An AI startup is paying $1.7m a year so its staff can live near the office. In return, Rilla's roughly 120 employees work 72-hour weeks, and the chief executive says the perks are about flow, not comfort.
Tech loves a perk, but few go this far. Rilla, an AI startup that makes coaching software for sales teams, spends about $1.7m a year on housing stipends so staff can live near its New York office, Fortune reports. The trade-off is a 72-hour week.
Employees who live within a 10-minute bike ride of the Williamsburg office get an $18,000 annual housing stipend. About 80% take it. That helps in a neighbourhood where a studio rents for around $4,000 a month.
Chief executive Sebastian Jimenez frames the spending as focus, not indulgence. “We’re not trying to coddle people,” he told Business Insider . “A lot of companies offer perks that end up distracting employees. We ask ourselves, ‘Can this help someone get into the flow?'”
That logic runs through the rest of the package. Rilla pays for three meals a day and is building a gym with a sauna and cold plunge. It even hired a Harvard healthy-buildings expert to pick an office with ventilation that aids concentration.
The bill runs steep for a small firm. Rilla spends roughly $37,000 per employee a year on these extras, near $4.4m across about 120 staff, and it signed a 10-year lease. Jimenez says the return justifies it, and claims each engineer generates $4m to $5m in revenue a year. Staff work 12 hours a day, six days a week, and he says he hires people, from Division I athletes to founders, who want that.
It fits a wider hardening of work culture in tech. As the industry argues over whether AI adds or cuts jobs , some startups lean the other way. They hire a small core of elite staff and ask them for marathon days . Rivals sell softer versions of the same idea, from JPMorgan’s tennis courts to Goldman’s cycling studios.
The stipend reads as generous, and as a lever. Cut the commute, remove the friction, and the workday stretches. Critics of the always-on office, including voices warning against cutting the junior tier or chasing raw output , would call it a gilded cage. Jimenez sees it differently. “Our goal isn’t simply to get people into the office,” he said. “It’s to build an environment where they can do the best work of their lives.”
Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moment (show all) Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moments of discovery, shaping how teams find and adopt SaaS every day. Since 2020, she has led Tekpon’s brand voice, media strategy, and growth plays with a clear focus on human outcomes behind every metric. Before Tekpon, Alina followed curiosity across industries and countries. She was CEO of King Casino Bonus and led affiliate and brand strategy at Extremoo Media and Fable Media in Denmark, where she learned how to build partnerships that last. Early on, she sharpened her CRM and pricing instincts at K.H. ApS, always asking why customers choose what they choose. Her approach is rooted in more than a decade of international experience and two master’s degrees, one in Sustainable Consumption from the Technical University of Munich and one in Consumer Affairs Management from Aarhus University.