The Sane Asylum

Author: Brie Wolfson, for Colossus, October 2026 (“A love letter to a new kind of company”) URL: https://colossus.com/article/sane-asylum-turbopuffer/ One-line: AI-era Silicon Valley is making its people unwell, and a small set of profitable, AI-native companies that barely touch venture capital (above all turbopuffer) show you can work at the frontier without going insane.

Kyle saved it from Wolfson’s own announcement post. See I was drawn to Silicon… (tweet). Disclosure in the piece: Wolfson spent six months working with turbopuffer on marketing and communications while reporting it.

Key claims

• Everyone is unwell, in three ways. Frontier-lab and decacorn employees (“the chosen ones—the permanent upper class”) have no time for kids, partners or friends, and weddings are on hold. Startups racing them feel they left “$100mn on the table” and are “cooked” without a billion in ARR. Pre-AI startups find 30% growth “feels like death” while Bending Spoons buys Airtable and Miro “for peanuts.”
• Too much, too fast. A new frontier model every month; 311 unicorns minted in the first 300 days of 2026; Cursor’s $0 to $100mn in a year is now the expected pace. People are “9-9-6’ing, sometimes 0-0-7’ing.”
• A different class of company. Midjourney, Pierre Computer, Increase and turbopuffer, following earlier examples like Linear, Basecamp, Valve, Obsidian and early GitHub. They are AI-native, ambitious and profitable, with “a very healthy relationship—if any—to venture capital.” She says these are not lifestyle businesses. She also thinks the confidence to build this way comes more easily to founders who already have money.
• turbopuffer’s origin. Simon Hørup Eskildsen and Justine Li (Shopify alumni) started in 2023. Their first customer was Cursor: they promised a 95% cost cut and migrated its workload. They funded early salaries from personal savings. Their first raise was $700K from Lachy Groom at a $14mn valuation, after Simon had walked away from VCs he says engaged in “ambition bullying.” Simon’s view: “ambition should be something right at the edge of your reach. Anything beyond that is delusion.” The company now has more than $100mn in annualized run rate. Its only other raise, from Thrive Capital and Groom in December 2025, funded an employee tender offer.
• Customers instead of investors. “Customer orientation comes especially naturally, which is what happens when customers pay your salaries instead of venture dollars.” Examples: engineers swarm customer questions in Slack; Justine bought a private fiber link to cut a customer’s latency from 15ms to 8ms; the team is honest when the product isn’t a fit.
• Slow hiring, high bar. Just over 50 people, adding a couple a month at most: “We are okay with pain, but we are not okay with lowering the bar.” Other practices she describes: a “Life Story” interview borrowed from Shopify, remote-first teams with unlimited travel for in-person “campfires,” and a “hardcore / whimsical” culture with lots of talk about life outside work.
• The business is what makes the culture work. The CFO walks every all-hands through the full P&L, and the cap table is designed to benefit employees first. Her verdict: “this company is built on real stuff.”

Notable quotes

“The people of Silicon Valley are unwell. Too many of my friends are spiraling. I don’t know how we’re supposed to live and work like this.”

“Customer orientation comes especially naturally, which is what happens when customers pay your salaries instead of venture dollars.”

“How was I supposed to know we were going to build a billion dollar company?!” (Simon Hørup Eskildsen)

“We are okay with pain, but we are not okay with lowering the bar.” (Justine Li)

“It’s built on the enduring qualities that make companies worth building and work worth doing.”

Full text

How it connects

• Colossus · Brie Wolfson — she also wrote Colossus’s “Inside Cursor.”
• Hustle Culture · Burnout · Work-Life Balance — the diagnosis.
• Bootstrapping · Bootstrapped Startups — turbopuffer’s mostly self-funded path.
• Company Culture · Hiring · Remote Work — the operating practices.
• Customer Obsession — customers as the funding source and the focus.
• Christopher Alexander — Simon is a fan of The Timeless Way of Building: let the path unfold as you go.
• Derek Sivers — Wolfson compares turbopuffer to his “bare cabin” approach of building only what you find you need.