Original author: Sleepy

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

A young man named Nico Laqua, 25 years old, grew up in San Diego. His father spent his entire career as a lawyer at USAA, the military insurance company. Nico grew up watching his father type at the computer, fill out forms, and sift through policy clauses, rooms stacked high with paperwork.

Then ChatGPT came along. Staring at all that paper, he thought: insurance is one of the most text-heavy industries in the world, so using ChatGPT to handle it should be a perfect fit.

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

Corgi isn't a broker; they underwrite, issue policies, and handle claims themselves, holding a full-stack insurance license. To obtain this license, they spent $35 million acquiring an insurance company that had been around for decades, buying both its shell and its 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 are undeniably solid numbers.

But recently, people have been paying attention to Corgi for reasons beyond this impressive performance.

In late 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 a bit inconvenient."

He sleeps three to four hours a night, has developed psoriasis, and experiences some heart palpitations. He recounted these health issues in a steady 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, the area has virtually no "nightlife." So, he leased an old barbershop space in his office building's ground floor, spending less than $100,000 to turn it into a 24-hour cafe, ensuring he and his employees always have access to coffee during their 24/7 work schedule.

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 believes that high-growth startup offices should be full every day. Employees can take an occasional day off, but fixed weekends off simply don't exist. "If you can get things done in five days, you can definitely get more done in six or seven. You should go all out."

Despite this, two-thirds of Corgi's first 30 employees have tattooed the Corgi dog logo on themselves.

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

"Easy. I'm going to die eventually anyway." Nico also cited a statistic: 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 dying thirty years earlier – that's his choice. What bothered me was that he found the question simple. A question pricing a life, and he answered without hesitation, as if he had already thought it through, or perhaps never found anything worth thinking about in it.

A person so decisive about their own life is either truly enlightened or has never given it any real thought. From the outside, these two states look exactly the same. But I worry more about 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 a flood of messages. Linear founder Karri Saarinen wrote on X that this mindset "often represents young founders who see entrepreneurship as their identity. They find it difficult to do anything outside of work and cannot understand that your work is not the same as who you are."

Nico replied: "If you really care about a problem, you'll naturally work your ass off."

He doesn't think he's crazy.

Something Bad Will Happen to You

To understand why this is so contradictory, let's look at the origins of the insurance business.

17th century London. An unremarkable coffeehouse on Tower Street by the River Thames, run by a man named 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 lucrative but risky. A ship sets sail – no one could guarantee its return.

From these discussions, a trade was born. You pay a fee, and I'll shoulder the risk you can't bear. Lloyd's Coffee House later became Lloyd's of London, still a global icon of the insurance industry today.

A coffeehouse, spanning over three centuries. And from the moment insurance was born, it had five words written on its forehead: Something bad will happen to you.

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

The Industrial Revolution arrived. Machines took fingers. Hence, workers' compensation insurance. Your product might harm someone. Hence, liability insurance. Economic cycles are unpredictable. Hence, unemployment insurance. Life gets more complex, so complex that no one can grit their teeth and bear every misfortune alone.

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

The last thing an industry like this should do is worship someone who doesn't value their own life. Yet Corgi does the opposite. A risk management company proving its reliability by having a founder who disregards their own safety.

Austerity is a Valuation Art

But this isn't really complicated. Don't think about it philosophically; think about it in terms of valuation.

AI is making companies increasingly lightweight. Before, it took fifty people working for five years to dare ask for funding. Now, five people with a demo can get a seat at the table. Corgi achieves $40 million in annualized revenue with 177 people – remarkable per-person output. Their AI system handles the entire process: underwriting, quoting, claims. The efficiency is clear, and investors see it.

Yet its valuation growth is still staggering. From a $1.3 billion valuation in early May 2026, it doubled to $2.6 billion by month's end – doubling in three weeks, with cumulative funding reaching $269 million. A two-year-old insurance company, valued higher than many established rivals that have been around for decades.

Valuation is something built on the "future," and this "future" feels flimsy. To make something weightless stand firm, you need something heavy on top of it. So, the office mattresses were revealed, the lights stayed on all night, employees showed off their tattoos, and Nico's psoriasis and heart palpitations were put on display.

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

In the AI era, this inflation is worse. The technology is genuinely doing things that were impossible before, which only blurs the line between hype and reality even further. Austerity is the perfect disguise for a bubble. It grounds an outlandish vision 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 greatest skill isn't paying salaries or offering options – it's offering an identity. It makes a 25-year-old feel they aren't just working a job, but participating in something worthy of their life. Nico says he wants to hire people who "want to do something important with their life."

The words sound nice, even sincere. But flip it around. You have a system that specifically selects people who tie their self-worth to their work, replaces normal labor protections with mission and meaning, and brands those who need sleep, weekends, or time to pick up their kids as "not fully committed." Is this system fulfilling young people's dreams, or is it consuming them?

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

So they utter those three words: I do.

But behind these three words stand more things than they realize. Visions of wealth. Fear of falling behind. The anxieties thrust upon them by this era. Whether choices made under this pressure truly represent free will is something I doubt.

Labeling exhaustion as a choice, anxiety as ambition, and burnout as passion. Ultimately teaching you to utter the most cost-effective management phrase yourself. Once uttered, management costs drop to zero. You are no longer a worker needing protection, but a believer burning willingly. The boss doesn't owe you overtime pay; you owe yourself a great future.

This system has another function: filtering. It doesn't filter out those lacking skill. It filters out those with a normal life – people who need to pick up kids, care for elderly parents, have had health scares, want a decent relationship, or just want to sleep in on weekends.

Those filtered out, of course, won't know these are the real reasons. The only feedback they get is that they are "not all-in enough."

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Camus wrote at the end of *The Myth of Sisyphus*: One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The gods condemned Sisyphus to roll a rock up a hill. Just before the top, the rock would tumble down. He'd walk down, and start over. Forever.

Camus says he is happy. Not because the rock reaches the top, but because he knows the rock will roll back, yet he still pushes it. No end, yet he does it anyway. The rock is his. The hill is his. The absurdity is his. Consciousness itself is freedom.

Silicon Valley also talks about Sisyphus, but not in Camus' sense. Silicon Valley's Sisyphuses refuse to accept the rock will roll down. They believe this time, with enough effort, the rock will stay put at the top. They always say "this time is different." They always think this time they'll truly reach the summit.

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

Nico has founder shares. Before 25, he had already started a company, made the Forbes list, and been through YC. If he fails, he can just tell another story. But the 23- or 24-year-olds who pack their suitcases, move to San Francisco, and sleep on office floors – what can they reboot if they fail?

The very point of insurance is to acknowledge that failure is a probability, not a fault. To acknowledge that people will break, have bad luck, and make wrong decisions at the wrong times. To acknowledge that some rocks are destined to roll down the hill, regardless of how hard you push.

There is a certain kindness in this understanding. It doesn't ask why you fell. It just ensures the cushion is in place before you fall. This is a severely underrated kindness.

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

But it insists on telling another story. A story of not sleeping, of not fearing death, of overworking. Making you believe it's worth $2.6 billion not just because of its great product, but because its people are more reckless with their lives than anyone else.

One must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only if that rock is truly his own.