[vidarh]

I can understand people considering it fucked up, but I've also done this on a smaller scale (my first startup - we were 5 people initially and 3 of us lived in the office, and the other two spent most of their waking time there too) and it can be awesome for a while if you're young, without dependents and enjoy what you're doing.

In fact, I'd recommend the experience for a year or two. It was a bit like an extension of university dorm life. And it was a lot of fun that first year.

Living in the office (we had our separate rooms, our breakfast table was in the reception area; our living room was also the meeting room...) and being used to bizarre sleeping patterns provided a lot of unintentional entertainment.

Like the time I happened to be up at 3am on a Sunday morning, and the support phone rang (we ran an ISP), and I decided I might as well pick it up, only to hear a lot of noise on the other end before a bewildered voice told me he'd called in pure frustration and didn't actually expect anyone would answer, and had gotten so surprised he actually dropped the phone.

And this is a bit sad, but one of my best memories from that year (1995) was staying up late at night to max out our little ISPs 512kbps line downloading Netscape 2.0 right after it had been put on the FTP site.. Font color, animated gifs and livescript/javascript!

[goldfeld]

So I suppose you were a founder of the startup, or at least an early employee with the expected benefits. It sure is great! Like this dear CEO of Meta, he wakes up with a big smile on his face thinking of his equity and all these employees who probably have little enough or none and put in just as much time as he does, and are presumably as immersed in it as he is.

Frankly, I felt filthy hearing him talk about productivity and evening brainstorming sessions and people talking in the kitchen, you know, furtively at 3am, about his great company and product. Does it occur to him that his employees are humans and might be interested in talking about other things? Every mention he makes of spontaneous social interaction involves "brainstorming and great ideas." The dream of every founder, that he could scale his (warranted) passion down to all those who have not nearly as much stake in it but should love it all the same! Yuck.

If you want communal living, there are cooperatives and similar arrangements with equal stakes. If you want to play capitalism, don't play fucking coy.