No company valuation is worth a life

It should never take a death to wake us up. Yet here we are, mourning a 25-year-young engineer, who died by suicide after what appears to be relentless pressure and emotional distress at a startup’s AI division. Observing this with the lens of a parent, the details that surfaced first on Reddit are hard to read, and harder to accept.

A fresher reportedly handed the workload of three people, constantly berated in meetings where abusive language flew freely, and crushed under expectations that had no guardrails. But then, for many of us familiar with the workings of corporate India, startups, and ambitious teams, including successful, well-known brands, such toxicity of culture is not new. We sadly have become part of this immune collusion.

The moment a young life is lost to the workplace, something irreversible breaks. Not just in families, but in the silent collective that enables these conditions. This entity’s founder’s style of functioning and culture has been spoken about in countless media reports for far too long. But we can only speculate without being insiders. Former executives have left abruptly, co-founders have exited, and insiders have whispered about the dysfunction for years. Yet it continues.

Let us confront the deeper, systemic issues in India’s high-growth startup and corporate India culture. A toxic blend of valuation obsession, founder’s or CEO’s FOMO, boards’ indifference, and cultural silence around workplace pressures has already shaped a crisis of human dignity.

Despite all the brochures, campus placement posters, and hashtags, Workplace India has normalised burnout and emotional neglect. The glamorisation of hustle and the fear of missing out — among both investors and job-seekers — is perpetuating a dangerous cycle where ambition routinely comes at the cost of human dignity.

Part of the answer lies in the insulation high-growth companies enjoy. Once a startup enters the golden club of soonicorns or unicorns, backed by sky-high valuations, and investor narratives, the scrutiny goes soft. Founders become poster-children of national-ambition, celebrated across corporate, investors, potential employees, bureaucracy, and governments. The rush to build empires blinds everyone to the bodies that get buried in the foundation.

What of the boards? Has a unicorn status and a lofty valuation made founders untouchable? It seems so. Most board members in many of these companies are investor appointees or selections, sent to safeguard capital, add reputation-valuation and speed up exits. So, when things go wrong, when the inside rot leaks into public view, they duck behind the same playbook of statements and sympathy. This pervasive interest in returns, dressed up as stewardship, is a farce when paired with the phrase: corporate governance.

Employee well-being is a nice catchphrase and is built as values, only in outlier organisations. In other places, abuse is passed off as urgency towards goals. In emails and WhatsApp team groups, bullying is disguised as stretched-target.

To expect an HR leader to stand up to a toxic leader or a revenue-obsessed business head in these environments is a tragic comedy. HR in many such firms has been reduced to a compliance department that protects the company, and most importantly, the founder or the CEO, not the average employees. When the founder loses their temper or when a senior executive bullies junior staff, HR often watches in silence or sugar-coats it as ‘culture fit’ and ‘performance rigour’.

There is also a darker complicity among employees themselves. India’s services job market has already tightened, even if our statistics don’t say so. In this climate, a job at a high-growth firm is seen as proof of potential, a badge of relevance. The FOMO is real. So is the pressure to stay and survive.

Yet beneath the headlines and the LinkedIn posts lies a deeper cultural fault line. We have normalised suffering at work. We wear burnout as a medal. Toxicity is excused because that is just how things are done here. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ is a philosophy we have absorbed without protest. If someone breaks down, it is seen as a weakness, not as a warning sign.

No unicorn is worth a life. Yet, in our midst, aren’t each of us, but for our loved ones, just mere statistics in the larger narrative?

But will things change? I doubt it. Humans are too expendable in the game of valuations, and in the throne room of ambition. The history of humans shows us this more eloquently than we care to admit — that we rarely learn from our past when it most matters. So, we mess up the present, in pursuit of a future that was never predictable to begin with.

To expect that things would change, that all would be well someday, is a comforting delusion. Now and then, a tragic headline reminds us — a young life lost, a cry for help silenced by deadlines and deliverables. Like it did last year, when a young girl in a consulting company fell victim to work culture/stress.

We rage. We post. We write beautiful, evocative words. We organise digital town-halls from the comfort of our home sofas. And just as quickly, we move on. In that very cycle of outrage and amnesia lie the cracks that allow more companies to continue unchecked. These tragedies of our youngsters reflect what we have chosen to become as a society. In pursuit of what we define as success.

In many of our corporations and startups, the toxicity is so deep and systemic that a culture sample could give a microbiology lab a run for its money. The only difference is, in labs, we expect to find disease. In companies, we pretend it is all just part of growth.

(Srinath Sridharan, author of ‘Family and Dhanda’, is a corporate adviser and independent director on corporate boards. X: @ssmumbai.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.