It’s been six years since the start of the pandemic, but some companies are still embracing remote work culture (albeit very few). But even fewer companies are ushering in a new workplace trend: the four-day workweek.
It’s become a norm for some organizations in Japan and has been tested in the U.K. But until recently, a very select few U.S.-based organizations have even given it a shot.
One exception: Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform. Its estimated 200 to 400 U.S. employees work fully remote, and work just four days a week for a total of 32 hours.
“I wanted to be empathetic at a time where a lot of CEOs were like, ‘We need to make people return back to the office,’” Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor recently told The New York Times.
While he says he does this because he wants employees to live a “fulfilled and beautiful” life, his work standards don’t change just because employees are working fewer hours.
“I have a very high bar for work and excellence,” he said.
And as he should. Kickstarter was founded in 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler as a way to fund creative projects outside traditional finance. It grew explosively in its early years: By 2011, tens of thousands of projects had been successfully funded and pledges had climbed into the tens of millions of dollars.
Within about five years, backers had pledged more than $1 billion to campaigns on the site. As of early 2025, backers have pledged more than $8.5 billion across roughly 650,000 projects, and a project success rate just over 40%, according to Statista.
But even with that success, the four-day, remote work week isn’t a perfect science, Taylor admitted.
“It’s not all good. You have to trust people to be responsible,” he said. “We know that not everyone’s responsible. A lot of people don’t even work 40 hours in a five-day workweek.”
Plus, he worries this setup encourages people to apply to Kickstarter only because they want a four-day, remote work week, and not because they’re genuinely interested in the company or its mission.
“We have attracted some of those people,” he said. “If you’re not at Kickstarter for the right reasons, I don’t want you here.”
He also admitted a four-day work week also doesn’t allow for the same amount of work to get done—and it means people have to work harder during the hours they’re on.
“The math doesn’t math,” he said. “The level of intensity, intention and velocity that you have to bring in everything that you do is extreme.”
What other CEOs say about a four-day work week
While championing the four-day work week from the perspective of adding to the work-life balance and mental health of his employees, Taylor also fully recognized the pitfalls of that work setup.
Other CEOs are also split on whether a four-day week is a smart bet or risky distraction, mirroring Taylor’s mix of optimism and anxiety about output.
Ryan Breslow, founder of fintech startup Bolt, made his company’s four-day week permanent after trialing it, and called it an “absolute no brainer,” arguing a shorter week actually raised the bar on execution and productivity instead of lowering it.
“This is a selfish thing that we’re doing because our hypothesis is that not only would employees be engaged and healthier, but they’d be more productive at work,” Breslow told Inc. in 2022. “And that’s what we’ve got. We found that the four days that they’re here, they’re overwhelmingly more productive than your traditional five-day week.”
Other business leaders have trialed, but then dialed back, four-day work week experiments after seeing the strain of squeezing five days of work into four. Executives at workflow software firm Formstack reported double-digit gains in productivity, flexibility, and happiness during a shortened-week pilot—but they saw a 27% jump in stress as employees worried about cramming their workload into less time.
So instead, the company moved toward a half day on Fridays instead of a true four-day work week.
“It was truly a win-win situation as output increased and employees had more flexibility with their work-life balance,” Tammy Polk, former chief human resources officer at Formstack, told Forbes. “Employees also enjoyed sharing how they spent their half days on Slack and social media, which strengthened our remote company culture even further.”
Other CEOs are skeptical of the four-day week altogether, arguing it doesn’t match how most companies actually operate. But some high-profile CEOs including Tesla’ Elon Musk and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon have said AI could make it possible in the future.
Because AI will “affect every application, every job, every customer interface,” Dimon argued at the America Business Forum in Miami in November, “my guess is the developed world will be working three and a half days a week in 20, 30, 40 years, and have wonderful lives.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
