I’m that type of person that enjoys working way too much. But as a founder I had unlimited vacation time, which I quickly realized lead to no one taking vacation. So now I say “ten days minimum vacation”, and if you are dragging your feet on taking time off, you’re getting your Gmail, GitHub, etc access cut off on Friday’s, weekends, and or Monday’s when you’ve been working hard.

Currently not a founder, but a senior employee - never mentioned to my CEO that was my policy, and it’s quite nice to have a boss that does the same and forces me into long weekends.

I failed an interview once when a founder started bragging about how his wife is sad that he doesn't come home to see her and their young children enough, and he was proud because it meant he was working hard enough. He asked me if I was a hard worker and I told him I preferred to "work smarter not harder" and gave some lines about being efficient and not burning out. I gather that he was not impressed, given I got no offer after appearing to pass the technical screen, getting along great with the engineering team as a whole, and applying to a team where I had direct (uncommon) experience and knew every member of.

It’s the flip side of something that can actually be good, which is not asking people to do something you’re not willing to do, like work weekends for a deadline or take a pay cut.

But your relationship to the company is different than ours. A pay cut still leaves you with a 40% stake in the company, while we get nothing in a fire sale (your preferred stock doesn’t get diluted nearly as much or as frequently as ours does). Equally or perhaps more importantly, this was your dumb idea/baby in the first place, we just showed up to work. You had better be more invested than the rest of us our why are we even here?