The demand for six-day, in-office weeks is back in circulation, in San Francisco job listings and London term sheets alike. Adopting the schedule also means adopting its hiring pool, and Gallup puts the millennials who want to be fully on site at 4%. This week's issue takes the mandate back through its own history, the country that outlawed it and the factory owner who cut day six for output, and ends with a 90-minute test you run on your own calendar.

partnerUP removes the bottleneck. You guide the brief, it does the rest. Outreach at a scale no one person could reach, scoring every applicant by fit, then handling contracts, payments, and tracking in one place. Your first two creators are on us.

Start with two free

Jason Lemkin, the tech investor who founded SaaStr, told Fortune last month what he wants his money backing: "small, high-paid teams that work in the office over six days a week." Founders running gentler schedules got the verdict in the same interview: "They're going to fail." He argued that a team spending 15 or 20 of its hours remote can't keep up in an AI market, and that eight-figure outcomes come with this kind of intensity, while people who want flexibility should expect smaller ones. He framed the demand as necessity, adding that "it's not because I don't have empathy."

He has plenty of company. An AI startup called Rilla warned applicants to skip applying "unless they are excited about working ~70 hrs/week in person," on salaries of $200,000 to $300,000, and its head of growth told Wired that nearly all 80 employees work the schedule. Cognition expects 80-hour weeks from new hires, and CEO Scott Wu has said it outright: "We don't believe in work-life balance." Sergey Brin urged Google's Gemini team into the office every weekday in a February 2025 memo that called 60 hours the "sweet spot" of productivity.

The demand crosses the Atlantic too. Harry Stebbings, whose 20VC funds manage $650 million, wrote in a viral June 2025 LinkedIn post aimed at European founders: "If you think that you can build a $10 billion business and work five days a week, then I'm sorry to say, you're deluding yourself." In the same debate he set the bar higher still: "7 days a week is the required velocity to win right now."

People are keeping these schedules; you can see it in corporate card spending. Ramp economist Ara Kharazian found a Saturday surge in restaurant and delivery charges at San Francisco companies in 2025, running noon to midnight, that no prior year shows; New York's bump came in at roughly a quarter the size, and the pattern holds across sectors.

Odds are you read that coverage somewhere past hour 60 of your own week, laptop open on a Saturday. The schedule has a paper trail, and the investors selling it leave that part out.

The mandate crowd has a case. DeepSeek reached the AI frontier with a headcount put at about 160, and Fortune ties the revival of 996, the 9 AM to 9 PM, six-day schedule born in China's tech sector, to that shock. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated the competitive logic in one line: "Remember, we're up against the Chinese. The Chinese work-life balance consists of 996."

The people signing up believe it too: Rilla's recruits, per its head of growth, "grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates." The premise, that speed decides these markets, is one you've lived: you've been paying for pace out of your own calendar since the early days.

The paper trail starts in China. ByteDance, Huawei and the rest of the country's tech giants built empires on the schedule through the 2010s, and in April 2019 Jack Ma told Alibaba employees that "being able to work 996 is a huge blessing." Developers answered with a protest page on GitHub called 996.ICU, shorthand for the joke about where the grind ends: the intensive care unit. The repository spread fast enough to become a news story on its own.

Then the state ended the argument. On August 26, 2021, China's Supreme People's Court and its labor ministry published 10 model overtime cases, decided for the worker every time, and restated the law: 8 hours a day and 40 a week, overtime capped at 36 a month; 996 runs about 72.

One case was a courier who refused the schedule, got fired, and won about $1,240 after arbitrators ruled the policy a serious violation of labor law. Another was a man who had been logging more than 300 hours a month, collapsed on a 12-hour overnight shift in December 2020, and died; judges made two companies pay his family roughly $118,000. The arrangement now appearing in American job listings is the one China's highest court took apart.

The measurement question is older than the argument. During the First World War, the British government set up a committee to find out whether marathon weeks were producing more shells, and its munitions plants logged what each shift put in and what came off the line. Stanford economist John Pencavel worked through those records, covering workers who were mostly women, and published the findings in The Economic Journal in 2015.

Output rose in step with time on the clock up to a threshold. Each addition past 49 hours a week bought less than the last, and a 70-hour total delivered little more than a 56-hour one. The plants tried the seventh day too, and weekly production came out slightly higher at 48 hours across six days than at 70 across seven; the workers gave up their Sundays, and the factories got nothing for them. The committee came down on the side of shorter schedules and a guaranteed day of rest, and Pencavel's verdict, a century on, was that it had been "fully justified."

The study measured piece work, and a founder's day is mostly decisions, so treat the numbers as reference points and nothing firmer. I've watched tired operators for 20 years, and fatigue degrades judgment at least as much as it slows a production line.

The week the intensity crowd is rolling back was itself an output decision. Henry Ford moved his factory workers to a 40-hour, five-day schedule on May 1, 1926, among the first big American employers to try it, and extended it to office staff that August. He made the reasoning plain to World's Work magazine: "It is not necessary to bring in sentiment at all in this whole question of leisure for workers. Sentiment has no place in industry." The change had been in the works since 1922, and his son Edsel, the company's president, offered the softer version: "Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation."

He cut the sixth day because he expected five days to out-produce six. "We can get at least as great production in five days as we can in six, and we shall probably get a greater, for the pressure will bring better methods."

He had made this kind of bet before: in 1914 he had set wages at $5 for an eight-hour day when the industry average was $2.34 for nine. He defended the time off itself, too: "It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either 'lost time' or a class privilege." Manufacturers across the country followed, which is where the five-day standard came from.

A founder's added hours land in the same places: the refund only you can approve and the answer that lives in your head. Each of those is a gap between what the team needs and what's written down, and closing it personally buys a day at most; by Tuesday it's back on your desk.

Hours spent building run the other way. Write the discount rules once and your support lead signs the next refund herself; record the sales walkthrough and proposals stop waiting on you. An onboarding checklist puts the next engineer to work without you in the loop.

Run the six-day argument on your own numbers. Track a week of your time in half-hour blocks and sort it into two piles: building, or standing in for a system that ought to exist. Estimates are fine; totals matter more than minutes.

Then take the interruption that shows up most and retire it: a refund ceiling with a dollar figure and an owner, or a written list of the answers the team keeps coming to you for. Attach the reasoning, because that's what lets someone extend a rule to a new case. And if there's a 996 streak in you, give it one Saturday: build the replacement for the biggest gap in the log, in one push.

Brin was after the workload where output peaks. In the wartime data, returns were thinning a full 11 hours before his sweet spot.

Even inside the investor class the mandate has dissenters. Balderton Capital's Suranga Chandratillake called the six-day discourse a "fetishization of overwork rather than smart work," and Husmus co-founder Sarah Wernér went further: "What Europe really needs isn't more hustle-porn, it's more aggressive funding." The in-office half of the demand has its own math: Gallup puts millennials who want to be fully on site at 4%, with hybrid the favorite across generations. A venture-backed lab can staff itself from the sliver that will take that deal; a growth-stage company hires from the rest of the market.

China tested the schedule at national scale and outlawed it. Ford did the arithmetic on the sixth day and cut it. You have the intensity already; what your company runs low on is places to put it that keep producing after you go home.

That stays true even if you read all this and choose the six days anyway. Spend your hours on systems and you get the week back for the work only a founder can do, building the product and scaling the company. And your direct reports stop queueing behind you for answers, so their long weeks produce more too.

Next Saturday is coming either way. Spend it building one system, and the week after starts with one less reason to need a sixth day.

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get Your Guide

Thanks for reading. See you next Wednesday.
— Jason

P.S. Hit reply and tell me: what did your last working Saturday go to?