DeepSeek’s founder says his workers have no KPIs and no overtime, while Silicon Valley copies China’s 996 grind

Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, told staff in a nearly four-hour discussion that the company does not do overtime and does not use KPIs. “No one manages them,” he said of his researchers, according to a transcript obtained by Tencent Technology. The remarks describe a workplace culture that is the opposite of the 996 grind that Western tech founders are now rushing to copy.

Liang gave two reasons for the approach. “Research needs a relaxed environment; if you push too hard, you can’t do research,” he said. The second is extreme focus, meaning DeepSeek does very few things at once.

Employees are told what to do for only half their working day, and the rest is unstructured time they can spend however they choose. There is no formal hierarchy, no written rulebook, and no monthly targets. “We don’t really have an organization, we’re driven by a vision, organized by a vision,” Liang said.

The company he is describing is not a quiet research lab. DeepSeek has been downloaded 173 million times since it launched to the public in January 2025, and a funding round in June valued the Hangzhou startup at roughly $60 billion. Liang is now the wealthiest AI model creator in the world, with a fortune Bloomberg estimates at roughly $36 billion, ahead of Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and former OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

The timing makes the comments sharper than they would have been a year ago. China’s 996 schedule, working 9am to 9pm six days a week, was declared illegal by the Supreme People’s Court in 2021, but instead of fading it has become a badge of honour among Western tech investors. Harry Stebbings of 20VC wrote on LinkedIn last year that seven days a week was “the required velocity to win right now”

Martin Mignot of Index Ventures echoed that with “forget nine to five, 996 is the new startup standard.” Some AI startups have reportedly begun adding 996 clauses to employment contracts.

Liang’s leaked remarks have already caused him trouble once. DeepSeek paused its second fundraising round in late July after separate comments he made about China’s dependence on Nvidia chips went viral on Weibo without his permission. The latest transcript, from an internal discussion rather than an investor meeting, paints a picture of a founder who believes exhaustion-driven output is wasteful rather than heroic.

Whether the no-KPI model can survive DeepSeek’s transition from research lab to public company remains an open question. Liang himself said he hoped the relaxed culture would hold, but he also acknowledged that the company is run by “a bunch of very ordinary people.” What is harder to dismiss is the result: a three-year-old startup valued at $60 billion, built by a team whose founder insists nobody works late.