Nico Laqua said he’d rather shave years off his life than see his startup fail.
He cofounded Corgi, an AI insurance company, in 2024. Corgi became a unicorn in May, raising its Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation — before raising a Series B1 round at a $2.6 billion valuation three weeks later.
To reach such heights, Laqua said he keeps an unusually strict schedule, where he works seven days a week, sleeps in the office, and gets around three hours of shut-eye.
On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released Saturday, host Harry Stebbings asked Laqua: “Would you rather Corgi was a trillion-dollar company, but you died at 50, or it was a fail, and you live till you were 80?”
“The answer to that is pretty easy,” Laqua said. “I’m dying either way.”
Laqua’s outlook is part of a bigger trend in tech: the locked-in, “grindset” style of work. Founders are embracing the ‘996’ schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — and cutting out alcohol and sex.
But Laqua takes it to an extreme. Here’s what he told Stebbings on the podcast:
He isn’t sleeping much
Laqua said he has a mattress on the floor of the Corgi office. His employees call it “Nico’s room.”
“I don’t spend every single night there anymore,” he said. “I used to shower at the Equinox one street over, and they close very early, like 8 p.m. on Fridays. So, that was unpleasant.”
Other startup founders are also embracing the office bed. When Business Insider toured young founders’ apartments in September, several pointed to couches and blow-up mattresses in their offices.
While the fusion of work and life may work for some, it can also cause burnout.
Laqua also said that he isn’t sleeping much. He said that he gets three to four hours of sleep a night. “I would rather measure my lifespan in victories than years,” he said.
The 7-day workweek
Some leaders want a four-day workweek. Laqua aims for seven.
“Whatever you can get done in five days, I promise you you’ll get more done in six and seven,” Laqua said. “You should go all out.”
Laqua said that high-growth startups in San Francisco have full offices on the weekends. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
That doesn’t mean Corgi workers can’t take a rest day. Laqua said that its employees take a day off “every now and then” — but that they don’t have a ritualized weekend of rest.
“If your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every week, then you will not have a place at Corgi,” he said.
Linear cofounder Karri Saarinen wrote on X that Laqua’s thinking represented that of young founders “where the startup becomes their identity.”
“They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you,” Saarinen wrote. “But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.”
Laqua responded: “If you’re obsessed with a problem, you work hard.”
Those doggy tattoos
When Stebbings shared the interview online, he included one extra detail: that “2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.”
The statistic is not discussed in the interview. In September, Laqua told the Wall Street Journal that “two-thirds of our early employees got Corgi tattoos.”
Corgi has 177 employees, per PitchBook. Laqua and Corgi did not respond to requests for comments from Business Insider.
The tattoos stirred up debate online. “Imagine getting a tattoo all for building B2B SaaS,” wrote Coinbase’s Richard Wu. Former Lovable engineer Tiger Abrodi called it a “clown show.”
Others seemed intrigued. OpenClaw chief architect Vincent Koc quoted the line on X, added “Hmmmm,” and tagged the agent’s creator, Peter Steinberger.
On the podcast, Laqua emphasized the importance of strong branding.
“The cosmetic stuff does matter,” he said. “There’s a reason why governments and religions and all of the really important things tend to care about symbols.”
