- Reid Hoffman, the visionary behind LinkedIn, is not a believer in work-life balance for serious startup entrepreneurs. With the exception of one nightly ritual, he expected employees to constantly be working.
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has a reality check for entrepreneurs: If you’re serious about starting a company, you should say goodbye to binge-watching your favorite Netflix show after dinner or sleeping in on the weekends—you need to be on the work grind all hours of the day.
“If I ever hear a founder talking about, ‘This is how I have a balanced life,’ they’re not committed to winning,” Hoffman told Stanford University’s How to Start a Startup class in 2014. “The only really great founders are [the ones who are] like, ‘I am going to put literally everything into doing this.’”
While Hoffman’s tough love when it comes to work-life balance is nothing new, the clip resurfaced on social media and racked up thousands of likes.
And even after the pandemic, when Americans realized the constant work grind was hurting their mental health, his opinions haven’t changed.
“You’re by nature dead as a startup,” he said late last year on the Diary of a CEO podcast. “Work-life balance is not the startup game.”
Startups can’t afford to take time off from working—except for this one daily ritual, Hoffman says
Even though one-third of employees in LinkedIn’s early days had children, taking time off was not an option—with the exception of dinner at home.
“When we started LinkedIn, we started with people who had families. So we said, sure, go home have dinner with your family. Then, after dinner with your family, open up your laptop and get back in the shared work experience and keep working.”
While that may sound brutal in today’s culture, it was even worse when Hoffman was helping to found PayPal; there, dinner was served at the office.
“The people that think that’s toxic don’t understand the startup game, and they’re just wrong,” he said. “The game is intense. And by the way, if you don’t do that, eventually, you’re out of a job.”
For those who disagree, working at a startup is a choice, Hoffman insisted.
But the reward on the other side is second to none; the 100 or so first employees at LinkedIn don’t need to work anymore, he added. Microsoft purchased the professional networking platform for $26.2 billion in 2016.
Fortune has contacted Hoffman for comment.
As a leader, the ‘pain’ must be embraced if you want to find success
Hoffman’s words resonate with leaders across all parts of the tech industry who sometimes have to substitute work-life balance to overcome challenges.
Take VSCO, for example. Founded in 2011, the social media company rode a wave of popularity after the “VSCO girl” trend and was later valued at $550 million. However, when Eric Wittman took over as its CEO in 2023, the photo app was trying to shake off its image as being just a fad.
Under Wittman’s leadership, the company finally turned a profit in 2024. And he told Fortune accepting there will be stress and long nights in that process is key.
“There’s a lot of pain along that journey,” he said. “You gotta embrace it.”
And he says that the need to grind extra hours extends to staff—because success doesn’t come from just the top.
“All the people I’ve invested in, they get what it takes to be modest overachievers—embrace the grit, work together with a bunch of other really great like-minded people and are just willing to grind their way through to find those wins and to grow that into something that you know is increasingly successful,” he added.
“When you distill it all down those are generally the attributes that I’ve seen where you’re creating a successful company or a successful product.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on April 2, 2025.
More on work-life balance:
- Barack Obama says work-life balance isn’t real for successful people
- Palantir CEO says Gen Z can either have a social life at age 20 or be successful—but they can’t do both
- Nvidia’s Jensen Huang works from ‘the moment he wakes up,’ 7 days a week—he can’t even sit through a movie without thinking about his $4.2 trillion tech giant
