Posting about your long, long day at work? It might be "grindslop."Getty Images; Tyler Le/BITechies coined a new term for performative posting about hard work on social media. They call it "grindslop."Business Insider spoke with the grindslop accused — and accusers.Who is it all for? Three founders said that grindslop posts were meant to impress venture capitalists.Han Wang insists his intentions were pure.The 25-year-old cofounder of Mintlify is a prolific X poster, sending off his snippets of management philosophy to the platform's techies. One of his essays fanned the flames of Silicon Valley's hardcore workplace debate. He called it: "Remember to not smile."Wang said that the essay's lesson was "challenging yourself and seeking discomfort." Commenters took it differently: they saw a piece of performative overwork, telling employees to labor until they're miserable. Founders whom Wang looked up to criticized him; his friends publicly posted their reasons for disagreeing with him.Critics of his post called it "grindslop.""It's this sentiment against saying these crazy work ethic buzzwords," Wang said. "For those two weeks, I became the vessel for that disdain."The AI era has brought a relentless new standard of work: 996ing, Celsius-fueled all-nighters, and nonstop vibe coding. Some call it committing to a once-in-a-generation opportunity; others call it unhealthy.As tech workers chafe against an increasingly extreme work schedule — and the public posturing behind it all — "grindslop" has grown into a rallying cry.What is grindslop?When Martin Tobias took my call, he had no idea what grindslop was.The 62-year-old venture capitalist posted on X that, after taking on investments, founders can't use the excuse of being tired. "A dog can sleep all day," he wrote. "It has no cap table." In his comments, a user leveled the "grindslop" accusation.this is sort of grindslopanyone can be tired it's entirely fairif you're merely obligated from capital and people then it's less of a company and more of a burdenthis is why being mission focused is really important because the obligation is to yourself not others— kyle (@kylecompute) July 22, 2026 I explained the term's generally understood definition. Grindslop refers to people who share publicly just how hard they work, or expect others to work. Sacrifice is a theme. Most often, these folks are in tech.While its exact origin isn't clear, the term was popularized by Will Manidis' essay about founder hagiography. For grindslop companies, Manidis wrote, "the documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product."So, did Tobias think his don't-be-tired post was grindslop? No, he said, because it was about hard work. "I don't want you having a long to-do list and ticking off a bunch of random things," Tobias said. "I want you doing high-leverage things."While far from mainstream, the word is spreading. Monthly references to "grindslop" on X shot up from 21 mentions in January to 422 mentions in April, according to the social intelligence company Sprout Social. It peaked at 453 mentions in July, Sprout Social said.When a founder posts about their long work hours or extreme routines, other founders may feel pressure to adopt those habits to stay competitive."It was sad to me when it started happening in real life," said Dhravya Shah, the 20-year-old founder of the AI agent startup Supermemory.imagine working for someone like this. Must suck. Some of the longest weeks of my life where me and my team have worked the hardest were always the most fun. We’re grinding but we’re smiling, talking, living. This is grindslop. https://t.co/wMe64cSTzL— andrew pignanelli (@ndrewpignanelli) July 15, 2026 While "slop" may sound like an allusion to AI slop, it's more about the perceived low quality of the content than how it was created. Mintlify's Wang said that he asked AI to review his essay, which "in hindsight made it sound less genuine."And there's clear incentive to be a grindslopper: internet clout can help your business grow. While Wang insists that he wasn't chasing virality, he certainly got it — and it resulted in signups and some job applications, he said."A lot of our investors, in hindsight, were really excited about this whole thing because of the amount of attention that we were getting," he said.The rise of performative hustlingJustin Banusing thinks grindslop is the result of a "massive pendulum swing."The 26-year-old cofounder of the social media distribution startup Clouted called it a reversal on "remote slop." This was the content du jour during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people posted about working while traveling or poolside.Things are different now."Everyone's trying to say: 'Hey, everyone should be inside the office, inside your company, 996ing,'" he said.say NO to grindslop https://t.co/KUZPb9yLL2— khushi suri (@khushkhushkhush) July 19, 2026 Ruby Justice Thelot, a 30-year-old professor of design and media theory at New York Univ
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