Silicon Valley has a new insult for performative hustle posts: ‘grindslop’

Han Wang insists his intentions were pure.

The 25-year-old cofounder of Mintlify is a prolific X poster, sending off his snippets of management philosophy to the platform’s techies. One of his essays fanned the flames of Silicon Valley’s hardcore workplace debate. He called it: “Remember to not smile.”

Wang said that the essay’s lesson was “challenging yourself and seeking discomfort.” Commenters took it differently: they saw a piece of performative overwork, telling employees to labor until they’re miserable. Founders whom Wang looked up to criticized him; his friends publicly posted their reasons for disagreeing with him.

Critics of his post called it “grindslop.”

“It’s this sentiment against saying these crazy work ethic buzzwords,” Wang said. “For those two weeks, I became the vessel for that disdain.”

The AI era has brought a relentless new standard of work: 996ing, Celsius-fueled all-nighters, and nonstop vibe coding. Some call it committing to a once-in-a-generation opportunity; others call it unhealthy.

As tech workers chafe against an increasingly extreme work schedule — and the public posturing behind it all — “grindslop” has grown into a rallying cry.

What is grindslop?

When Martin Tobias took my call, he had no idea what grindslop was.

The 62-year-old venture capitalist posted on X that, after taking on investments, founders can’t use the excuse of being tired. “A dog can sleep all day,” he wrote. “It has no cap table.” In his comments, a user leveled the “grindslop” accusation.

I explained the term’s generally understood definition. Grindslop refers to people who share publicly just how hard they work, or expect others to work. Sacrifice is a theme. Most often, these folks are in tech.

While its exact origin isn’t clear, the term was popularized by Will Manidis’ essay about founder hagiography. For grindslop companies, Manidis wrote, “the documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product.”

So, did Tobias think his don’t-be-tired post was grindslop? No, he said, because it was about hard work. “I don’t want you having a long to-do list and ticking off a bunch of random things,” Tobias said. “I want you doing high-leverage things.”

While far from mainstream, the word is spreading. Monthly references to “grindslop” on X shot up from 21 mentions in January to 422 mentions in April, according to the social intelligence company Sprout Social. It peaked at 453 mentions in July, Sprout Social said.

When a founder posts about their long work hours or extreme routines, other founders may feel pressure to adopt those habits to stay competitive.

“It was sad to me when it started happening in real life,” said Dhravya Shah, the 20-year-old founder of the AI agent startup Supermemory.

While “slop” may sound like an allusion to AI slop, it’s more about the perceived low quality of the content than how it was created. Mintlify’s Wang said that he asked AI to review his essay, which “in hindsight made it sound less genuine.”

And there’s clear incentive to be a grindslopper: internet clout can help your business grow. While Wang insists that he wasn’t chasing virality, he certainly got it — and it resulted in signups and some job applications, he said.

“A lot of our investors, in hindsight, were really excited about this whole thing because of the amount of attention that we were getting,” he said.

The rise of performative hustling

Justin Banusing thinks grindslop is the result of a “massive pendulum swing.”

The 26-year-old cofounder of the social media distribution startup Clouted called it a reversal on “remote slop.” This was the content du jour during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people posted about working while traveling or poolside.

Things are different now.

“Everyone’s trying to say: ‘Hey, everyone should be inside the office, inside your company, 996ing,'” he said.

Ruby Justice Thelot, a 30-year-old professor of design and media theory at New York University, compared it to gym posts.

“You’ll have a very, very jacked guy, waking up early in the morning, going to the gym, telling you that you can do it, too,” he said.

He charted a path to grindslop. First, there was “conspicuous consumption,” in which wealthy people flaunted the leisure they had purchased. Then there was “conspicuous creation,” he said, where the act of creation was the leisure. Think of the trad wife, making their homemade cookies.

Now we’re in an era of “conspicuous production,” Thelot said, where there’s no leisure at all. “You’re just working,” he said. “That is also a symbol of virtue.”

The VCs (and other founders) watching

Who are these posts for? Three founders said that the grindsloppers were courting venture capitalists. “All of these are targeted toward investors,” Shah said. “Users don’t care.”

Not all VCs are on board. Tobias said that he was turned off by the founders who post about their long hours. He’d rather they post about customers.

Sarah Catanzaro, a Bay Area-based general partner at Amplify Partners, said that her opinion of grindslop ranges from “don’t care” to “hazardous.”

Though she said her portfolio companies don’t post grindslop, some emulate its habits: 996 schedules, air mattresses. “I’ve had conversations with these companies about the cost of it,” she said, such as talent retention.

She worries about longevity, too. Sure, you can hustle hard in your early years, Catanzaro said, but at some point you have to get off the hamster wheel. “It is getting dangerous,” she said.

There’s another audience for this content: other founders. “People are just trying to impress each other,” said Saarth Shah, the 23-year-old cofounder of the corporate investigations startup Sixtyfour.

It’s depressing, he said.

“Initially, startups were basically a bunch of nerds working on hard problems that they found fun,” Shah said. “Now, it’s becoming this whole circle jerk.”