If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know how much time, effort, and problem-solving can go into the day. From venue selection to menu planning, dress fittings to dealing with everyone’s many intense feelings, it can get a bit exhausting. But fortunately, the day itself is usually a great reward. All efforts pay off and you can kick back and enjoy the fruits of your labors… Unless you’re the guy who recently went viral for whipping out his laptop during his wedding reception. Yes, this actually happened. No, the collective internet is having precisely none of it.
It all started on LinkedIn, when Thoughtly co-founder Torrey Leonard shared a picture of his co-founder, Casey Mackrell, on his laptop during a wedding reception… Mackrell’s own wedding reception.
“My co-founder Casey has built a reputation for himself as “the guy who sits on his laptop in bars” from SF to NYC,” Leonard wrote. “Last week, Thoughtly brought on a customer that needed to launch within 2 weeks. He just so happened to be getting married within that 2 week window… So, here he is wrapping up a pull request. At his own wedding. Congrats Casey — now please, go take some time off.”
OK. I’ll preface this by saying that if anyone was going to do this, it had better be a founder or owner of a company and not someone lower on the company ladder. That said, no one should be doing this. Not only is it your wedding day, but you’re honestly telling me anything that was happening on that sad laptop during that reception couldn’t be done even a few hours later? Or *gasp* the next day? Or that the people he was doing it for wouldn’t have understood he was busy with a personal matter?
I was not alone in this assessment…
From LinkedIn to Twitter to Reddit, commenters were largely dismayed by the picture and the sentiment.
“Next month: What my divorce taught me about B2B SaaS sales,” joked Twitter user @DakotaJGordon.
“My Dad was one of the hardest working people I’ve ever known. Owned his own business, worked 12 hours days, six days a week. Always glued to the phone, never put it down to just be with his family. Very few vacations, and when he did, always on the phone. Always obsessed with growing his business. Dropped dead of a heart attack at 56,” shared Redditor u/IPFan724. “Spend time with your loved ones, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.”
Many highlighted the fact that if the work absolutely couldn’t wait until after the wedding, it would make them question company management and the product itself.
“It’s an AI call center company,” noted Redditor @OswaldReuben. “If that doesn’t scale without someone working on it during their wedding, then your product is faulty.”
Others were skeptical this post was anything more than a PR stunt to draw attention to the brand. (I mean—I’m talking about it right now so if it was, mission accomplished, I guess.)
“This is rage bait guerrilla marketing, and sadly it’s obviously working,” observes u/citori421 on Reddit. “How many people heard about Thoughtsly today for the first time? Possibly the majority of people who have heard about Thoughtsly lol. They probably … were like ‘What would be the most ridiculous example of this trope? Hahaha how about you pretend to work through your wedding bro!’”
But even then, some said, wanting to be seen as someone who would work at a wedding is a bit icky or maybe even counterintuitive.
“Maybe that was just a fun shtick for Casey,” tweeted @mfishbein, “but makes it seems like the company is very poorly managed.”
Moral of the story: don’t work at your wedding folks. Not even for a picture as a joke. We respect the hustle, but not for the sake of hustling.
