A verified employee at fintech startup Zeta took to Teamblind’s India channel with a message for anyone daring to complain about life at an Indian startup: stop. “Long hours, no weekends, countless sacrifices,” the post read. “You knew the challenges going in.” It racked up over 15,000 upvotes. The comment section told a different story.
Within hours, the replies turned into a referendum — not just on one anonymous post, but on an entire philosophy that has shaped how Indian startup culture talks about work. Comments invoked Narayana Murthy, Bhavish Aggarwal, the ESOP gap between India and Silicon Valley, and the harder question no founder cheerleader wants to answer: what exactly has all this sacrifice built?
A Debate India Has Had Before — Just Louder Now
The grind gospel isn’t new in India’s startup world. In October 2023, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy told a podcast that young Indians should work 70 hours a week — a figure that, broken down over five days, means 14-hour shifts — as a matter of national duty. The comment spread everywhere. Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal endorsed it publicly, writing that it wasn’t the moment for Indians to “work less and entertain ourselves.” JSW Group chairman Sajjan Jindal agreed. The narrative had the momentum of consensus.
But the backlash was equally sharp. All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union declared a 70-hour work week illegal under Indian labour law, which caps weekly hours at 48. UpGrad co-founder Ronnie Screwvala argued that productivity came from skills, fair pay, and a positive environment — not hours logged. And on the street level, social media wasn’t having it either. One widely shared calculation showed what 70 hours actually looked like in a day: 14 hours of work, two hours of commute, seven hours of sleep, and nothing left.
Murthy, undeterred, came back in late 2024 to revise the number upward — to 72 hours, the equivalent of China’s infamous 996 schedule. China, for context, legally banned the 996 practice in 2021.
The Comment That Landed Hardest
Back on the Blind thread, one reply from a Microsoft employee drew particular attention: “US startups give a good amount of ESOPs for early stage startups. Did that company give a good amount? If not, then why would anyone need to sacrifice life/time for the gain of a few founders?”
It’s an argument that cuts differently from the usual work-life balance conversation. This isn’t about self-care or millennial softness. It’s about the economics of who benefits from the grind. In the US, early employees at high-growth startups routinely receive equity stakes that make the late nights a rational bet. In India, that model is the exception rather than the standard. A reply thread below the ESOP comment put it plainly: “It’s just slave labour and making someone else’s dream come true.”
An Amazon commenter summarised it differently — calling the original post “Narayan Murthy 2.0.” The Splunk commenter who asked “Bhavish, is that you?” got 24 upvotes.
The Wellbeing Numbers Behind the Rhetoric
The debate about hours is not just ideological — the toll is increasingly documented. A 2024 Gallup State of the Global Workplace survey found that 86% of Indian workers reported struggling at their workplaces. A separate analysis published by Outlook Business, citing Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting data from close to 1,200 companies, found that average employee turnover in India rose from 24% in FY2022 to 31% in FY2024. Among employees with less than six months of experience, attrition ran at over 18% in 2023–24 — a sign that new hires are walking out faster than they used to.
The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization, in a 2021 joint report, linked long working hours directly to deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease. Japan coined a word for this decades ago — ‘Karoshi”, death by overwork. India does not yet have a word for it. That may simply mean it hasn’t named it.
The Founders Who Shaped the Culture
Bhavish Aggarwal’s case is worth dwelling on, not because he is an outlier but because he represents a tendency. Reports from current and former Ola employees, first surfaced by Bloomberg and subsequently corroborated across multiple platforms, described a workplace where presentations were torn up over missing page numbers, where Punjabi epithets were hurled at staff, and where an employee was allegedly instructed to run laps around a factory floor for leaving a door open. Aggarwal’s reported response to these accounts: “Not everybody is a fit for our culture.”
He has also been public about his belief that weekends are a Western import and that work-life balance is not a concept he subscribes to. He reaches his office at 7 AM and returns home at midnight, by his own account, and presents this as a model. When asked about the hostile incidents, he said: “My anger, my frustration — that’s me as a whole.”
The problem isn’t that Aggarwal works long hours. The problem is that a founder’s voluntary obsession, when it becomes an institutional expectation, stops being voluntary for everyone else.
What the Pushback Actually Signals
The Blind thread is not a breaking news event. It is a data point in a longer arc. What has changed since the Murthy controversy of 2023 is the texture of the response. Two years ago, the debate was split — industry leaders on one side, social media on the other. Today, even on a platform where India’s tech workforce is the primary audience, the consensus is harder to manufacture. The Zeta post got its upvotes, yes. But read the comments: the validation came for the workers, not the sermon.
A CRED commenter on the thread offered the sharpest summary of where the innovation conversation intersects with the grind debate: “Didn’t know Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Tesla were from India.” It was a joke with a serious edge. The implication — that decades of celebrated hustle have not yet produced a single globally adopted product born out of the Indian startup ecosystem — is a question that grind culture has never been asked to answer directly.
India’s startup workers are not asking to work less. They are asking what they are working for. That is a different question, and no amount of motivational Blind posts resolves it.
