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I worked 14-hour days at a startup. A cancer diagnosis changed how I succeeded at Netflix and Meta.

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This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with David Ronca, a retired video systems engineer. He spent 12 years at Netflix and six years at Meta. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

My time at a startup in the early years of my engineering career was like a really bad relationship.

I joined a company that specialized in video playback around 2000. I loved working on video. I consider those seven years like going to school, and I came out with a Ph.D. in practical video systems. But it was the hardest seven years I’ve ever had in terms of work demands.

I was told when I joined that it would be really important that you’re seen around here a lot. So I would work until 7, 8, 9 — sometimes until 10 p.m. Then we started hitting delivery schedules, and I was getting to work around 10 in the morning and going home sometimes at 2:30 in the morning. We’re talking 14-hours days, six to seven days a week. Eighty hours a week would’ve been a break.

We didn’t have good direction. We’d be four or five months into solving a hard problem before leadership would stop us and say, “Go work on this instead.” It was madness.

We were using work hours to compensate for really bad decisions.

In January 2004, I started feeling ill. On a Sunday, I didn’t feel so good, and by midweek, I got worse.

On Friday night, January 17, my wife took me to the emergency room. The doctor told me, “This is likely colon cancer.” After the first surgery, he said, “There’s no way you have a tumor like this and it’s not cancer.”

Two weeks earlier, I had been running and feeling great. Within a week, I was in a hospital bed on machines.

It took another week before doctors could do the full surgery. And you spend that time with no idea what they’re going to find. That was a very dark week.

My mother died of breast cancer when she was 48. I was 16. Now, I’m in the hospital at 44. I remember thinking, “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”

My wife would bring the three kids. My oldest, who was seven, would sit quietly in the room with me. My youngest was two years old. He didn’t really know me.

I was looking at my young son, thinking he’s going to grow up without a dad.

After surgery, they told me it was stage 3 colon cancer. They removed 60% of my colon. There was lymph node metastasis. My five-year survival prognosis was about 25%.

‘I will not work like this’

I went back to work part-time at first.

I was told that I had used up all my sick leave and vacation and was put on California disability, which is around $200 a week.

By that time, this was a company I had spent four years working 24/7 for.

I told my boss, “I’m sorry, I will not do this. I still want to work here, but if I have to leave, I will quit. Because I will not work like this.”

From that point on, I didn’t. And that was the irony of it all.

I feel like I did some of my best engineering after that. The real change was that I was no longer wasting my brainpower and my thinking on junk.

You don’t do good work after 12 hours. You can’t work sustained all-nighters and be productive. The quality of your work is going to suck. I don’t care who you are. For most mere mortals, you try to work those hours, you’re just not going to be doing good work.

I also started making intentional decisions for life, not just work.

I coached soccer for all three of my kids. I went to their games. My daughter did ballet, and we were there all the time. We started planning and taking family vacations — hiking in the mountains, RV road trips, and Maui.

I realized you have to work to have a life, but you have to have a life to work. So you want to stand in the middle of those things.

Hours worked are not a performance metric

In 2007, after several clean scans, I joined Netflix. I delayed accepting the offer until I got my scan report. I didn’t want to change jobs yet because if you have positive liver metastasis, you’d be lucky to get two years.

In my interview, Patty McCord, the chief talent officer at the time, told me, “We don’t value 24/7 work. You won’t be successful here working all the time.”

That was almost foreign to me. But it also didn’t mean we didn’t work hard.

At Netflix, I was part of the early streaming team — maybe 12 to 16 people. We made aggressive schedules, and we didn’t miss them. We launched a Netflix app on the original iPad on Day One within two months.

The culture at the company was: If you have to work 24/7 for us to be successful, you’ve got a problem, and we’ve got a problem, and we’re going to fix it.

Even at Meta, my favorite poster had a silhouette of a rocking horse that said, “Don’t mistake motion for progress.”

In other words, high performance is not measured by how much work you do. It’s measured by how impactful your results are.

This is not to say that it’s wrong to work more than eight hours. Instead, you should understand why you’re working more hours. It should be intentional. Intentional exceptions.

If I were to tell my younger self anything, it would be to make work-life balance part of your DNA. Learn to take time off.

Don’t wait until you have cancer or some other near-death experience to realize this.




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I worked closely with Rev. Jesse Jackson after he took a chance on me at age 19. Here’s what he taught me about leadership.

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Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. took a chance on me as a 19-year-old college student.

At that age, as an intern in 2009, I should’ve been pouring coffee, maybe making copies. Instead, he put me to work on college affordability policy, youth violence prevention, and immigration reform at his Rainbow PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) Coalition on the South Side of Chicago.

That was nearly two decades ago. This week, he passed away.

A few weeks ago, I sat with him in the hospital. He was extremely present even as Progressive Supranuclear Palsy disorder had taken his voice — the same instrument that had formed seemingly impossible coalitions and made the moral case for justice in language that brought people together instead of tearing them apart.

I considered Rev. Jackson a close mentor

I met him in 2009 at a press conference he held to announce his intention to negotiate the release of journalist Roxana Saberi from an Iranian prison.

Saberi was an alum of Northwestern University, where I was a student. Several classmates and I had staged a rally to call attention to her issue, and Rev. Jackson had invited us to join him at his press conference in Chicago.

When it ended and everyone packed up to leave, I made a split-second decision.

I grabbed him by the shoulder — strongly enough that his security detail sprang into action — and asked if I could volunteer for his Reduce-the-Rate initiative on college affordability. It was an issue that deeply resonated with me, as I’d borrowed a crippling amount to attend Northwestern. He said yes.

That moment changed everything. Less than a month later, I became the campaign’s manager, working part-time during school. I handled policy research and community interface and accompanied Rev. Jackson to meetings and events. I spent time with him every week and at times even did my homework at his house.

He became a mentor, coaching me and looking out for me not only professionally, but personally. I left the role in 2011, but over the years, we stayed close.

From Rev. Jackson, I learned three lessons about leadership that have shaped everything I’ve done since.

Lesson 1: Lean into hard moments, not out.

Rev. Jackson had a pattern: When things got difficult, he moved closer to the problem, not away from it.

He negotiated the release of over 200 hostages across Syria, Cuba, Iraq, and Serbia. He flew into war zones and sat across the table from dictators. He showed up to Texaco’s headquarters during their discrimination scandal. He walked into corporate boardrooms where he wasn’t welcome.

Many leaders I know do the opposite. When crisis hits, they create distance — delegate to lawyers, let the public relations team handle it, wait for it to blow over.

Rev. Jackson taught me that the moments when you want to step back are precisely when you need to step forward. Your measure as a leader is taken in the hardest moments, not the easy ones.


The author with Rev. Jackson during an interview outside of Pacific Gardens Mission, a homeless shelter in Chicago, in 2012.

The author with Rev. Jackson during an interview outside of Pacific Gardens Mission, a homeless shelter in Chicago, in 2012.

Courtesy of Bradley Akubuiro



Lesson 2: Never stop investing in people.

Rev. Jackson had no reason to believe in my abilities. But he understood that individuals have incredible capacity for growth — they just don’t start off optimally productive.

He put a 19-year-old on policy work that mattered, then put me on-air representing the campaign. That wasn’t reckless — it was intentional investment. He knew that by giving people opportunities, some would disappoint him over the years, but the ones who didn’t might surpass what he could’ve imagined.

I’ve carried that forward — looking for people others overlook and investing in their growth. Not everyone pans out. But the ones who do become extraordinary.

Real leadership isn’t about finding perfect people. It’s about developing the potential in imperfect ones.

Lesson 3: Conflict and conversation can coexist.

Rev. Jackson was simultaneously the agitator and the negotiator. The prophet and the pragmatist.

He showed up uninvited to shareholder meetings and organized boycotts, but also sat down with those same executives afterward to identify resolutions.

“Diamonds can’t be produced without pressure,” he once told me. This applies to individuals, organizations, and systems.

He understood that real change requires both confrontation and conversation. You can’t just be nice and hope things improve. But you also can’t only apply pressure and expect people to come around.

I watched him do this with the Wall Street Project, pressuring corporations like Texaco and Coca-Cola to commit billions to diversity initiatives. He made them uncomfortable with boycotts. Then he sat down with their leadership and helped build solutions.


Bradley with Rev. Jackson and his son, Rainbow PUSH Coalition COO, Yusef Jackson, in 2025.

The author (right) with Rev. Jackson and his son, Rainbow PUSH Coalition COO, Yusef Jackson, in 2025.

Courtesy of Bradley Akubuiro.



Too many leaders think they have to choose to either be tough or be empathetic. Rev. Jackson taught me that’s a false choice; the best leaders do both.

The work continues

Rev. Jackson once told me the work of justice isn’t about being comfortable. It’s about being consistent. It’s about showing up when it’s hard, especially when staying silent would be easier.

He showed up. Consistently. The work he did — building coalitions across impossible divides, making the moral case in language that united rather than divided — we need it now more than ever.

Last year, during one of my Saturday visits to Rainbow PUSH, I brought the manuscript for my book “Faster. Messier. Tougher: Crisis Communications Strategies in an Era of Populism, AI, and Distrust.” He saw how I was continuing on the work and agreed to put his name behind it.

Last week, when I held the first copy from the printer and saw the quote from him on the front cover, it was so moving. That he could support me one last time means the world to me.

I grabbed his shoulder at 19 because I didn’t want to let the moment pass. He taught me to lean into hard moments, develop people others overlook, and hold the tension between conflict and conversation.

That work doesn’t end with him. It’s up to us to pick it up.

Bradley Akubuiro is a partner at Bully Pulpit International, where he advises corporate leaders like Levi Strauss and the NFL on high-visibility reputation and diversity and inclusion matters.




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I used to be proud of only sleeping 3 hours because I worked so much. Now I realize health is freedom, not wealth.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tyler Smith, founder of Hundred Health. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I used to brag about how little sleep I got. It felt like a superpower: I could sleep just three or four hours a night, and still operate at a very high level.

That helped me get ahead early on. As a teen, I bused tables and sold firewood. By the time I was 19, I bought a house (which was possible because it was the subprime mortgage days). Having a mortgage gave me real responsibility at a young age.

It also got me thinking about a career. I couldn’t believe how much my real estate agent made on the sale. Her commission was about $13,000 — which seemed like $1 million to me at the time — and I thought she didn’t do a very good job. I realized that if I did good work in real estate, I could make even more.

I did well in real estate and developed software that took off

I dropped out of college to get into real estate. During the financial crisis, I found a niche helping banks sell foreclosures. In 2006 and 2007, I oversaw about 1,000 home sales a year and managed triple that number of properties.

I was working 14-hour days, seven days a week. It wasn’t a good life, but I was young enough that it didn’t matter. I fueled myself on energy drinks and embraced the fact that work was my life.

To help scale, I developed software to track my business’s transactions. Other brokerages inquired about what I was using, and soon I had clients paying $2,000 or $5,000 a month to use the software.

I was in the right place at the right time with the right product as real estate transactions went digital. By 2012, that software, SkySlope, was doing $12 million in annual revenue. In 2017, Fidelity bought a majority stake, valuing the company at more than $80 million.

I wanted to focus on my passion: health

That deal meant that I had enough money to never work again. I’m wired to build, though, so I planned to use my financial freedom to focus on something with purpose: a mission-driven business.

When I was 39, my wife and I were trying to have a child. I took a biological age test, which said my biological age was 47. That stopped me in my tracks, because my own father had died suddenly of a heart attack at 47.

The test showed me that what I was telling myself wasn’t true. I was working out and eating relatively healthy. I looked fit, but the data showed that what was happening inside my body didn’t match what was on the outside.

I spent over $1 million building a home wellness center

Once I saw that data, I couldn’t ignore it. I spent well over six figures hiring a top-notch healthcare team. My wife and I rented a 2,000 square-foot unit in Sacramento, which we transformed into our own personal wellness center. It had IV infusions, a hyperbaric chamber, a red light bed, cold plunges, massagers — basically anything you can name in the health and fitness world.

We were building a home in Napa and wanted to know which equipment we would actually use. We spent about $700,000 fitting out the Sacramento space, and eventually over $1 million building the wellness center in our home.

Today, I use the red light bed, oxygen therapy, and cold plunge almost daily. Other therapies — like massagers and bikes — didn’t make the final cut. I love the results of the hyperbaric chamber, but don’t like lying in it for an hour, so for now, that’s out of rotation.

I want to help others have more access to health information

I changed everything about my health and fitness, and because of that, everything in my life changed: my muscle mass and energy levels went through the roof, and my mood improved. I felt better than ever, and friends began to notice.

I know not everyone has the money and access I do. Most people have more data about their health than ever due to smart watches and wearable monitors, but they don’t have a team of doctors helping them use that information.

I started Hundred Health not only to provide data, but also to offer a personalized plan for what to do with it. I used to think that wealth was freedom, but now I know that health is — and I would like to help more people access that.




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Jeffrey Epstein and Brad Karp worked together to surveil woman’s alleged ‘extortion’ attempt

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Before Brad Karp resigned as chairman of Paul Weiss, the elite Wall Street law firm said he interacted with Jeffrey Epstein to “negotiate a series of fee disputes” on behalf of Leon Black, the billionaire former Apollo Global Management CEO.

Recently released records from the Justice Department show the two men also discussed how to handle a woman who allegedly demanded Black pay her $100 million.

The emails show Epstein and Karp trading notes about secret recordings, professional surveillance, and efforts to have the woman arrested for what Epstein described as an “extortion” attempt.

“I have come to the conclusion that we will need to bring in law enforcement sooner rather than later,” Epstein told Karp in a typo-strewn email. “Needs tobe a close sensitive relation Your call on fbi or nypd.”

Karp stepped down as the chair of Paul Weiss on Wednesday after the Epstein files revealed he advised the convicted sex offender on his legal battles with women and asked for help getting his son a role in a Woody Allen movie. He has also resigned from the board of Union College, his alma mater.

The latest emails, some of which were first reported by Law.com, show Karp agreeing with Epstein’s recommendation to have the investigation firm Nardello & Co. surveil the woman — referred to as “GG” — for “a full week” in 2015.

A spokesperson for Nardello confirmed the firm worked on the case for Black’s legal counsel, but denied working with Epstein, who Black paid for financial advice.

“In the course of that engagement, no one at Nardello had any contact or communication with Epstein whatsoever nor did the firm know that Mr. Black’s counsel was sharing documents or other work product with Epstein,” the firm said.

The emails show Karp updated Epstein on GG’s movements in August of that year. He informed Epstein about “GG” staying at an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood before being “snuck out” through the garage, “in a car with tinted windows,” to JFK airport.

“we have license plate numbers,” Karp told Epstein.

Karp also kept Epstein updated about a transcript of a meeting with GG that took place at the Four Seasons.

“GG is in Moscow; the transcript should be completed tomorrow,” Karp told Epstein in one email. “I’ll send it to you as soon as I receive it.”

Representatives for Paul Weiss didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.

At the time, Black was concluding an extramarital relationship with Guzel Ganieva, according to a 2022 lawsuit he filed against her. In the suit, Black claimed that Ganieva demanded $100 million from him in 2015 during a meeting at the Four Seasons restaurant. The lawsuit accused Ganieva of participating in an “extortion plot” with her lawyers and Black’s rivals, saying she threatened to reveal their relationship to his wife and Apollo’s board if she didn’t get the money. A judge dismissed the lawsuit later that year, finding the lawsuit’s claims were “vague” and “more creative writing than factual.”

A person familiar with the matter confirmed that the “GG” in the newly released emails was a reference to Guzel Ganieva.

Susan Estrich, an attorney representing Black, told Business Insider that Ganieva was trying to “blackmail” Black following a “years long consensual relationship” at the time that Epstein and Karp were exchanging emails.

Guzel, in her own lawsuit, alleged Black forced her into violent sexual encounters while promising to help her with educational and career ambitions. A judge dismissed the allegations, finding a non-disclosure agreement between Ganieva and Black barred her from bringing the case.

Ganieva also said Black introduced her to Epstein, whose relationship with Black led him to step down as the CEO and chairman of Apollo in 2021. An Apollo investigation found Black stopped using Epstein’s financial services in 2018 over a fee dispute.

An attorney for Ganieva didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.

The Justice Department’s files show Nardello, the investigative firm, sent Karp and another Paul Weiss attorney, Lorin Reisner, transcripts of conversations between “GG” and their client, referred to in the transcripts as “John Doe.” Karp then forwarded them to Epstein.

The transcripts show GG and John Doe discussing their past relationship. John Doe repeatedly raises what he claims were GG’s requests for millions of dollars.

“For me, it’s not about money, it’s about respect,” GG told John Doe in a transcript where he refers to her as “Guzel.” “I think you were very unfair to me,” she added.

At one point, Epstein advised Karp and Reisner — who joined Paul Weiss after serving as Chief of the Criminal Division of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — to “have her arrested” and possibly deported.

He urged Karp to contact law enforcement before the woman could file a lawsuit.

“i think the extortion claim AFTER a filing is fairly weak. and would be seen to be an intimidattion tactic from a powerful man, if you think you are being extorted,” Epstein wrote with his signature freestyle grammar.

Karp responded enthusiastically.

“I’ll check again with lorin, but my strong belief is that the answer is yes,” he told Epstein. “Especially with the referral coming from the most recent head of the sdny usao.”




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I worked at Tesla and Waymo. Here are the leadership lessons I bring to my startup.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Spencer Penn, the 33-year-old founder of LightSource, who lives in San Francisco. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

I moved to California 10 years ago, back when Tesla was a boutique car business. We were making 1,000 vehicles a week.

My friends and family were telling me it was a big career mistake to work at Tesla. They said it would never be someone’s main car, that it’s a tech toy, that it’s an iPad with wheels on it. But I was just excited to see what this Elon guy was up to.

My interactions with Elon were always very positive, but I’m not a fanboy. There were some things that were very notable about his leadership style.

Tesla is a very flat organization. When I was there, even relatively young and out of college, it was two levels between Elon and me. That’s very unusual to have such close proximity so early in your career.

Just because it’s a flat org structure, doesn’t mean it’s a horizontal power dynamic. Elon is the king. What he says goes. If you wanted to get something done, you really did have to go through Elon.

The drawbacks were that the guy didn’t have that much time. In 2017, he was running three different companies: Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He was just getting started with OpenAI. He had two and a half days a week to really focus on Tesla exclusively. You’d have to get things approved in that period of time.

But he was also very focused on the product. He would get involved in the way that things felt. If you wanted to change a texture on a paint, you’d want to get his buy-in.

Many CEOs go the opposite direction. They let themselves get so far removed from the product. Elon always felt the product was the thing, and the innovation would be what drives the company forward.

I like to embody that here at our company. I still do demos. If you take your hands off the wheel, things might veer in a direction you don’t like.

Elon has a knack for setting overly ambitious goals. There are benefits and drawbacks. Sometimes, you lose credibility. Certain products like the new Roadster were unveiled back when I was an employee, and they’ve yet to be delivered.

But there are certain things where you shoot for the moon and you do hit the stars. Nobody thought Starlink would be as successful as quickly as it has been.

If you apply the right amount of pressure, you can see where the leaks are. That kind of ambition is everything.

That’s the final thing Elon does: he’s really a risk taker. He’s bet the company multiple times; he always keeps putting the chips back on red. I think about that a lot. Sometimes it can be hard for professional management to take the risks they need to. Sometimes you can sleepwalk into a long-term, uncompetitive position.

There was some internal signaling. People knew that Elon was in the factory. They knew that he was going to stay there until the issues were fixed. Elon works about as hard as any human on earth possibly can.

There’s a hotel right across the street from the Fremont factory. Part of me always felt like, instead of setting up pillows in a conference room, I would like our CEO to be well-rested and go to the hotel five minutes away. But the signaling was very potent.

I try to embody that to some degree here, too. I like to come into the office five days a week. I want people to know that I’m coming in early and I’m staying late. I unload the dishwasher in the office. I’m assembling IKEA furniture.

How I found Waymo compared

Waymo was a very different organization. It’s a very vertical org structure. Google is a large organization with lots of levels, and that translated directly to Waymo, which is a much smaller business.

Even though it’s a very vertical org structure, it’s a horizontal power structure. It’s like it’s rotated 90 degrees from Tesla.

Some people compared the org to slime mold. It starts to spread and find all the crevices on its own. Individual contributors could construct their own ideas.

There are benefits and drawbacks. There is the possibility that there are duplicative teams doing the same things in different ways. But it also leads to a lot of creativity.

At Tesla, it was very clear that Elon and his lieutenants were driving a lot of the decisions. The decisions that the more junior people made would be incremental. At Google, I found that a lot of the best ideas come from the individual folks in the business, because they’re given the freedom to roam.

In a startup, you have limited resources. You have to be focused, but a lot of the best ideas come from experimentation.

We had an engineer who asked if he could move his start date by a month. He was like, “I want to spend a month before I get into work catching up on everything that’s happening in AI.” He came to the table, and he had so deeply immersed himself that he had a lot of new and fresh ideas. Many of those ideas have become product features.

I have to delegate innovation to folks on the team to find those opportunities. That’s something I learned from Google.




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An 88-year-old worked 5 days a week at a supermarket. Then strangers raised almost $2 million so he could finally retire.

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Before December, Ed Bambas was among the sizable swath of older Americans still working with retirement nowhere in sight. Then, he met content creator Samuel Weidenhofer.

Weidenhofer, who has 12 million followers across social media, set up a GoFundMe fundraiser for Bambas on Monday to help him leave his job at a Detroit supermarket and retire.

“I’m opening a fundraiser to help Ed live the life he deserves to finally give him some relief, comfort and the peace of mind that comes from knowing he can enjoy his later years without constant struggle,” Weidenhofer wrote on GoFundMe.

The fundraiser had a $1 million goal. As of Sunday, over 65,000 people have donated, reaching a total of almost $2 million.

In a video shared to Weidenhofer’s social media accounts, Bambas said he’s an 88-year-old veteran who works at the supermarket five days a week, eight hours a day. Bambas said he retired from General Motors in 1999, but lost his pension after the company went bankrupt in 2009.

Bambas told Weidenhofer that his wife, who died seven years ago, had been sick around the time his pension stopped. Without his pension, Bambas had to re-enter the workforce.

Nearly 550,000 Americans 80 and older are still working, according to 2023 US Census data.

As part of Business Insider’s “80 over 80” series, reporters interviewed nearly 200 workers over 80 — in addition to conducting surveys and receiving emails — in an effort to understand why.

While some older Americans are driven by a personal desire to work, others take on jobs to combat financial insecurity. Some workers over 80 told Business Insider that they use their income to supplement their Social Security and other retirement payments. They fear that without the income, they can’t afford the cost of living.

Weidenhofer shared a video of Bambas receiving his GoFundMe check on Friday.

“It’s something dreams are made of,” Bambas said in the video.

Bambas also thanked everyone who donated to the fundraiser.

“I cannot express in any words how thankful I am to all the people,” he said.




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