Rilla founders will approach the office by offering employees a $1,500 rent scholarship
Businesses have recently offered all sorts of extraordinary benefits, from wellness retreats to executives Gap year. At AI startup Rilla, employees have the opportunity to take advantage of rare, disappearing corporate perks to cover the high cost of living in New York City. However, there are some strings attached.
To receive the money, Employees up to $1,500 must live within 10-15 minutes of the company’s Long Island-based office, and are expected to work around 70 hours a week. Rilla CEO and co-founder Sebastian Jimenez said rent scholarships are an incentive to limit commute times and that employees can designate jobs instead.
“One of our core principles is to maximize productive time,” says Jimenez, who founded the company in 2019 and lives within a five-minute walk from the office. “If you live 30 minutes away from the office, that’s an hour a day where you can work.”
So far, about 12 of the approximately 80 employees have taken Rilla into the rent offer. And that certainly is an attractive proposition given the perennial high cost of New York City rents. Last year alone, median rent for New York City property increased by 5.6%, up $3,397. data From Realtor.com.
Rent benefits are just an example of Rilla’s hardcore work culture. The company uses a “996” calendar. Employees are expected to work six days a week from 9am to 9pm. Jimenez said the company frequently holds off-site events on Sundays. Jimenez rejects the concept of “not being smarter at work” and says that the only way a team can succeed is to spend as much time as possible. But he defends one night’s rest.
“We want them to take care of themselves, exercise and eat healthy. They want them to maximize their time and still sleep eight hours a day,” he says. “They can do this and still have an hour or two of their leisure time on days outside of work. This is enough time to do the important things in life.”
In addition to rent benefits, the company also allows employees to spend at least two meals a day, covering gym memberships. It also appears to generally provide high compensation for a variety of roles. According to Rilla’s, the product designer role has a salary of between $110,000 and $230,000 a year Websiteand software engineers can make between $200,000 and $300,000. Jimenez said people working in sales average around $350,000 a year.
Rilla may be an extreme example when it comes to intense working hours, but businesses are becoming more and more comfortable looking for more from their workers. In a cost-cutting environment, leaders are tasked with finding ways to increase productivity from their employees without hiring additional people. Inside a February employee note, Google The co-founder told the employees that 60 hours of working week It’s a “sweet spot” for productivity. And recently Report from Microsoft The average working days have increased later, with meetings after 8pm up 16% from last year, with about 29% of workers checking their inboxes after 10pm.
Rilla gets in the way to let them know exactly that they’re signing up for candidates. Job postings on the company’s website tell workers not to apply if they’re not excited to work 70 hours a week with some of New York’s most ambitious people. The company also expresses these expectations on the “cultural deck” that all potential employees need to read before accepting positions, Jimenez said.
He doesn’t necessarily recommend that other companies follow, and he knows that such work schedules don’t work for most people. He says that most of the people he hires are the startup founders themselves or the D1 athletes who graduated from university. Anyone who is used to working 13 hours a day “want to be busy all the time.”
“This is by no means a way to run every startup,” he says. “This is how it works for us.”