There’s recently been a lot of discussion around 9-9-6, so I wanted to quickly share my thoughts on this.

As a company we won’t be enforcing 9-9-6 or any other combination of three arbitrary numbers any time soon. That being said, I don’t need to tell any of you that we’re an extremely hard-working company and this will continue well into the future (you will see that I’m posting this memo at 2am on a Wednesday).

First of all, measuring productivity by the number of hours employees are made to work seems like a certain brand of SF25-only hysteria that will at best produce uninspired work and at worst will result in generic slop. I’d be curious to hear any SF AI company CEO list out 5 iconic Chinese software companies from the last decade which is where 9-9-6 has originated.

Second, output is often not a linear function of the number of working hours. An example of where this would be true would be a factory line producing rivets, where the sheer man hours correlate linearly with the number of rivets produced. An example where this would not be true would be a team of mechanical engineers designing a better electric motor. At Brainbase Labs, we will always strive to make sure our day-to-day closer to the latter, as we try to uncover new S-curves that will help enable AI in the global workforce, and as such our bottleneck will often be around communication of ideas and clearing out space for everyone to work effectively as opposed to mindlessly maximizing hours put in.

This also helps explain why some AI companies do get outsized returns from implementing 9-9-6, as they are sadly closer to producing rivets than designing engines.

Finally, not only is the work we do at Brainbase Labs more cerebral than mechanical, we’re in fact a company built on removing mechanical work for other companies, and it’s only natural that we lead by example.

Even though we will most likely never formalize this, if you’re interested in knowing how I view our scheduled ours here’s my mental framework:

Our current ideal working schedule is 5-6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. You should think of the ranges here as “rep ranges” in weight training: on average you should have enough tasks assigned to you weekly to be able to finish your work Mon-Fri from 9:30am to 7-9pm. If you find yourself consistently being able to complete your work before needing to stay until 7pm, you need to take on more work. On the contrary if you find yourself having to work weekends or stay after 9pm multiple nights a week, you should either revise if there are inefficiencies in the way you work or if you have too much on your plate (anyone in the team including me would be more than happy to “spot” you here and give feedback).

On a personal note, I find doing hard work to be of the most fulfilling things in life, and I believe a big portion of the fulfillment comes from the internal drive to put in hard work. This is what I hope for and expect from everyone at Brainbase Labs, regardless of hours and mandates.