Grindslop: the new insult that turns a founder's work-ethic posting into a hiring problem

Silicon Valley has settled on a name for founders who post about how hard they and their staff work: grindslop [s1c1]. Business Insider reports that the term, popularized by Will Manidis' essay on founder hagiography, describes content in which "the documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product" [s1c2] - which means the same posts that once read as evidence of seriousness now read, to the people a founder needs to hire, as a warning.

The mechanics are visible in one case. Han Wang, the 25-year-old cofounder of Mintlify, published an essay titled "Remember to not smile" [s1c3]. Wang told Business Insider the lesson was about "challenging yourself and seeking discomfort," but commenters read it as instructing employees to work until miserable [s1c4]. Founders he looked up to criticized him, and his own friends posted publicly about why they disagreed [s1c5]. "For those two weeks, I became the vessel for that disdain," he said [s1c6]. He also said he had asked AI to review the essay, which "in hindsight made it sound less genuine" [s1c7].

Note what the accusation does not require: any claim that the poster works less than advertised. Martin Tobias, a 62-year-old venture capitalist, posted that founders who have taken investment cannot use tiredness as an excuse - "A dog can sleep all day. It has no cap table" - and was told in his replies that this was grindslop [s1c8]. Tobias told Business Insider he had not heard the term and did not think the post qualified, because it was about hard work and doing high-value things rather than long to-do lists [s1c9][s1c10]. The label is applied by the audience, on the audience's reading, and the poster's stated intent does not settle it.

The volume is small but moving in one direction. Sprout Social counted monthly references to grindslop on X rising from 21 in January to 422 in April, peaking at 453 in July [s1c11]. Business Insider describes the word as far from mainstream but spreading [s1c12].

The complicating fact is that the incentive to post has not gone away. Wang says he was not chasing virality but got it, and that it produced signups and some job applications [s1c13]. His investors, he said, were excited about the volume of attention [s1c14]. So the founder trade is between short-term reach with an investor audience and standing with the labor market. Andrew Pignanelli's widely shared reply - "imagine working for someone like this. Must suck" - is the version a candidate sees [s1c15]. Dhravya Shah, the 20-year-old founder of Supermemory, said it was sad when the posted habits started showing up in real life [s1c16], and Business Insider notes the peer dynamic: when one founder posts extreme hours, others feel pressure to match them to stay competitive [s1c17].

Justin Banusing, the 26-year-old cofounder of Clouted, frames the whole thing as a pendulum swing away from pandemic-era "remote slop," the posts about working poolside or while travelling, toward "Hey, everyone should be inside the office, inside your company, 996ing" [s1c18][s1c19]. Pendulums are the point. A norm that swung once will swing again, and rhetoric written for the current position ages badly.

What to watch: whether the mention count keeps climbing past July's peak or settles, since a term at 453 monthly mentions is still a subculture rather than a market signal [s1c11]. Watch also whether the attention actually converts - Wang's signups and applications are self-reported [s1c13], and no source here measures what happens to acceptance rates or attrition at a company whose founder has been labelled. Until someone does, the honest position is that the reputational cost is real and the size of it is unmeasured.