Trade 30 years of life for a trillion-dollar valuation: Silicon Valley is once again rewarding those who sacrifice everything

Original Author: Sleepy

Silicon Valley has recently been debating a question: how much is a life worth?

A young man named Nico Laqua, twenty-five years old, grew up in San Diego. His father worked as a lawyer his entire career at the US military insurer USAA. Nico grew up watching his father type, fill out forms, and sift through clauses in front of a computer, with rooms full of paper.

Then ChatGPT came out. He looked at all that paper and thought: insurance is one of the industries in the world that deals with text the most, so using ChatGPT to handle it should be a perfect fit.

So, in the summer of 2024, along with Stanford dropout Emily Yuan, he took this idea into Y Combinator and started an insurance company named Corgi, with a Corgi dog as its logo.

Corgi is not a middleman. They underwrite policies, issue them, and handle claims themselves, holding a full-stack insurance license. To get this license, they spent $35 million acquiring an old insurance company with decades of history, buying both its shell and qualifications.

Corgi officially launched in July 2025. By the end of the year, its annualized recurring revenue had surpassed $40 million, covering over 40,000 startup clients across 49 states, with a customer churn rate of less than 1%. In an industry with razor-thin margins, these numbers are solid and undeniable.

But lately, people have been looking at Corgi not because of this impressive performance.

At the end of May 2026, Nico appeared on Harry Stebbings' podcast, 20VC. The episode was titled "America's Most Extreme Workplace Culture."

He lives in his office in San Francisco's Financial District, with a mattress directly on the floor, and showers at the nearby Equinox gym. "They close at 8 PM on Fridays," he said. "That's not ideal."

He sleeps three to four hours a night, has developed psoriasis, and some heart palpitations. He recounted these health issues in a very calm tone, as if reading someone else's medical report.

He also complained that the cafes in the Financial District close too early. After 6 or 7 PM, there's virtually no "nightlife" in SF's Financial District. So, he leased an old barber shop space in his office building's retail area, spent less than $100,000 to turn it into a 24-hour cafe, ensuring he and his employees could get coffee anytime during their 24/7 work hours.

Corgi's interviews are deliberately scheduled on weekends. Nico said, "If your days off are Saturday and Sunday, then there's no place for you at Corgi."

He claims that the office of a high-growth startup should be bustling every day. Employees can take an occasional day off, but fixed weekends off don't exist. "If you can get things done in five days, you can definitely do more in six or seven days. You should give it your all."

For such a company, two-thirds of the first 30 employees still have the Corgi dog logo tattooed on their bodies.

Near the end of the interview, the host posed a choice: Corgi becomes a trillion-dollar company, but you die at 50. Or the company fails, and you live to 80. Which do you choose?

"Too easy. I'm going to die anyway." Nico also cited data claiming that 98% of Olympic athletes would trade ten years of their life for a gold medal.

I listened to that part several times and felt something was off.

Not because he chose to die thirty years earlier – that's his choice. What baffled me was that he found the question easy. It's a question pricing a life, and he answered without hesitation, as if he had already thought it through, or as if he never felt there was anything worth considering.

Someone so decisive about their own life either has truly figured it out, or hasn't thought about it at all. From the outside, these two states look identical. But what I'm more worried about is a third possibility: he did think about it, but the logic itself is flawed, and he is completely unaware.

After the episode aired, he received death threats and a flood of DMs. Linear founder Karri Saarinen wrote on X that this mindset "often represents young founders who make entrepreneurship their identity. They find it very hard to do anything outside of work and cannot understand that your job is not who you are."

Nico replied: "If you care deeply about a problem, you will naturally work your ass off."

He doesn't think he's crazy.

You're Going to Have Bad Luck

To understand why this is so contradictory, we need to look at the origins of the insurance business.

In 17th century London, there was an unremarkable coffeehouse on Tower Street by the River Thames, run by a man named Edward Lloyd. Ship owners, merchants, and brokers crowded inside drinking coffee, all discussing bad news. This ship might sink, that cargo might be lost, storms are merciless and treat every brave sailor equally. Maritime trade was highly profitable but also incredibly risky. When a ship set sail, no one could guarantee its return.

From these discussions, a new trade was born. You put in some money, and I'll bear the risk you can't handle. Lloyd's Coffee House eventually became Lloyd's of London, a global icon of the insurance industry to this day.

One coffeehouse, spanning over three hundred years. And since the birth of insurance, the industry has had one core concept: you're going to have bad luck.

This isn't a curse; it's stating a fact. Houses will catch fire, people will get sick, cars will crash, deals will fall through, and you will experience misfortune at the worst possible time.

The Industrial Revolution came, machines took workers' fingers, and thus workers' compensation insurance was born. Your product might harm someone, so liability insurance was created. Economic cycles are fickle, leading to unemployment insurance. Life becomes increasingly complex, so complex that no one can grit their teeth and bear all the misfortune alone.

Insurance never expects people to tough it out. It directly assumes you won't make it and prepares the money in advance.

The very last thing an industry like this should do is idolize someone who doesn't value their life. Yet Corgi does the exact opposite. A company selling risk management tries to prove its reliability through a founder who seems reckless with their own life.

Austerity is a Valuation Art Form

But actually, this isn't complicated. Don't think about it on a spiritual level; think about it in terms of valuation, and it becomes clear.

AI is making companies lighter and leaner. In the past, you needed fifty people working for five years before you could dare to raise funds. Now, five people can build a demo and get a seat at the table. Corgi has 177 people generating $40 million in annualized revenue, with impressive per-capita output. Their AI systems handle the entire process of underwriting, issuing policies, and claims processing. The efficiency is clear, and investors can see it.

But the growth in its valuation has been too rapid. In early May 2026, its valuation was $1.3 billion. By the end of the month, it had doubled to $2.6 billion – doubling in three weeks – with total funding reaching $269 million. A two-year-old insurance company is now valued higher than many established peers that have been around for decades.

Valuation is something built on the "future," and the current "future" seems somewhat ethereal. Something weightless trying to stand tall needs something heavy to anchor it. So, the office mattress is brought out, the lights are kept on all night, employees' tattoos are shown off, and Nico's psoriasis and heart palpitations are brought up in conversation.

Austerity has never been just a management technique or even a work attitude. Austerity is a narrative art, especially in this age of narrative inflation. Co-working spaces claim to be "elevating human consciousness," ride-hailing apps claim to be "reshaping the future of cities," crypto traders claim to be "rebuilding financial freedom."

In the AI era, this inflation has intensified. The technology truly does things that were previously impossible, which ironically blurs the line between genuine achievement and hype even further. Austerity is the perfect disguise for a bubble. It grounds lofty, intangible visions in physical sacrifice, making you feel it's more than just PowerPoint rhetoric. If someone is willing to risk their life, it can't be fake, right?

"I Do"

A startup's most powerful tool isn't paying salaries or offering stock options; it's offering an identity. It makes a 25-year-old feel like they aren't just working a job, but are part of something monumental, worthy of their life's effort. Nico says he wants to hire people who "want to do something important with their lives."

It sounds beautiful and sincere. But flip it around. A system that specifically selects individuals who tie their self-worth to work, replaces normal labor protections with mission and meaning, and then labels people who need sleep, weekends, or time to pick up their kids from school as "not committed enough." Is this system really fulfilling young people's dreams, or is it consuming them?

Young people in the AI era fear being left behind by the world. They fear that if they don't advance, they'll regress. They fear waking up one day to find themselves relics of a bygone era.

And so they say those three words: I do.

But behind those three words lies more than they realize. Imagination of wealth, fear of falling behind, the anxiety this era delivers. I have my doubts about whether the choices made under the weight of these things truly represent free will.

Consumption is framed as choice, anxiety as ambition, burnout as passion. Ultimately, you are taught to utter the most cost-effective sentence for management. Once those words are spoken, managerial costs go to zero. You are no longer a worker needing protection; you are a willing believer burning for the cause. The boss doesn't owe you overtime; you owe yourself a great future.

This set of rules has another function: it screens people. It doesn't filter out those lacking ability; it filters out those with normal lives – people with kids to pick up, elders to care for, bodies that have shown warning signs, or who simply want a good relationship and a lazy weekend sleep-in.

Of course, those filtered out won't know these are the reasons. The feedback they receive is simply that they weren't "All In" enough.

We Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Albert Camus ends his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" with the line: "We must imagine Sisyphus happy."

The gods condemned Sisyphus to push a rock up a mountain. Just before reaching the top, the rock rolls back down. He walks down and starts over, endlessly, forever.

Camus says he is happy. Not because the rock reaches the top, but because he knows the rock will inevitably roll back, yet he pushes it anyway. Without an end, he still acts. The rock is his. The mountain is his. The absurdity is his. Awareness itself is freedom.

Silicon Valley also talks about Sisyphus, but in a completely different sense from Camus. Silicon Valley's Sisyphuses refuse to accept that the rock will roll back to the bottom. They are certain that this time, if they try hard enough, the rock will stay put at the summit. They always say this time is different. They always believe this time they will truly reach the top.

Camus' Sisyphus possesses his fate. Silicon Valley's Sisyphus is possessed by his fate.

Nico has founder shares. Before turning 25, he had already started a company, been on the Forbes list, and gone through YC. If he fails, he can just tell another story. But what about the 23 or 24-year-olds who came to San Francisco with a suitcase and put their mattress on the office floor? If they fail, what can they restart?

Insurance, at its core, is about acknowledging that failure is a matter of probability, not personal fault. It acknowledges that people will break, have bad luck, and make wrong decisions at the wrong time. It acknowledges that some rocks are destined to roll down the mountain, regardless of how hard you pushed.

There is a certain kindness in this understanding. It doesn't ask why you fell; it just makes sure to lay out a cushion before you do. This is a severely underrated form of kindness.

Corgi's technology is real. Its efficiency is real. Issuing a policy within 24 hours. Handling the entire claims process with AI. If it only talked about these things, it would be a very good company.

But it insists on telling another story. A story about not sleeping, not fearing death, about working overtime. It wants you to believe it's worth $2.6 billion not just because of its product, but because its people are more willing to risk their lives than others.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only on the condition that the rock is truly his own.