Man Congratulates His Company’s Co-Founder For Working During His Own Wedding — ‘Divorce Lawyers Must Be Salivating’
The post sparked a heated debate about work-life balance and hustle culture.
Shchus | Shutterstock Gather 'round, friends and neighbors, for we have at last reached the apotheosis of absurd and insane online hustle culture! The internet is rife, of course, with all kinds of gurus and wannabes extolling the virtue of the "grindset" that says work and success must come before all else.
Perhaps no place is a better repository of this silliness than LinkedIn, and a recent post from a start-up founder takes things to what many feel is a whole new extreme.
A tech entrepreneur congratulated his start-up co-founder for working during his own wedding.
Please excuse me for a moment; I have to go scream into a pillow until my vocal cords burst, and I begin coughing up blood like a Victorian child with consumption because WHAT?!?
The viral LinkedIn post in question comes from tech founder Torrey Leonard, whose company Thoughtly (is there a law in San Francisco stating all tech companies must be named with adverb-like made-up words?) provides an AI-driven platform for customer service phone calls.
That sounds like an absolute nightmare, to be perfectly honest, but is surely a lucrative one as AI's takeover intensifies.
Judging from Leonard's post, the secret to Thoughtly's success is apparently an insane work ethic that saw co-founder Casey Mackrell working at his own wedding reception.
The post applauds the company co-founder for taking on a new customer even though they came on board right before his wedding.
"My co-founder Casey has built a reputation for himself as 'the guy who sits on his laptop in bars' from SF to NYC," Torrey wrote of his friend.
He explained that Thoughtly had just signed on a hot new customer who needed their services to launch within two weeks. "He just so happened to be getting married within that 2-week window," Torrey wrote of Mackrell.
So that, of course, meant one thing: "wrapping up a pull request. At his own wedding," as Torrey put it. And to some degree, this is understandable — when you're trying to make something happen, the world doesn't just stop because you're getting married, right?
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But, like, is this REALLY the only recourse? There was NO ONE ELSE available to do whatever a "pull request" is? (I am far too much of a liberal arts major to even theorize what that means, but I bet it's important.)
Is literally ANYTHING so important you have to take time out of your own wedding? Apparently so, according to "founder mode," the hallowed tech-industry concept that start-up CEOs should be intricately involved in all aspects of their company rather than delegating tasks to underlings. Which is honorable to a point — a point that pretty much the whole internet felt Leonard and Mackrell crossed.
The backlash to the congratulatory post was pretty much instantaneous.
As you might expect, Leonard's post didn't go over very well online. The tech industry has a long-held reputation for holding this kind of absurd overwork in high regard, but work culture attitudes are changing fast, of course. Nowadays, work-life balance is the rage, not work above all else. So backlash on LinkedIn was swift.
"This isn’t a flex. It’s sad," one man wrote.
"Divorce lawyers must be salivating," another added.
One woman who works in recruiting focused on how this reflects on Thoughtly as a whole. "If this isn’t satire, this work ethic should neither be publicized nor applauded," she wrote. "Doesn’t say a lot about the company either, if he was the ONLY person that could deal with this that day."
Over on Reddit, Torrey's post landed in the ever-popular subReddit r/LinkedInLunatics, where it was posted multiple times. And Redditors had even more to say. "Not the flex he thinks it is, unless, of course, he married his laptop?" one user wrote.
Another dispensed with the snark entirely. "Casey is missing the point of life," the Redditor wrote, which is kind of dark but pretty hard to argue with, at least if you take the post at face value.
Leonard later clarified the situation — and is using its virality to fundraise for Hurricane Milton relief.
The post went so viral and generated so much bad press that Leonard soon sent out a press release clarifying the situation — it turns out that Mackrell's "work" involved about 30 seconds of sitting in front of his laptop to essentially press "go" on… whatever it was he was doing. (Look, I have a degree in theater and an unfinished master's in film, I don't know what you want from me.)
So in reality, it was really not that big of a deal — certainly not as big a deal as it has become on the internet, anyway. Still, even 30 seconds on a laptop at our wedding is something most of us wouldn't agree to, and Leonard admitted that his and Mackrell's approach isn't for everyone while also acknowledging the validity of "[prioritizing] work-life balance] and "[questioning] the sustainability of such intense work cultures."
But while they may be overworkers in many of our eyes, Leonard and Mackrell are also full of good ideas — including leveraging their virality for good. At Mackrell and his now-wife Grace's request, Thoughtly now has merch featuring the mega-viral photo of Mackrell working at his wedding, with all proceeds going to Hurricane Milton relief.
Hey, maybe hustle culture isn't all bad after all…
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.