Dying thirty years early in exchange for a trillion-dollar valuation, Silicon Valley rewards those who risk their lives.

Text | Sleepy

Silicon Valley has recently been arguing over one question: how much is a life worth?

A young man named Nico Laqua, twenty-five years old, grew up in San Diego. His father spent his whole career as a lawyer at USAA, a U.S. military insurance company. Nico watched his father sit down at the computer since he was little—typing, filling out forms, translating clauses—and the whole house was piled high with paper.

Later, ChatGPT arrived. He stared at those papers and thought: insurance is one of the industries that deals most with the written word. Using ChatGPT to handle it should be extremely straightforward.

So in the summer of 2024, he and Emily Yuan—who had dropped out of Stanford—walked into Y Combinator with this idea, starting an insurance company called Corgi, whose logo is also a corgi dog.

Corgi is not a middleman. They underwrite themselves, issue policies themselves, and handle claims themselves, holding a full-stack insurance license. To obtain this license, they spent $35 million to acquire a decades-old insurance company, buying it together with both its shell and its credentials.

Corgi officially opened in July 2025. By the end of the year, its annual recurring revenue had surpassed $40 million. It covered more than 40,000 startup customers across 49 states, with a customer churn rate of less than 1%. In an industry where profits are as thin as paper, these numbers are so solid you almost don’t know what to say.

But recently, when people see Corgi, it’s not because of those impressive results.

At the end of May 2026, Nico appeared on Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast. The title of that episode was “America’s Most Extreme Workplace Culture.”

He was in his office in San Francisco’s Financial District. A mattress was laid directly on the floor. He showered at Equinox, the gym across the street, and “they close at 8 p.m. on Fridays,” he said, “which isn’t great.”

He sleeps only three to four hours a day, has psoriasis, and also gets palpitations. When he talked about these conditions, his tone was very steady, as if he were reciting someone else’s medical report.

He even complained that cafes in the Financial District close too early. After 6 or 7 p.m., there was almost no “nightlife” in San Francisco’s Financial District. So he found an old vacant storefront on the retail level at the bottom of an office building and spent less than $100,000 to convert it into a 24-hour coffee shop—so he and his employees can have coffee whenever they need it during their 24/7 overtime.

Corgi’s interviews were deliberately scheduled for weekends, and Nico said, “If your days off happen to be every Saturday and Sunday, then Corgi doesn’t have a place for you.”

He said that the offices of high-growth startups should be packed every single day. Employees can take an occasional day off, but fixed weekend rest doesn’t exist. “If you can finish things in five days, then six or seven days means you can do even more. You should go all out.”

That’s the kind of company it is. Among the early 30 employees, two-thirds had tattooed the corgi dog logo on their bodies.

Near the end of the interview, the host asked a multiple-choice question: Corgi makes it into a trillion-dollar company, but you die at fifty. Or the company fails and you live to eighty. Which would you choose?

“Too easy. Anyway, I’ll die sooner or later,” Nico replied. He also cited data saying that 98% of Olympic athletes are willing to trade ten years of lifespan for a gold medal.

I listened to that part again and again, and something felt off.

Not because he chose to die thirty years early—that’s his choice. What confused me was that he thought the question was simple. A question priced in lives, yet he answered without hesitation, as if he had already thought it through— or as if he never considered there was anything worth pondering in it.

Someone so decisive about their own life must either have truly figured something out, or not thought about it at all. From the outside, the two states look identical. But what I’m more worried about is a third possibility: he has thought about it, but the logic itself is wrong—and he has no idea.

After the episode aired, he received death threats and a flood of private messages. Karri Saarinen, founder of Linear, wrote on X that this kind of thinking “often represents young founders who treat entrepreneurship as part of their persona. They find it hard to do anything outside of work, and they can’t understand that your work doesn’t equal who you are.”

Nico replied with one line: “If you care a lot about a question, you naturally work yourself to the bone.”

He didn’t think he was crazy.

You Will Be Unlucky

To understand why this is so tangled, we first need to talk about where the insurance business comes from.

In 17th-century London, on Tower Street by the Thames, there was an unassuming coffee shop owned by Edward Lloyd. Shipowners, merchants, and brokers crowded in, drinking coffee and talking only about bad news. That ship might sink; that cargo might be lost. Storms are merciless—they treat every brave sailor the same. Maritime trade is profitable, but risky. When a ship sails out, no one can guarantee whether it will come back.

They talked and talked, and eventually they came up with an industry model. You pay a sum of money, and I take on the risk you can’t bear. Lloyd’s coffee shop later became Lloyd’s of London, and to this day it remains a totem of the global insurance industry.

A coffee shop—more than three hundred years old. And from the very day insurance as a business was born, five words were written on its forehead: You will be unlucky.

This isn’t a curse—it’s a statement of fact. Houses will catch fire. People will get sick. Cars will crash. Deals will go bad. You will run into misfortune at the worst time when you least should.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, and machines ate through people’s fingers, leading to workers’ compensation insurance. Your product might harm someone else, so liability insurance emerged. Economic cycles turn hostile and no one can recognize them, leading to unemployment insurance. Life kept getting more complicated—so complicated that no one could bite down hard enough to shoulder every misfortune alone.

Insurance has never depended on people to tough it out. It directly assumes you won’t make it, and prepares the money in advance.

In an industry like this, the worst thing you could do is worship someone who doesn’t value their life. Yet Corgi does the opposite. A risk-management company proves it’s reliable by having its founders act as though they don’t care whether they die.

Asceticism Is an Art of Valuation

But the truth is, this isn’t complicated. Don’t think about it on a spiritual level—think about it in terms of valuation, and it becomes clear.

AI makes companies lighter and lighter. In the past, fifty people would need five years just to dare to raise funding; now, five people can put together a demo and sit at the table. Corgi, with 177 people, achieves $40 million in annualized revenue; per-capita output is truly astonishing. AI systems have been run end to end for underwriting, issuing, and claims processing. Efficiency is right there for investors to see.

But its valuation growth is still too outrageous. In early May 2026, the valuation was $1.3 billion. By the end of the month, it doubled to $2.6 billion. In just three weeks, it doubled again, with total financing of $269 million. A two-year-old insurance company already has a valuation that surpasses many veteran peers that have been around for decades.

Valuation is something you build on top of the “future,” and the “future” right now is weightless. If something without weight wants to stand firm, something heavy has to hold it up. So the mattresses in the office came out. The lights stayed on all night. Employees’ tattoos were shown. Nico’s psoriasis and palpitations were also brought up.

Asceticism has never been a management technique, and not even a work attitude. Asceticism is an art of storytelling—especially in this age of narrative inflation. Coworking spaces say they are “enhancing human consciousness.” Ride-hailing apps say they are “rebuilding the future of cities.” Crypto traders say they are “rebuilding financial freedom.”

In the AI era, inflation only gets worse. Technology really does things that weren’t possible before, and that makes the line between bragging and doing even more blurred. Asceticism is the best disguise for bubbles. It drags far-fetched visions back into flesh and blood, making you feel that this isn’t just talk on a PPT. When people are literally risking their lives, it can’t be fake, right?

“I’m Willing”

The greatest strength of a startup isn’t paying wages, or offering equity options—it’s giving people an identity. It makes a twenty-five-year-old feel like they aren’t just working a job, but participating in something worthy of their entire life. Nico says he wants to hire people who “want to use their lives to do something important.”

The words sound beautiful and sincere. But flip it around and look again: a system that is specifically selecting those who tie their self-worth to their work, replacing normal labor protections with mission and meaning, and then defining people who still need to sleep, need weekends, or need to go home and cook dinner for their kids as “not committed enough.” Is this system fulfilling young people’s dreams—or consuming them?

Young people in the AI era fear being left behind by the world. They fear that if they don’t keep up, they’ll be outpaced. They fear waking up one day and realizing they’ve become relics of a previous era.

So they say those three words: I’m willing.

But behind those three words is much more than they think. Imagination of wealth. Fear of falling behind. The anxiety passed down by this era. In the face of these things, are the choices they make truly free will? I doubt it.

Turn consumption into choice. Turn anxiety into ambition. Turn overextension into love. And then teach you to say the most cost-effective words in management. Once you say them, the management costs go to zero. You are no longer a laborer who needs protection—you are a voluntary believer burning yourself. The boss doesn’t owe you overtime pay; you owe yourself a great future.

This set of rules also has one more effect: it filters people out. It doesn’t screen out those who lack ability—it screens out those whose lives are normal. People with kids to pick up. People who have elderly relatives to care for. People whose bodies flash red warnings, yet still want to date, still want to sleep in on weekends.

Those who get filtered out obviously won’t know it’s due to these reasons. The feedback they receive is only that they are “not all-in enough.”

We Must Imagine Sisyphus Is Happy

At the end of “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus wrote one line: We must imagine Sisyphus is happy.

The gods condemned Sisyphus to push a boulder uphill. Near the top, the boulder rolls down with a crash, and he goes back down the mountain, starts over again—endlessly.

Camus said he is happy—not because the boulder reaches the top, but because he knows it will roll down again, and still pushes it. With no end in sight, he keeps doing it. The boulder is his. The mountain is his. Absurdity is his. Clear-sighted awareness itself is freedom.

Silicon Valley also talks about Sisyphus, but it’s completely not what Camus meant. Silicon Valley’s Sisyphus doesn’t accept that the boulder will roll back down the mountain. They believe that this time, with enough effort, the boulder can stay firmly on the top. They always say this time is different, always assuming this time they really can reach the summit.

Camus’s Sisyphus has control over his fate; Silicon Valley’s Sisyphus is controlled by fate.

Nico has founder shares. Before he was twenty-five, he started a business, made the Forbes list, and went through YC. If he fails, he can just tell another story. But those young people—those who arrive in San Francisco with suitcases and lay a mattress directly on the office floor—if they fail, what can they reboot?

Insurance is, by nature, about acknowledging that failure is a probability, not a personal fault. Acknowledging that people will collapse, be unlucky, and make wrong decisions at the wrong time. Acknowledging that some stones are destined to roll down the mountain, no matter how hard you push.

Within this understanding there’s a kind of kindness. It doesn’t ask why you fell. It just lays down a cushion before you fall. A kindness that’s seriously underestimated.

Corgi’s technology is real. Its efficiency is real. It issues policies within 24 hours, and AI handles the entire claims process. If you only talk about that, it’s a very good company.

But it insists on telling another story. It talks about not sleeping, about not fearing death, about working overtime. It makes you believe it’s worth $2.6 billion not only because of the product, but because the people here are more willing than others to act as if they might die.

We must imagine Sisyphus is happy, provided that the boulder is his own.