996 Is Back. Here’s What It Costs a Founder Dad.

AI startups are bringing back “996”: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, 72 hours. Quartz reports the schedule is spreading as startups race each other to ship, and it cites a 2023 survey of more than 400 founders in which 72% said overwork hurt their mental health. The usual defense is that founders have to do it even if employees shouldn’t. One venture partner, quoted by MIT Sloan Management Review India, says the real mistake is imposing it on staff, because it can pull people away from their families. The article says that logic doesn’t extend to founders.

Maybe. I can’t tell you what your company needs. I can tell you what the founder part of me did to the dad part, because Adam and I put it in the preface of our book.

I grew up in a split home, and I learned early that work was the one thing I could control. I wrote:

Then my son was born. I loved him the moment he arrived. What surprised me, I wrote, was how quickly I disappeared back into my old routine. “Within weeks, I was back at work full time and then some.” And this:

The hours aren’t the point of that passage. The screen is. I was doing this for my family, and I was missing it, and both of those were true at once. There are no warning labels for dads who cope by providing. “I’m doing this for my family” quietly turns into “I’m never actually with them,” and nothing in a startup tells you when it happens.

What it cost the dads we interviewed

When Adam and I sat down with more than a hundred dads for the book, the same story kept showing up in different clothes.

Noel T. built a fintech from nothing, won global innovation competitions and sold it. After the acquisition, he told us, “I still worked as if my life depended on it.” His thirteen-year-old daughter came to visit that first year. “She was waiting for me. She wanted that time. I should’ve taken her to the boardwalk, played games, had hot dogs, those father-daughter moments. But I was on these freaking calls, building stuff, managing teams.” Then the company let him go.

Noel now describes an entrepreneur’s life as a vat of acid. You’re surviving, solving problems, and the only relief is a sacred chamber that has oxygen and your family in it. His version is concrete: blocked time for training, blocked time for putting the babies to bed, and Thursday night date night with his wife. “It’s sacred. Nothing touches it.”

Ralph Cochrane was a corporate banker until his department was eliminated six weeks after his twin girls were born. He started a consulting practice and it took off fast. Clients wanted him everywhere, and he spent nearly twenty weeks in a row on the road. His wife finally told him she couldn’t handle it anymore. Ralph realized he had become a visitor in his own home. He rebuilt his week around one rule, no work on Fridays, and he started sending a colleague when a client wanted someone onsite. He took a line from Stephen Covey as his compass: “The key is not to prioritize your schedule but to schedule your priorities.”

Adam Seifer spent years trying to fit family into small promises, a half hour here, a dinner there, and he told us those promises “didn’t really stand a chance in the daily fires and noise.” What worked was a bigger decision. He decided to become “the kind of guy that doesn’t think twice about prioritizing my family.”

The case for a sprint

I don’t think the answer is never to work hard. Adam Rossi and his wife started their company broke, with a baby. “We brought our baby to work because we couldn’t afford childcare. Then it was toddlers. Then two kids running around the office while we tried to hold meetings. It was chaos, but it worked.” He told us you can build a business and raise a family at the same time. “People think they have to choose, but you don’t.”

But Adam and his wife also knew where the line was. When they sold their company at thirty-nine, they could have held on for five more years and maybe had a billion-dollar exit. “The business needed sixty hours a week to run, and our kids were still young. We looked at each other and said, ‘This is enough.’” The bankers thought they were crazy. They wanted to coach basketball, be the scout leader and be at every school event.

That’s the question I’d take from these dads. A sprint you chose, with a family that knows why, is one thing. A culture that makes 72 hours the price of belonging is another, and you’re the one who decides which you’re in.

If you want a place to start, borrow Noel’s. Pick one block of time that nothing touches, a dinner, the hour before bed, a Thursday night, and put it on the calendar before the week fills up. Then see what happens to the rest.

We collected these stories, and the practices that came out of them, in REBL Dad. If you’re a founder who wants to talk about it with other dads, you can request an invitation to our next gathering.

Best Regards,

Derek Notman and Adam Holt