great-2
Explanation
This comic shows two people lying in bed after sex. One says, "That sex was great but it won't scale." The caption below reads: "Never sleep with a startup coworker."
The joke is a collision of two completely different registers of language: post-coital intimacy and Silicon Valley startup jargon. "It won't scale" is a ubiquitous phrase in tech/startup culture, used to describe a product, process, or business model that works in its current small form but cannot be expanded to serve a larger market or handle greater demand. It is the kind of critique a venture capitalist or product manager would deliver about a prototype.
Applied to sex, the phrase is absurdly inappropriate. The speaker is evaluating an intimate experience using the same framework they would use for a pitch deck, suggesting that while the sex was enjoyable (like a successful MVP -- minimum viable product), it is not viable for broader implementation. The implicit concern might be about efficiency, repeatability, or market fit, none of which are concepts that belong in a bedroom.
The caption -- "Never sleep with a startup coworker" -- frames this as a cautionary lesson, implying that startup culture is so all-consuming that people who are immersed in it cannot turn off the jargon even in their most private moments. The humor is in the recognition that startup culture has its own language that its practitioners apply to everything, and that sleeping with someone steeped in that culture means subjecting yourself to performance reviews framed in business terminology.