Sam Altman’s eye-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, has a message for its employees: Forget about your weekends. The company behind the “Orb”, a metal sphere that scans irises to verify human identity, has reportedly urged its employees to work on weekends and put their jobs above everything else. The company told workers that its mission towards humanity was critical, and that they must make this sacrifice, a report claims. The company’s CEO, Alex Blania, conveyed a clear message during an all-hands meeting earlier this year, setting expectations for the staff.A Business Insider citing a recording of the meeting claimed that Blania explained that the company is aiming for an outcome that was neither failure nor average. He said, “that’s all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter.” The report suggested that Blania was blunt about his expectations for employee commitment at the meeting and added that anyone who prioritises other concerns “should just not be here.”
Read Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania’s instructions to his employees
In the all-hands meet, Blania said: “We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that’s what we want, and that’s all I care about every day, and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter. If you should care about something else, and if you want something else, you should just not be here. It’s as simple as that. We don’t care about politics, we don’t care about DEI, we don’t care about anything, we just care about how we can achieve the mission through merit, performance, and excellence.” As per the report, multiple “team values” shown on a TV screen in the start-up’s now-former San Francisco office reflected Blania’s messaging.One of the messages read: “We are very (very) hard working. We believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime project and that success is important for humanity. Therefore, we work weekends, we’re always on call, and we push as hard as our circumstances allow us to. As a result, we defy the odds, get to escape velocity and succeed on the mission.”Apart from this, another of these team values also featured a statement that the company doesn’t “tolerate slowness and comfort,” along with the notion that “we have no place for talkers, ideology, or politics. We don’t have time to worry about each other’s feelings; we say what needs to be said.” Citing a former employee, the report also claimed that Blania himself wrote these values.In a statement, a Tools for Humanity spokesperson said: “The organisation’s transparency about its values and operating principles has resulted in building a team that is passionate and focused on its increasingly urgent mission of ensuring every human benefits from the age of AI.”The core values include optimism about the project, individual responsibility, and clear thinking. Its mission is to build a global digital identity system that can verify whether someone is human in an AI-driven world. Blania said it exists to do that, and that anything else is a distraction.
