Alibaba co-founder says founders should work 24/7, not pursue work-life balance
Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai says startup founders shouldn’t chase work-life balance in the early days, because building a company requires serious time and commitment. Instead, he recommends choosing a team you’re happy to spend with 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If you are a startup founder, you should not be looking for work-life balance. Instead, choose a team with which you can comfortably work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s the advice for young professionals from Joe Tsai, co-founder and chairman of Alibaba.
Speaking to students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business last month, Tsai emphasized that starting a company often requires passion and setting aside personal time and hobbies. So he advises budding founders to be prepared for long-term and blurred boundaries between personal and professional life.
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“As a startup, you won’t go home too much. This work-life balance is not something you should focus on,” he told the audience of young professionals, highlighting that building a startup requires an intense commitment to building a company from the ground up.
Tsai emphasized that since building a startup requires hard work, the pressure of working long hours becomes far more manageable if entrepreneurs surround themselves with the right people. That said, the real priority is to select co-founders and teammates you actually enjoy spending time with.
“A simple test,” Tsai suggested, is to ask: “Do you want to go out after work and have a beer with this person? I think that’s the first test.” He said personal compatibility is as important as professional capability, as startup teams often spend almost all of their waking hours together.
Tsai, who co-founded Alibaba with Jack Ma, said working with Ma was not just a business partnership, but also a mentorship. Tsai said, “He taught me a lot of things and I felt I could learn a lot from him.”
Notably, Tsai’s views have also been echoed by other global business leaders. His business partner Jack Ma has previously defended China’s controversial “996” work culture – working from 9am to 9pm six days a week – saying that if you are passionate about your work, it should not be a problem. “If you’ve got a job you love, the 996 problem doesn’t exist; if you’re not passionate about it, every minute at work is torture,” he said in a 2019 interview, arguing that passion makes the long hours feel less burdensome.
Similarly, Warren Buffett has long said that loving what you do removes the workload and that career satisfaction depends heavily on the people you work with.
In fact, Elon Musk has repeatedly promoted an intense work schedule. He has said that working 80-100 hours per week gives founders a competitive advantage.
In India too, Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy sparked debate in 2023 when he said young Indians should consider working 70 hours a week to help boost the country’s productivity. He argued that India’s work culture needs to be strengthened and that young professionals should devote more time and effort during their early careers to drive national development.