죽을 각오로 30년을 단축해 수조 달러의 기업 가치를 얻는다, 실리콘밸리가 또 목숨을 건 사람들을 보상하기 시작했다

Original author: Sleepy

Silicon Valley has been arguing over a question lately: what is a human life worth?

A young man named Nico Laqua, twenty-five years old, grew up in San Diego. His father spent his career as a lawyer at USAA, the military insurer. Nico grew up watching his dad type, fill out forms, and sift through clauses, surrounded by piles of paper.

Then ChatGPT came along. He looked at all that paper and thought, insurance is one of the world's most text-heavy industries. ChatGPT should be perfect for handling it.

So in the summer of 2024, he and Stanford dropout Emily Yuan took this idea into Y Combinator. They started an insurance company, named it Corgi, complete with a corgi logo.

Corgi isn't a middleman. They underwrite policies themselves, issue them themselves, handle claims themselves – they have a full-stack insurance license. To get that license, they spent $35 million acquiring an old insurance company that had been around for decades, buying the shell and the qualifications together.

Corgi officially launched in July 2025. By the end of the year, 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 are solid, undeniable numbers.

But recently, people are noticing Corgi not because of these impressive results.

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. He showers at the nearby Equinox gym. "They close at 8 PM on Fridays," he said. "That's a bit of a problem."

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

He also complained that the cafes in the Financial District close too early. San Francisco's Financial District has almost no "nightlife" after 6 or 7 PM. So he took over an old barbershop space on the ground floor of his office building, spent less than $100,000 turning it into a 24-hour cafe, so he and his employees could have coffee available anytime while working around the clock.

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

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

Even so, at this company, two-thirds of the first 30 employees had the corgi logo tattooed on their bodies.

Near the end of the interview, the host asked a multiple-choice question: Corgi becomes a trillion-dollar company, but you die at fifty. Or the company fails, and you live to be eighty. Which do you choose?

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

I listened to that part several times. Something felt off.

Not because he chose to die thirty years earlier – that's his choice. What puzzled me was how easy he found the question. A question about putting a price on his life, and he answered without hesitation, as if he'd already thought it through, or as if he never saw anything worth thinking about in it.

Someone this decisive about their own life has either truly figured it out, or never thought about it at all. Both states look exactly the same from the outside. But what worries me more is a third possibility: he has thought about it, but the logic itself is flawed, and he is completely unaware of it.

After the episode aired, he received death threats and countless private messages. Linear founder Karri Saarinen wrote on X that this mindset "often represents young founders who make entrepreneurship their entire identity. They struggle 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 naturally work like crazy."

He doesn't think he's crazy.

You're Going to Have Bad Luck

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

Seventeenth-century London. An unremarkable coffeehouse on Tower Street by the Thames. The owner was Edward Lloyd. Ship owners, merchants, and brokers crowded in, drinking coffee and talking about nothing but bad news. This ship might sink, that cargo might be lost. Storms are merciless, treating every brave sailor equally. Maritime trade was hugely profitable but also incredibly risky. When a ship set sail, no one could guarantee its return.

From their discussions, a trade was born. You put up some money, and I'll take on the risk you can't bear. Lloyd's Coffee House eventually became Lloyd's of London, still an icon of the global insurance industry today.

A coffeehouse, over three hundred years. And from the day insurance was invented, it had five words written on its forehead: You're going to have bad luck.

It's not a curse; it's a statement of fact. Houses catch fire. People get sick. Cars crash. Deals fall through. You will have trouble at the worst possible time.

The Industrial Revolution came. Machines ate workers' fingers, leading to workers' compensation insurance. Your product might harm someone, hence liability insurance. Economic cycles turn unforgiving, hence unemployment insurance. Life gets more complex, too complex for anyone to grit their teeth and bear all misfortune alone.

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

This industry, above all others, should be the last to worship someone who doesn't value their own life. Yet Corgi does the opposite. A company selling risk management proves its own reliability by having a founder who risks everything, including their life.

Austerity as a Valuation Art Form

But actually, this isn't complicated. Don't think about it spiritually; think about it in terms of valuation.

AI makes companies increasingly lightweight. Before, you needed fifty people working for five years before daring to seek funding. Now, five people can put together a demo and get a seat at the table. Corgi achieved $40 million in annualized revenue with 177 people – impressive per capita output. Their AI system runs the entire underwriting, issuance, and claims process. The efficiency is clear; investors can see it.

But its valuation growth is still excessive. In early May 2026, it was valued at $1.3 billion. By the end of May, it had doubled to $2.6 billion – doubling in three weeks, with cumulative funding of $269 million. A two-year-old insurance company, already valued higher than many established players operating for decades.

Valuation is something placed on the "future," and this "future" feels weightless. Something weightless needs a heavy anchor to stand firm. So the office mattress comes out, the lights burn all night, employee tattoos are shown off, even Nico's psoriasis and heart palpitations are brought into the narrative.

Austerity was never a management technique, nor even a work attitude. Austerity is a narrative art form, especially in this era 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. Technology truly does things that were previously impossible, which ironically blurs the line between genuine achievement and hype even further. Austerity is the best disguise for a bubble. It grounds lofty, intangible visions in raw human sacrifice, making you feel it's more than just talk on a PowerPoint slide. If someone is willing to risk their life, it can't be fake, right?

"I Do"

The greatest power of a startup isn't paying salaries or offering stock options; it's offering an identity. It makes a twenty-five-year-old feel they aren't just working a job, but participating in something worthy of a lifetime. Nico says he wants to hire people who want to "use their life to do one important thing."

It sounds nice, and even sincere. But flip it around. A system specifically selects people who tie their self-worth to their work, replaces standard labor protections with mission and meaning, and defines those who need sleep, weekends, or time to pick up their kids from school as not being committed enough. Is this system fulfilling young people's dreams, or is it consuming them?

Young people in the AI era are terrified of being left behind. They fear stagnation means regression. They fear waking up one day as relics of a bygone era.

So they say those three words: I do.

But behind these three words stands more than they realize. Visions of wealth, fear of falling behind, the anxiety handed to them by this era. Choices made under these pressures – I question whether they represent true free will.

Framing consumption as choice, anxiety as ambition, and burnout as passion. Ultimately teaching you to utter the phrase that minimizes management costs. Once spoken, management costs drop to zero. You are no longer a worker needing protection, but 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 screen for lack of skill. It screens for people with normal lives: those with children to pick up, elderly parents to care for, health issues they've faced, those who want a proper relationship or to sleep in on weekends.

Those screened out, of course, never know these are the reasons. The feedback they receive is simply that they weren't "All In" enough.

We Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Camus ended "The Myth of Sisyphus" with a line: We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The gods punished Sisyphus by making him push a boulder up a mountain. Just before the top, the rock rolls back down. He walks down, starts over, forever.

Camus says he is happy. Not because the boulder reaches the top, but because he knows it will inevitably roll back, yet he pushes it anyway. No end goal, yet he continues. 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 way. Silicon Valley's Sisyphuses refuse to accept the rock will roll back down. They insist this time, with enough effort, it will stay put at the top. They always say *this time is different*. They always believe *this time* they'll truly reach the summit.

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

Nico has founder shares. Before turning twenty-five, he had already started a company, made the Forbes list, and was part of YC. If he fails, he can simply tell another story. But those twenty-three or twenty-four-year-olds who pack a suitcase, move to San Francisco, and sleep on office floors – if they fail, what can they restart?

Insurance, by its nature, acknowledges that failure is a matter of probability, not personal fault. It acknowledges people break down, have bad luck, and make bad decisions at the worst times. It acknowledges some boulders are destined to roll back down, regardless of how hard you push.

Embedded in this understanding is a form of kindness. Don't ask why someone fell. Just make sure the cushion is there before they hit the ground. It is a severely underrated form of kindness.

Corgi's technology is real. Its efficiency is real. Issuing policies within 24 hours. AI processing the entire claims flow. If it only told this story, 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. Making you believe it's worth $2.6 billion not just because of its product, but because the people here are more willing to sacrifice themselves than anyone else.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy. The prerequisite is that the boulder is his own.