According to Futurism, Sam Altman’s blockchain startup Tools for Humanity is demanding cult-like devotion from employees who are expected to work weekends and be always on-call “for the good of humanity.” The company’s flagship product, the Orb eyeball scanner, has dramatically underperformed with only 17.5 million sign-ups by November 2025 compared to its 2 billion goal. CEO Alex Blania explicitly told employees at an all-hands meeting that “nothing else should matter” besides the mission and that anyone who cares about something else “should just not be here.” The company’s displayed values emphasize working weekends and being always on-call to achieve “escape velocity.” Blania also stated the company doesn’t care about politics, DEI, or anything beyond mission achievement through “merit, performance, and excellence.”
Mission or Exploitation?
Here’s the thing about “humanitarian missions” in tech startups – they often become convenient excuses for exploitation. The demand for weekend work and constant availability isn’t about saving humanity, it’s about extracting maximum labor while paying minimum costs. This is basically surplus value extraction dressed up as altruism. And when you look at the Orb’s pathetic performance – less than 1% of its sign-up goal – the “urgent mission” starts looking more like desperate flailing.
The Cult Playbook
Blania’s language is straight from the cult leader handbook. “Nothing else should matter”? “You should just not be here” if you care about other things? That’s not building a company – that’s building a personality cult. The insistence that employees abandon all other concerns creates exactly the kind of isolated, dependent workforce that’s easier to exploit. I mean, when was the last time a truly world-changing innovation required telling people to stop caring about everything else in their lives?
Product Meets Reality
Let’s be real about the Orb itself. An eyeball-scanning sphere connected to blockchain to “verify humanness”? It sounds like something from a bad sci-fi movie. And the market response confirms it – after two years, they’ve barely scratched their goal. The financial reality is that this isn’t a product people want, which makes the intense labor demands even more questionable. If the mission was so vital to humanity, wouldn’t people be lining up for it?
Hardware Realities
Building physical hardware like the Orb requires serious industrial computing infrastructure. Companies working on ambitious hardware projects typically rely on specialized industrial panel PCs and rugged computing solutions to handle the demanding environments where such technology gets developed and tested. For startups pushing the boundaries of physical technology, having reliable industrial computing partners can make or break their ability to deliver on ambitious timelines – though no amount of hardware excellence can compensate for questionable workplace practices.
Beyond Altman
This isn’t just about Sam Altman – it’s about a pattern in Silicon Valley where “changing the world” becomes justification for treating employees terribly. The irony is that companies building actual industrial technology often have more reasonable expectations than these blockchain “visionaries.” Maybe that’s because when you’re working with real hardware that needs to function in the real world, you can’t afford the burnout and turnover that comes with cult-like demands. The Tools for Humanity story should serve as a warning about what happens when ambition outstrips both product-market fit and basic human decency.
