectiveness. A hundred hours of work do not equal a hundred hours of productivity. Sleep deprivation impairs attention and decision-making, while constant overwork can lead to burnout. This is especially dangerous for a startup: if an extreme schedule becomes a mandatory part of the corporate culture, the company risks losing employees who are not prepared to turn work into a way of life.

Manidis specifically questions the logic of competing over who is more «hardcore». His essay includes a critique of the 996 schedule — working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. In his view, this approach may be suitable for scaling an established process, but it is poorly suited to creating fundamentally new things, where the quality of decisions, creative thinking and the ability to maintain a clear mind matter.

At the same time, the cult of overwork did not emerge with grindslop. For decades, the technology industry has romanticized the image of a founder who is «burning» for their project. What is new is that the display of this passion has itself become a separate media product. The founder talks about a sleepless night, the audience discusses their sacrifice, investors receive an additional signal about the entrepreneur’s motivation, and the story continues to spread on social media.

Grindslop should therefore be understood not as a criticism of all hard work, but as a warning about replacing the criteria of success. Working hard for a specific result is one thing. Working hard because the amount of suffering itself is supposed to prove your value to others is something else entirely.

Ultimately, investors, employees and customers should care not about how many hours the founder spent in front of a laptop, but about what happened during those hours. If a night in the office produced a product that solves a real problem, that is work. If the main result was a photo captioned «fourth day without sleep», that is precisely the grindslop Manidis is calling on people to discuss.