I'm willing to believe that at a certain point in a startup's life cycle, it is reasonable to expect the early employees to work non-stop. It's also reasonable

I'm willing to believe that at a certain point in a startup's life cycle, it is reasonable to expect the early employees to work non-stop. It's also reasonable to sell your product early on at a loss, to garner interest. But at a certain point, if your customers are not willing to pay enough for your product to cover the costs, you've got a problem. Likewise, if your business only works if your employees are working 80+ hours a week, you have to ask yourself if you really have a viable business. I think this point comes a lot earlier than most people are willing to admit. If your startup needs 10 people to get off the ground and you can only afford 5 who work 'round the clock, that's one thing; if your startup needs 20,000 people and you have 10,000 working 24/7/365, that's another. I will also concede there are jobs worth devoting every waking moment to, because they are worth doing, because they satisfy you intellectually or emotionally, because they save lives, because you will benefit greatly, personally from the work, materially or in reputation. But a lot of tech and other professional jobs are a lot more predatory than that. You take a lot of young people straight from one environment which lionizes the all-nighter and accomplishing arbitrary assigned goals (college), drag them to a new place where they don't have friends, family, or anything else which either makes demands on their time or gives them meaning and validation, and then encourage them to work non-stop on projects with no clear moral pay-off and a financial payoff that accrues to other people.